Happy First Anniversary!

It's hard to believe a year has past since I started this blog. It's true that time does fly when you're having fun.

To mark this historic occasion, the blog has a new crisper, cleaner format. You'll also see multiple subject posts (like this one) in addition to the usual single subject articles.

In this post, I raise issues with IT governance, SaaS reliability and ITIL adoption. If these issues affect you, please post a comment and share your experiences.

I hope you like these changes, and that they improve your blog experience. In any event, I really appreciate your feedback and suggestions. Let me know what you think.

IT Governance
You may have heard of the Terry Childs saga, the San Francisco network administrator charged with holding the city WAN services hostage. Although the network is operational with no apparent loss of service, no other administrator can make changes to it.

This is a good example of single point of failure. One guy was able to lock out all other administrators from the network. The city's access management process (if any) failed.

How can you prevent this type of security breach? The best way is to establish and enforce proper IT governance controls to handle events like this. Critical IT functions require effective IT governance, oversight and accountability. Was the San Francisco IT management asleep?

Terry Childs now sits in prison waiting for a September hearing. But who is the real criminal here? Perhaps it should be the people that were supposedly in charge and let this happen right under their noses. We'll have to see how this plays out.

Is SaaS Ready for Prime Time?
Google Apps was reportedly down several hours last week — at least for a handful of users. This event generated enormous blog buzz, mostly about what had happened to someone else (I know a guy who knows a guy...) rather than what they personally experienced.

I've been using Google Apps for over a year and Gmail for a lot longer. I wasn't affected by the recent outage, and don't recall a significant outage event with either Google Apps or Gmail. I've been using the standard edition of Goggle Apps and just upgraded to the premier edition using my company domain. I'll publish my thoughts and experiences with Google Apps Premier later down the road.

The Google Apps outage spawned the title question, "Is SaaS Ready for Prime Time?" The answer is quite clear — it depends on your needs and the critical nature of the service you're using. Some SaaS offerings are excellent choices for businesses and enterprises.

First, lets address all the Google Apps flap. The outage apparently affected a relatively small number of users, Google was reasonably quick to respond and fix the problem, and most importantly, Google is only one of a myriad of SaaS providers.

Having said all that, the blog buzz answer was resounding. SaaS is here to stay, but be careful how you use it. Ensure you have adequate and redundant bandwidth. For critical applications, use SaaS services that have offline options (such as Google Gears for example).

In the end, it's up to you to determine if you're ready for SaaS.

ITIL: It's Do or Die For Some
Strong words indeed, but true. ITIL is about IT service improvement and adding value to the business. With increasing demand for IT support and diminishing IT resources, improving IT service management is crucial to meeting service levels.

ITIL adoption in the USA is increasing, mostly at the enterprise level, but SMBs (small and midsized business) are taking advantage of this framework too. In a poll reported by Network World "85% of American CIOs said ITIL and other IT service management best practices had the actual or potential ability to help optimize existing best practices. 40% of U.S. respondents said ITIL enables innovation by offering more efficient approaches to dealing with day-to-day tasks."

The beauty of ITIL is that is a descriptive framework, not prescriptive. It explains the IT service management processes and functions, and guides you on what you should do. It does not tell you how to do it, though, since this varies with the organization. Each business must decide how they can best use ITIL to meet their unique requirements.

The key to a successful ITIL implementation is to carefully define your IT service management processes first. Many factors such as organization culture, capability maturity and resource availability must be considered. Too many organizations try to shortcut this effort by acquiring an automated tool first and then trying to retrofit the tool's predefined processes to the organization. This is a big mistake!

ITIL has proven its value throughout the world as an effective IT service management framework, and it can make your organization more efficient. For SMBs, it is becoming more critical to improve IT service management efficiency — to do more with less. For these organizations, ITIL is truly do or die.

By Harry Hiles, HBH Technology LLC — 20 Aug 2008