ITIL is a set of best practices put forth by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) of the UK Government for better IT management. We (CPTTM Cyber-Lab) are implementing some of its practices and it is not hard at all. Here I'd like to share with you how we're doing it.
For example, one of the best practices in ITIL is "You should have a *measurable* service agreement with your suppliers". What does it mean to Cyber-Lab? We have about 100 PCs in our classrooms and some of them will be out of order from time to time. This affects our students. To improve the situation, we need to have a measurable (but simple please!) service level agreement from the computer vendors stating:
After checking with our centralized purchase department, I found that we did NOT have any written service level agreement for our new PCs at all. For the older ones, we did have one but it only specified point 1 above but not point 2. This is bad.
After some communication with
our purchase department and the
vendors, the vendors are happy to specify/add both points
in written agreements. This is not hard at all and I am sure
they
are happy too to have a clear agreement with us. They now know our
requirements clearly and they can measure if they are meeting our
requirements. We can also evaluate the vendors in the future regarding
how well they are meeting our requirements. We can now provide better
services to our own customers (students) as hopefully we won't have
out-of-service PCs for an extended period.
Simple to do, isn't it? To learn more about ITIL best practices, you may consider taking our upcoming ITIL course taught by *the* ITIL expert, Pink Elephant in Nov. For more details, please see http://www2.cpttm.org.mo/training/sdb/showCourse.do?courseCode=CM218-11-2005-E.
Have any question regarding ITIL or a best practice/case study to share? Contact me at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.
According to Yankee Group, OpenOffice's market share has reached 19% among small and medium businesses. For more info, see http://www.toptechnews.com/news/OpenOffice-org-2-0-Release-Delayed/story.xhtml?story_id=03100339SMZN.
OpenOffice 2.0 has been released. You can get it at http://www.openoffice.org. The Chinese version is unavailable yet. In addition, our testing shows that it contains a critical bug: If you have a Chinese character in an English font, when you export it to PDF the Chinese text character appear as a box. So, in my opinion it's better to wait for 2.01 before any deployment.
Any ideas or questions? If so, please contact us at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.
Until next time,
Kent Tong