Coffee With ITSM

I have seen a few major software vendors in the Business Process Management(BPM/BPA) domain demanding their customers to get rid of their processes and align the business with a general practice. The popular slogan they use to alienate this idea in your mind is "Industry Best Practices" Do we really need to be in what they called "industry's best practices" ?? What actually are the industry's best practices?? This is my little two cents about it........ Most of the time it's the uniqueness of the processes which makes the business a success. Hence you often find a well-defined set of processes behind every successful business. In IT, this is a key principle to understand as continuous improvement and continuous delivery play crucial roles in the novel day IT world. Only a successful process pipeline can ensure your survival in the industry. This processing pipeline you build in your organization should match your business modal. In that case, that pipeli...

People often ask why I'm keen on naming my solutions with fancy names. The question I return to them is "why do you have a name ?" Naming is a mind-manipulating technique that helps you to focus on the moment by hiding irrelevant personal complexities of that person.  The name often acts as a key to recalling memories and gives you comfortability in communication. In other words, the name of a person simplifies the engagement by providing him/her with a unique identification.  Similarly, when your solution has an attractive name, explaining your solution is less complex. Calling it by its' name will help people to focus on that particular section of the solution by hiding irrelevant complexities and components. Imagine you are building a solution to integrate all key ITSM-related systems into a process pipeline. Typically you can name that project "ITSM Application Integration". The complexity of the project is always attached to the name hence you always br...

As in the real world, ServiceNow is not just software. It's a culture.  As in nature, the culture built by ServiceNow also should match the domain. Unless it can easily become a pain point for the organization. To avoid this phenomenon from occurring it is important to understand why we need ServiceNow and where we map it with the organizational roadmap. Often organizations understand ServiceNow as an ITSM tool. But in reality, facilitating ITSM is just one milestone of the ServiceNow journey of an organization.  Said that the ultimate goal of implementing ServiceNow in an organization should be facilitating a Continual Improvement Process (CIP). CIP required ITSM to sit in the picture to facilitate it with the required operational information/knowledge. Incidents, problems, changes, and requests are the main information sources of CIP.  The key component which combines all these processes and information together to facilitate CIP is the Configuration Item(CI). Raised ag...

As seen in the industry most organizations seem struggling to get CMDB corrected or implemented. Following are 5 simple tips to get it back on track. 1. Plan before Jump : To simplify the concept; CMDB is an entity that consists of 20% tech components and 80% business components. Often organizations rush to implement the technical part of CMDB without having a proper plan for the rest of the 80%. CMDB is not about having CIs in a database it has a border business vision to cater for. Understanding this business vision and matching it with your business roadmap is required before you jump into technical implementation. Said that first should think about why you need a CMDB and what are you expecting to do with it. Once you are confident with the answers, plan the data you wish to have in the CMDB and the systems you need to integrate with CMDB to have those data in it. Are we ready now? Nop 2. Plan the CSDM Without a Common Service Data Modal, CMDB is just a database with lots of da...

In case I need to get to know about a ServiceNow environment; especially how bad it is; I ask 2 questions. How long you've been using ServiceNow in your organization? How many developers do you have on your team? Being a low-code framework, ServiceNow should have the ability to delegate a considerable amount of functional work to the end-users of each specific business area.  Developers are to get your environment to that stage by providing prominent and long-lasting solutions. If you are on track, achieving this maturity does not take time more than 3 years. Once you get there, you should not have an excessive requirement of developers to maintain your system other than the developers who engage with required enhancements.  If it is not the case, you should reevaluate the following Maturity of the ITSM process.  Stability and suitability of custom solutions ServiceNow governance strategy

IT Automation is a process of automating IT Service and Infrastructure delivery that focuses on a single task at a time. The complexity of such a task can vary from a simple XML deployment to a Robot deployment. Tools like EMC EHC are capable of establishing efficient IT automation culture in complex IT organizations. Process automation is about more holistic automation of a sequence of tasks. IT Automation is often initiated because of an existing process that can be either automated or manual. Tools like ServiceNow are capable of establishing Process Automation in an organization. Tools like EMC EHC provides a panel of APIs and some other entry points that can be utilized in a process automation tool like ServiceNow. On the other hand, ServiceNow like process automation tools consists of all the interaction capabilities such as REST, SOAP, & PS to integrate tools like EMC EHC. The proper combination of Process and IT automation tools create a powerful and seamless  automation...

