Building Operational Excellence: IT People and Process Best Practices

This book shows IT managers exactly how to assess their own organizational processes, and then improve those processes to "best practice" levels -- starting today. Drawing on META Group's worldwide enterprise consulting experience, it introduces a new way to understand IT processes, and a step-by-step approach to defining goals, filling in gaps, eliminating weaknesses, and achieving excellence. This book focuses on five core areas of IT management: operations, engineering support, finance, security, and customer relationship management (CRM). The authors introduce Centers of Excellence (COEs): clusters of interrelated IT tasks that, when properly sequenced, can be the building blocks of "best practice" processes. Building on this concept, they show how to define IT processes that optimize efficiency and effectiveness across the IT organization; integrate and automate similar tasks and processes; improve accountability and correlate IT processes with service-level agreements; assign costs more accurately; and -- above all -- provide a consistent, excellent customer experience. For all IT managers seeking to improve the quality, timeliness, and value of the services they provide.

Table of Contents:
Preface. For Whom Is This Book Intended? The Elevator Pitch. Getting the Most Out of This Book. Acknowledgments. 1. What Are IT Best Practices? Obstacles to Improving IT Operations. What Do Best Practices Mean and Why Are They Important? Better Practices versus Best Practices. 4 The Three Fundamental Steps. Other Benefits of the Three Fundamental Steps. The Area of Application. 2. Laying the Foundation. Defining Tasks and Processes. Consolidating Tasks into Processes. Other Aspects of Tasks. From Tasks to Processes. Identify and Catalog Processes. Process Attributes. Questions to Ask. Template Tools. Evaluate and Prioritize Processes. Process Maturity Modeling. Process Maturity Modeling Characteristics. Extending Process Reach. 3. Gap Analysis and Process Refinement. Gap Analysis. Example of Gap Analysis: Change Management. Continuing with Gap Analysis. Deeper Gap Analysis. After the Analysis. What Then? Process Refinement. Process Evolution. Process Innovation. Process Integration. Centers of Excellence. Moving from Processes to COEs. 4. COEs—Building on the Process Foundation. COE Development. Operations Optimization. Identify the Organization's Goals. Identify Metrics to Track Goal Performance. Identify/Define Key Operational Processes. Integrate Processes to Reflect Synergy. Quantify Benefit Back to the Organization. From Process to COE. Task/Process/COE Trade-offs5. The COE Template5. A Process Foundation. What Processes Are Included in COEs? What Products/Services Are Included within the COE? Aggregating Processes. The Result: COEs. Core COEs. COE Staff. The COE Brain Trust. The COE RRT. Rapid Assimilation. The 1-Tier Transact Pattern. The 2-Tier Transact Pattern. The 3/N-Tier Transact Pattern. The Client/Server Publish Pattern. The Web Publish Pattern. The Stream Publish Pattern. The Real-Time Collaborate Pattern. The Store-and-Forward Collaborate Pattern. The Structured Collaborate Pattern. Conclusion. 5. Metrics. Pure IT Metrics. Metrics Gap Analysis. Mapping IT Metrics to Business Metrics. Mapping Business and IT Metrics. Qualitative Metrics. Value Metrics. Ongoing Metrics Reporting. 6. Putting It All Together. IT Products and Pricing. Productizing Operations. Cost—Allocation—Price Strategies. Product Catalog. Marketing the Value of IT. Business Relationship Management. alue/Metric Reporting. The IT Annual Report. Other Marketing Techniques. Conclusion. 7. Process Catalog. How to Use This Catalog. Form and Content of Process Catalog Entries. Application Optimization. Asset Management. Budget Management. Business Continuity. Business Relationship Management. Capacity Planning. Change Management. Configuration Management. Contract Management. Contractor Management. Cost Recovery. Data Storage Management. Facilities Management. Inventory Management. Job Scheduling. Negotiation Management. Network Management. Output Management. Performance Management. Problem Management. Production Acceptance. Production Control. Physical Database Management. Quality Assurance. Security Management. Service-Level Management. Service Request Management. Software Distribution. System Monitoring. Tape Management. Workload Monitoring. 8. Center of Excellence Catalog. Application Center. Asset Center. Command Center. Customer Advocacy Center. Data and Media Center. Engineering Support Center. Outsourcing Center. Security. Appendix A. Further Reading. Glossary. Index 0201767376T05132002

About the Author :
Bruce Allen is a vice president of META Group. Before joining META in August 1990, he managed corporate central processing of hardware and software resources at the Hartford Insurance Group, where he was responsible for procurement and strategic planning. During his seventeen-year data-processing career, he has been involved in all aspects of central environment support, including operations, systems programming, performance analysis, rates/chargeback, budgeting, service levels, forecasts, and overall planning. Dale Kutnick is the cofounder, CEO, and chairman of the board of META group, overseeing all of the company¿s research and analytical activities. Prior to cofounding META Group in 1989, Mr. Kutnick was executive vice president of research at Gartner Group. Previously, he was executive director and a principal at Yankee Group, and a principal at Battery Ventures, a venture capital firm. 0201767376AB05062002