The Forum - 05/08/2008  (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
Lead
•  President’s Corner – An Industry, A Profession and a Responsibility
Featured Columns
•  From the Editor’s Desk….
•  For Our Members
•  Focus on Three
•  Organizational Gatekeeping: itSMF USA Governance
•  Interest Group (IG) Services Update
•  San Francisco, Here We Come!
ITIL®/ITSM Related Articles
•  Service Strategy – The Intended Outcome
•  How to Justify Getting Started with ITIL® by Thinking Outside of the IT Box
•  Thinking Strategically about Services
•  IT Service Management: Where do we begin?
•  An old friend called Project Management: Bringing Project Management into ITIL® v3
•  ITIL® Strategy Needs to be Strategically Planned
•  Do’s and Don’ts - Business Service Management
•  Six Sigma and IT Service Management: Don’t recreate the wheel…just spin it a little faster and better!
LIG News
•  Practitioner Discussions Bring Wisconsin LIG Interests Into Focus
•  Speakers Needed for Ohio Valley LIG Professional Day on June 5
•  Growing Strong: National Capital LIG and ITIL®
•  itSMF New England LIG and Harvard University Host "Improving Process in Higher Education"

itSMF New England LIG and Harvard University Host "Improving Process in Higher Education"

By Dennis Ravenelle, Senior Project Manager, Infrastructure & Operations Faculty of Arts & Sciences (FAS IT), Harvard University
The March 24th meeting, “Improving Process in Higher Education,” provided an impressive, nationwide virtual panel of University IT professionals.

On Tuesday, March 25th, the itSMF New England Local Interest Group (LIG), partnered with Harvard University's FAS IT to host a meeting that included some thirty participants on-site and a dozen participants joining virtually, compliments of IBM's Centra Web collaboration facilities.

Largely organized by Peter Baskette, itSMF New England board member and FAS IT Manager of Faculty and Staff Computing, the session began with Dennis Ravenelle giving a brief history of the evolution of standards and best-practice process frameworks over the millennia…and we thought this was new stuff!  He also gave an overview of where things like ITIL, CMMI, and CobiT fit in the continuum of IT management tasks from setting strategy to operating the infrastructure.

Susan Grajek and Bill Cunningham from Yale University spoke about how "Yale met ITIL" and their implementation of Service Desk, Incident Management, and Problem Management.

Peter followed with a look at FAS IT's Change Management implementation.

Following lunch, Dennis moderated a virtual panel that included, in addition to Harvard and Yale, Carnegie Mellon, George Washington University, Kansas State University, Miami University of Ohio, Vanderbilt Medical Center, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.  The constituent population of the various institutions ranged from about 10,000 to 35,000 and the levels of maturity varied from one process being implemented to six processes having been fully implemented with additional processes under way.

Valerie Arraj, President of the itSMF New England LIG expressed her appreciation for a very successful meeting.