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Randy Steinberg

Randy Steinberg

Randy has over 25 years of hands-on IT Service Management and operations experience gained from many clients around the world. He was the lead author for the ITIL 2011 Service Operation book. He was a Global Head of Service Management for a worldwide media company with 176 operating centers around the globe. He recently led a major IT Service Management transformation project for a large government agency crossing implementation of management technologies, process, organizational and governance changes that was awarded an ITIL project of the year award from itSMF. Randy is also the author of several popular ITIL books: Implementing ITSM, Measuring ITSM, Servicing ITSM and Architecting ITSM. Randy has implemented IT solutions for one client that went on to win a Malcolm Baldrige award for the quality of their IT services. He carries ITIL Expert, ISO20000 and PMP certifications.

Contributions by Randy Steinberg

From Silos To Services – Transforming The IT Organization Part 2

It should be recognized that the ITSM transformation needs to operate as an ongoing program, not a one-time project. This describes a program that will start by putting the overall ITSM foundation in place in terms of organization, vision and governance followed by implementation of targeted activities to achieve first short-term wins and then longer-term strategies over time.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

From Silos To Services – Transforming The IT Organization Part 1

When it comes to providing IT support to the business, a major evolution is on the horizon. The traditional IT operating model of delivering IT to the business in the form of bundled capabilities and assets is wearing thin in an age of cloud computing, on-demand services, virtualization, outsourcing and rapidly changing business delivery strategies. What IT traditionally engineered, built, owned and operated can now be bought from many sources more easily without inheriting the specific risks of ownership, support, building and managing an operating infrastructure. Part 1 of this post discusses key concepts for adapting an IT organization to services.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Operate With Security As A Service And Fix The Mess!

For many IT organizations, security is run as a sprawling mess across multiple technical teams, providers and applications development staff. Many operate with overlapping responsibilities and sometimes unclear boundaries of responsibilities. Presented here is an approach to inject sound service management operating strategies, responsibilities and approaches. In other words, treat Security as a set of strategic services versus “something technical people do”.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Service Management In The Executive Suite – Part 5

This is part 5 of a running series on how to pull together key service management activities to support executive business decision making. Part 1 provided an overview of a 5-Step approach for pulling together actions and data for executive decisions. Part 2 addressed how to identify company services. Part 3 looked at how to apply service discovery and mapping, or “bill of materials” that support each of those services. In Part 4, we saw how to translate all this into service costs and unit costs. Here in Part 5 we’ll take a look at what to do with the information gleaned in the first 4 parts to develop a target IT strategy.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Service Management In The Executive Suite – Part 4

This is part 4 of a running series on how to pull together key service management activities to support executive business decision making. Part 1 provided an overview of a 5-Step approach for pulling together actions and data for executive decisions. Part 2 addressed how to identify company services. Part 3 looked at how to apply service discovery and mapping, or “bill of materials” that support each of those services. Here in Part 4, we will look at how to translate all this into service costs and unit costs. The outcomes of this effort are where executive leadership can see transparency in how their IT investments are being applied to support decision making and IT strategy.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Service Management In The Executive Suite – Part 3

This is part 3 of a running series on how to pull together key service management activities to support executive business decision making. Part 1 provided an overview of a 5-Step approach for pulling together actions and data for executive decisions. Part 2 addressed how to identify company services. Part 3 now takes a look at a very critical piece to identify the underlying assets, or “bill of materials” that support each of those services. This discusses the concepts of service discovery and mapping.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Service Management In The Executive Suite – Part 2

As the 2nd Part in this series, we continue with the 5-Step approach first outlined in Part 1. This approach leverages Services Thinking. It allows for sound business concepts that can be leveraged to change the dynamic for how IT manages itself and works with the business. In Part 2, we will examine how to build a portfolio of all current IT services used to support the business. This is not as simple as it sounds. Business people understand services from a business perspective, but not an IT perspective. IT people will understand technologies and platforms, but not necessarily understand how these support the business.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Service Management In The Executive Suite – Part 1

Many IT organizations have yet to recognize that the traditional IT operating model of delivering IT to the business in the form of bundled capabilities and assets is now wearing thin in an age of cloud computing, on-demand services, virtualization, outsourcing and rapidly changing business delivery strategies. While there is great value in establishing processes, tools and organization responsibilities for Service Management, there is tremendous opportunity for providing much more value at the senior leadership level. This is Part 1 of a series that describes a practical 5-step approach that IT organizations can use to quickly align themselves with the business by grasping their IT services, creating business cost transparency and establishing service strategies.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Predicting Future Incident Counts - Use Regression Analysis!

Predict incident counts before they happen! This describes a powerful approach for forecasting what incident volumes may look like in the future. The approach is very effective at showing a business case that gets executives and management on board to fund improvement initiatives for better service. Presented here is a step by step Regression Analysis approach that uses past incident volumes to model future incident volumes using an actual scenario from a very large IT organization.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

Prioritizing Service Improvement Projects Using A Scoring Framework – Take Out The Emotion!

Far too many times, IT organizations struggle with finding a fair means to prioritize the service improvement projects they will invest in. These sometimes turn into near war zones where each business unit fights to get their pet projects into the mix. Company politics may divert funding to those business units with the most clout versus what may be truly best for the business. Managing the portfolio can be done more effectively with use of an agreed scoring system based on key criteria. Through this, decisions can be made based on facts and scores versus raw emotions and competing business agendas.

Randy Steinberg by Randy Steinberg

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