The answer is in “HOW”, not “WHAT”

In my experience, its not the “what” framework you are using that helps an organization, its “how” you are using the framework that makes a difference.

This has been validated by organizations that have stayed with ITIL V2, and focussed on improving the maturity and compliance of existing processes, instead of jumping on to ITIL V3 bangwagon after it was introduced. There is another set of organizations that have started to adopt the V3 lifecycle approach and bringing in flavors of process definition and structure  from ITIL V3, however that still needs to translate to being able to execute what gets documented. And no results can be guarenteed unless there is adoption and compliance to the new set of processes.

The thought was triggered by the latest article on ITPReport by Alim Ozcan where he summarises the versions of ITIL and recommends  when to use them. I feel that he is correct, however I also feel that before an organization decides between one of the few available versions and best practice frameworks, a quick analysis of what we want to do, and how we are doing it currently is very important!

A quick checklist could look like this

1. Do we measure current process performance and adoption?

2. If no, start doing that before we decide on a new framework. If Yes, what is our level of execution? are we doing good?

3. If we are doing well on the current set of processes, what do we add to the process  to take it to a different level? Integration? Governance? Services flavor? It is important to benchmark the processes against best practices and a maturity assessment once in a couple of years would help answer the question # 3.

Eight Levels of Analytics

I came across a lovely article on levels of Analytics Maturity on SAS website. The 8 levels mentioned in the article are

Standard Reports

Ad Hoc Reports

Query Drilldown

Alerts

Statistical Analysis

Forecasting

Predictive Modelling

Optimization

I am yet to see maturity at anything more than a level 4 in most of the organizations that I know about, however I have been a part of Statistical Analysis and Forecasting in the BPO World. Click here to read the article, or here to download the pdf version.