itSMFI 2016 Forum Focus - December Forum Focus ITSMFIV3 | Page 27

Lorie Lynn Wilson
itSMF-USA, Phoenix Local Interest Group
I consider myself to be an optimist.
I realize from the title of this piece that that may
not be so obvious, but I really am an optimist. I
am an optimist who over the years of ITSM
growth within my organization has come to the
realization that there are some real obstacles
when it comes to implementing and sustaining a
robust IT Service Management Program but that
the struggle is well worth the effort.
Prior to working for my current employer, I
worked for a company that was at the point of
“thinking” about bringing ITSM/ITIL into our
organization.
We had a relatively strong
incident handling process which understood the
importance of providing as much front-line tools
and knowledge as possible. Those working in
this space, even though they did not officially
hold the title of incident management regularly
utilized automation to bounce JVM’s, could walk
a Network Operations contact through an
incident scenario and provide support as the
eyes, ears and sometimes hands of that NetOps
team member. On the side of Problem
Management, there were no designated
problem coordinators, however; several people
operated in the role of a Problem Manager.
They oftentimes would join an incident call to
proactively obtain key details on what actions
would be required to begin the root cause
analysis effort and oftentimes, before the call
was even completed, they had a problem record
opened, known error documented and tasks
had already been assigned to Subject Matter
Experts (SME’s) for follow-up. In the Change
Management space there was a person that
took on the role of documenting which changes
would be rolling out on a particular day and
ensuring that everyone on the “front line” was
aware of when and where these would occur
and who were the contacts in the event of an
incident/problem.
Now there were other
groups that acted in the role of Release
27 itSMFI Forum Focus—December 2016
Management, Configuration Management,
Continuity Management, etc… however, for
some reason, taking that step to be officially
called an IT Service Management engaged
organization, never seemed to happen.
Since ITSM was an area that I had a strong
interest in and wanted to learn more about, I
made the hard decision to move on to an
organization that officially supported ITSM and
had implemented many of the processes
outlined in the ITIL Framework. I entered this
organization in the role of an IT Pro