27 Nov 2012

Value and Constranits of Documentation - ITIL

For IT project, documentation is significant. In fact, enterprise architecture framework is a framework for documentation. Many other practices for documentation have been developed. For example, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a common documentation practice for IT service management (ITSM). ITIL focuses on aligning services with the needs of business.

“ITIL describes procedures, tasks and checklists that are not organization-specific, used by an organization for establishing a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.” (Wikipedia)
Compared with an enterprise architecture program is designed for each company to maximize the competency of the company, ITIL aims at setting minimum checklist which can be applied all organizations. 
 
 

Currently many major companies applies ITIL to increase efficiency their business. For example, The Walt Disney Company(TWDC) has started to adopt ITIL since 2008. Glen Taylor, VP of Technology for Theme Parks & Resorts (TP&R), led the TP&R’s ITIL initiative to move towards an integrated service management approach with ITIL best practices. TP&R is the largest division in the organization, which generated approximately 30% of TWDC’s revenue in 2009. The mission of IT in TWDC is 100% availability, reliability and maintainability in order to provide their guests with “the perfect experience”.
“It means we have to ensure that widespread change does not result in incidents; that we are sure-footed and confident with our release management and new capabilities. We also need to ensure we manage our outsourcing contracts with the utmost professionalism. ITIL best practice provides these assurances." (Disney's ITIL® Journey Case Study)
However, change of business in real world is not a simple way. One of major obstacle is not a technical problem; rather it is in human side.
“Where I talk about best practice and ITIL integration, at the start of the process, the staff only know how we do business. They are unaware of both ITIL and our interest in it. The first step is to make them aware of our interest.” (Disney's ITIL® Journey Case Study)

Anthony Orr, Global Best Practice Director and Senior ITIL Examiner, BMC points out that the most important factor in adopting ITIL is people.


 

"There are several constraints with adapting ITIL or utilization of ITIL. The major constraints are really found around people. In order to be successful ITIL, it requires executive involvement, management commitment, and individual contributor commitment. At the end of the day, the really constraints for these people are education."

As IT systems became necessity for the society, many frameworks and methodology including EA frameworks and ITIL have been developed. From many successful case studies, we can know these practices are useful. However, most important factor that determines success and failure of IT project usually seems to be in human side rather than technology or methodology side.

20 Nov 2012

eGovernment

As well as the movement of Enterprise 2.0, governments are trying to make a maximum use of capability of internet technologies. Wide-ranging application can be considered.

Jeong Chun Hai classified the e-Government delivery models as follows:*1
  • G2C (Government to Citizens)
  • G2B (Government to Businesses)
  • G2E (Government to Employees)
  • G2G (Government to Governments)
  • C2G (Citizens to Governments) 
Especially, G2C (Government to Citizens) is most important model considering the role of governments, and internet technologies can make substantial contributions in this field. Nowadays many governments around the world run their own website for provide their services.

Building website is not everything. Recent advancement in technology provide further capability of high quality and low cost services to governments. Keeping up with technology can offer governments more opportunities to improve their IT platform.

One of these cases is the websilte of federal government of the U.S. USA.gov. Using innovative technologies enable governments to provide better services at low cost. For example, USA.gov significantly cut the cost at significant level by using cloud platform for their website.

"Deputy Associate Administrator of The Office of Citizen Services, Martha Dorris, has estimated that the move to Terremark’s cloud platform will cut costs by 90%, while improving capabilities with the newfound infrastructure flexibility." *2
Also, in other areas, enthusiastic discussions are held involving not only public sector but also private companies such as IT and contusing companies. In 2010, O'reilly held gov2.0 summit in Washington, where major IT companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and people from government got together.


What is the future of eGovernment. Let's have a look at near future visions provided by governments. European Commission shows its action plan between 2011-2015 on the website. There are four main categories in this action plan as follows:

We can know that an eGovernment aims at more than just providing governmental services and information to their citizens. For example, in the "Empower citizens and business" section, there is a description as follows:
"Other crucial milestones to focus on are" ... "effective means enabling the active involvement of citizens and businesses in the policy-making process based on newly available technologies."
This message shows they consider that IT enable a new form of policy making process in a few years. In this sense, IT cannot be consider as just a technology, rather it need to be considered along with governmental strategy.

References:
*1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government
*2 Case Study: USA.gov Achieves Cloud Bursting Efficiency Using Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud

19 Nov 2012

Enterprise 2.0 with CMS

A content management system (CMS) is a web publishing platform which allows editors to create, edit, upload and modify contents. CMS usually has user-friendly GUI, so that uses need not know about systems on which the CMS is running.Today, many of public organization including government use CMS for building their websites.

The following link is the list of CMS used by government in the U.S.
http://www.howto.gov/web-content/technology/agency-cms-products

There are several products on the list such as:
These tools provides strong capability for users to manage contents and publishing them on the Internet. CMS is also used as an online collaboration tool. Users can allocate roles for other members and define the workflow depending on their rules.

Well, if it can be used for collaboration, why don't we use it for information platform inside an enterprise. These kind of ideas occurred in 2000s when a word "Web2.0" became popular. In 2006, Andrew McAfee, a professor of Harvard Business School, coined "Enterprise 2.0", which describe the way to use Web2.0 technologies for intranet and extranet of an organization.



AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) defines Enterprise 2.0 as
"a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise."
(http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Enterprise-20-E20)
At first, these discussions were abstract. The meaning of the concept itself is discussed. Several tools such as blogs, tagging, social bookmarking, etc, are proposed as tools for Enterprise 2.0. Also, some risk factors such as security issues are discussed. The word might sound like just a buzz word which would disappear in short time at that time.

However, as many people realized the value of Web 2.0 tools, several companies tried to use these tools for their business. Now, we can find many case studies online, and many companies are still engaging in this field. For example, E2 is a conference for Enterprise 2.0, which is held twice a year in the U.S.


Recently, Enterprise 2.0 issues become exciting filed connected to some hot topics such as big data, cloud, BYOD, and so on.

As a tool for Enterprise 2.0, CMS will not just a contents publishing platform. In fact, some CMS has functions such as  e-commerce, data analysis, etc., which might not be imagined in the past. CMS will acquire more functionality along with evolution of Enterprise 2.0.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0
http://www.cio.com/article/123550/Enterprise_2.0_Definition_and_Solutions