arlene trimbleAssistant IT Director| Local GovernmentAlamo, Ca, United States
How did you successfully establish IT governance in your organization? Any tips? Steps? Saving Changes...
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Markus KopkoAI Enabler for Project & Program Mgmt | Founder PMotion.ai / The PM
AI Coach| PMotion.aiHamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Hi Arlene,
we trying to follow ITIL standards and recommondations as close as possible.
For instance we establishe a change mgmt process and a formell CAB and so we did with the most other ITIL processes.
Regards,
Markus Saving Changes...
Michael AdamsSolutions Architect| LANLLos Alamos, Nm, United States
Hi Arlene,
I agree with Markus. ITIL is a great place to start looking. Whatever you implement, you want it to benefit the organization, as a whole. ITIL has IT partner with the business (in your case and mine) government, to create a service catalogue.
It also explores how to handle incoming service requests, and has you begin to explore the development of Service Level Agreements (SLA). You want to be sure that IT is forwarding and aligned with the business strategy, but you want to manage for taking good care of your IT staff as well.
Additional things to take into account are questions of disaster recovery, and defining core services.
Where I work, I've worked out a proposal where applications will be sorted into three categories:
1) loss of human life or injury can occur if this software is not functioning. This really applies only to public safety software. Liike the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) for 911 services, including the GIS functions that support that, along with software that supports fire response plans and medical triage over the phone. This software is critical and gets a 30 minute response on weekends. We pay for 24x7 vendor support, and we have manual work-around plans should the software or infrastructure fail.
2) The government is unable to pay bills and/or employees, or large numbers of employees are unable to do work. This is important, and gets a quick response during business hours. If it fails on the weekend, we'll work on in first thing Monday morning.
3) Annoyance. Software problems are intermittent, large numbers of employees may be affected, but manual workarounds are available, and / or other work can continue. During business hours, this receives a same business day response. Weekend support is EOB next business day.
4) Convenience. This may add efficiency, but it isn't preventing work from happening, and manual workarounds are simple. During business hours or on weekends, this is a 2 business day response.
We'll be discussing these categories and maybe trimming them down to 3. Then we'll come up with our idea of which applications (meaning enterprise applicaztions) belong in each category, and we'll propose that to expanded management for review, discussion, negotiation and approval.
Ultimately, this will result in other county employees knowing what to expect in response times when they submit a ticket on specific enterprise applications.
ITIL is big on defining performance with your stakeholders and agreeing on what performance means. Then measuring it, and assessing where improvements are needed regularly. Saving Changes...
