In the realm of a high transaction environment I find very little value in trying to analyze data on a day by day basis. That poses the question, what are we trying to perform analysis this low in the transaction chain?

These are conflicting phrases that somehow compliment what I do for a living. I am an Incident Manager. That basically means that when things break, I get the call and try to coordinate it to a functional state. Not that I actually do anything, I mainly get the right parties involved and manage everything until it is back up and running.

Part of the role is to also document everything that went on and was done to fix the problem. Sometimes that results in casualties of the moment. You know, people who make mistakes that blow things up. People not paying attention, not doing the right things etc. With my role these missteps are all part of the life cycle of an incident and get documented and distributed after the dust has settled. Before me, I felt as if everyone were hiding things or covering them up because we all know that no one wants to be the one to “throw someone under the bus.”

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that phrase. For me, I don’t care. I have no vested interest in protecting people’s feelings. I am only concerned with the facts and events that make up the timeline. The data doesn’t lie and as such, I get to be the one who has to deflect people’s whining as well as become the barer of bad news for many. Hence this image which I thought was so spot-on for the role of Incident Management.

Don’t Do It!!!

Why is it that every time I seem to be into working on something when my machine decides to want to restart due to some system maintenance installation that occurred in the background. Is there not some way for these automated maintenance scripts to detect keystrokes to determine if someone is actually using the machine?

In tonight’s case, I was working on a PowerPoint presentation needed first thing Monday morning when I was prompted to save all work as a shutdown was commencing. Does anyone understand how utterly frustrating this can be? I would think this would have been something experienced by anyone who works in a networked environment.

In an Enterprise environment such as mine, this type of thing is both necessary and critical to maintaining a healthy environment. Believe me, I understand the need to keep the Windows environment as up to date and protected as necessary, but in terms of impact to productivity, I would think that at some point, and I know I may be pushing the envelope of the individual user’s needs here, it would be nice to not to have work interrupted by some reboot script.

I wonder if this would be the first in a long line of “nice to haves” in terms of an software Service friendly environment. Who knows. I do know that I am more than likely not the only individual out there who has not either lost work due to an unexpected reboot or been interrupted by one that was kind enough to give you time to save your work.

Implementing IT Service Management is like baking a cake. There is a basic recipe, but can be whipped up in any manner the pastry chef decides. Like a recipe, baking up a good batch of ITSM cupcakes requires a list of ingredients which is where frameworks like ITIL come into play. Read the rest of this entry »