Continual improvement management is already a mandatory requirement of any growing IT organization to achieve customer expectations while striving through the highly dynamic technical nature of the industry. Considering this fact, most ServiceNow-based organizations decide to install the CIM module of ServiceNow at the very beginning of their ITSM/ServiceNow journey. But are they going to succeed??? The simplest answer is NO Installing the CIM module is the last part you can do to support the continual improvement of your organization. Most organizations seem not to understand the bitter truth of CIM being more of a process than a tool. Without having the process in place, installing ServiceNow CIM gives you nothing but another hole in your investment pocket. To get the best out of ServiceNow CIM, you should have a matured ITSM process. Technically, at least you should be in the second stage of overall maturity to get CIM installed in your organization (3rd stage recommended) Getting y...

The CMDB, in contrast to a static asset list, helps you track not only the configuration items (CIs) within your system but also the relationships between those items (Source: SN).IT plays the role of process and asset hub that combines all the major ITSM processes such as Incident Management, Change Management, and Problem Management hence Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is often considered one of the most important components of ITSM. Though CMDB has been recognized as one of the most important digital components which should be handled with care, most organizations lose that care at a single point and eventually, becomes a messy, unorganized, and unmanageable database, that creates lots of troubles. Lack of vision, Lack of governance, and immature change management process can are often recognized as the major reasons behind a messy CMDB. Lac of vision : Failing to decide what should be in the CMDB; most importantly what should not be in the CMDB, and lack of vision can be ...

ServiceNow SCCM plugin is an extension of ServiceNow which can go into your SCCM database via MID server and bring SCCM-managed CIs like OS and Software to your CMDB. ServiceNow Meraki plugin is also a similar extension that can be used to bring your Cisco Meraki CIs into CMDB. But this has a slightly different approach in the integration than the SCCM plugin as it uses REST web services to make the connection. Both of these plugins can bring CI data to ServiceNow but are capable of doing this other than that. With the plugins, you get a few dashboards that are really useful but have limited functionalities specific to each technology. ServiceNow  Discovery tool also brings the CI data of your organization to ServiceNow. From the first look, functionality seems very similar to the above-mentioned plugins hence most of the organizations who have both SCCM and Meraki plugging installed often think implementing discovery which costs them for licenses is duplicate work. But it's not .....

Things to Remember When you take the decision to ZBoot your ServiceNow instance. If you are using a highly customized ServiceNow environment that gives you a hard time being aligned with the latest trends, you might consider resetting your environment. ZBoot is the name given by ServiceNow for this operation. ZBoot simply factory resets your ServiceNow environment and brings it back to its original state. This sounds simple but is associated with numerous hard business decisions. ZBoot simply erases your existing data and changes the table structures to a different level. So Having your old business data in your newly built environment will be challenging and sometimes it's impossible.  So make sure you have a proper plan for the data before you make the decision of a ZBoot. Changing your usual business work environment requires proper user training. ZBoot results in drastic changes to the current work environment (Depending on the customizations you had).  So, make sure you h...

As a 9+ experienced Solution Architect who is mainly focusing on software system automation in ITSM Domain, I had the invaluable opportunity of being a part of a few successful business transitioning projects. With that experience on hand, I'm writing this article to share the challenges you can expect during this kind of transition. Agile Since we are in a rapidly changing business world which directly depends on IT, IT organizations play major roles in every business. Bigger the company, the responsibility of the IT company getting bigger and bigger day by day. Things get much more complicated when an IT organization supports IT businesses like Software development firms or Infrastructure services providers. Therefore a better process of managing delivery activities is required for such an IT company.  Many years ago, When Agile invaded the tech market, businesses eagerly looked forward to restructuring their IT organizations according to those practices.  Agile is a pr...

  What is iPaaS ? An integration Platform as a Service is a set of automated tools (Middleware) that are deployed in different environments under different conditions. their tools are used in large-scale B2B (Business to Business) enterprises to integrate their on-prem applications with cloud services.  Usually, most of the PaaS providers provide you with a server, middleware and data infrastructures, and other tools which help you to expose your on-prem apps as cloud-accessible services. Common features ESB (Enterprise service Bus) Data Mapping Data/information routing and filtering Orchestration Protocol and format bridging ETL (Extract, transfer, Load) - users for data science and related services Top-ranking iPaaS tools Dell Boomi URL: https://boomi.com/ Review: https://reviews.financesonline.com/p/dell-boomi/#user-review community: https://community.boomi.com/s/ IBM AppConnect URL: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/app-connect Review: NA community: https://community.ibm.com/commu...