We are happy to unveil the latest version of IssueNet, IssueNet 6.0. One major new feature in this release is its integration with both Outlook 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. Options such as “refresh” and “close all” have been added to the tabs in the interface of the IssueNet Manager, Administrator, and Architect. The program’s appearance has been updated, with 3D effects removed, gradients added, and toolbars replaced by more easily configurable tool strips. Roll over tool tips have also been implemented for items that contain descriptions and for items such as contacts. Spell-check is now done in real time, or it can be done on command by pressing the F7 key.

These are just a subset of the features we’ve added to this latest release of IssueNet. Visit our evaluation page to learn more about obtaining a copy of IssueNet 6.0, or visit our product page to learn what IssueNet can do for you and your organization.

This week, our team was in Louisville, Kentucky for the ITSM Fusion Expo. We provided custom demonstrations of IssueNet and ScreenConnect for all who stopped by. 

Our next show is the HDI Service Management Conference & Expo in Miami, Florida, coming up on October 6th. We hope to see you there! 

Last week the Elsinore team took a long overdue company outing to the little town of Morehead, NC for some fishing and relaxation. It was a great opportunity to break away from the emails and phone calls for a day and enjoy the salt water and some good fun. Since our return I have had a lot of questions about how the trip went and if we caught any fish. Everyone seems a little surprised when I note how many we caught during the excursion. Of course I leave out the fact that the captain dropped us in all the right places and the first mate did most of the work!

The trip took us almost 70 miles off shore with a few stops in between as we trolled around for Mahi and whatever else we could find. Here are a few pictures from our trip for posterity sake. Oh and no one got sea-sick but the Dramamine was used frequently and exorbitantly used before and during the trip. Overall the trip was a great success, with no major injuries or casualties to speak of...not that I would anyway.

 

 

 

Elsinore Technologies announced July 21, 2010 that it will be exhibiting at the 2010 HDI Service Desk Expo in Miami Florida. The event scheduled for October 6-8^th at the InterContinental Miami is an annual conference that brings together members of HDI community to discuss industry related topics such as Service Management, Governance, Service Quality, and much more.

This show appealed to us for a variety of reasons, but we ultimately made the decision because of the HDI community itself. Their focus on quality, knowledge sharing, and innovation mirrored what we as a small software company are trying to achieve every day. As we worked with the Expo team for several months learning, reading, and asking questions it was clear that HDI had a well thought out and focused event which we wanted to be involved with going forward.

The entire team here is excited about our first HDI Expo and no it’s not just because it’s in Miami! So if you are in Miami October 6-8^th and you want to talk about ITSM, Issue Tracking, or Remote Support stop by booth 3 and say hello to Jeff, Jake, or Morgan.

Elsinore Press Release

HDI Service Desk Exp 2010 

Has your team ever complained about the confusing issue submission form?

Have you had to alter how you’d like to handle certain issues due to the constraints of your software?

Do you have an issue tracking solution for facilities, software development, IT, HR, product management, and your help desks?

There are many issue tracking solutions available, but most are designed specifically to work within a certain department or group. For example, software development has a host of industry-specific solutions. These solutions can be tweaked or modified to marginally work for other teams, but inherent limitations persist due to the software’s designs.

IssueNet was developed with an object-oriented architecture that allows teams to completely customize all facets of the software to meet their specific needs. The options are endless and quite exciting when you consider the opportunities. For example, each issue type can have its own form, workflow, users, and notifications. Additionally, a single database can be used between all the solutions to allow better communication between teams, making implementation quicker and easier. Take a look at what an object oriented issue tracking can do for you! http://www.elsitech.com

Many global organizations are working on standardizing the best practices for workflows. One of the most notable practices is the business process modeling notation (BPMN). The BPMN provides a set of symbols and guidelines for charting the flow of a business process. In this second installment of our workflow discussion, we’ll talk about the different elements that comprise a BPMN compliant workflow.

 

Annotations – These are small text paragraphs that are often added by the workflow designer to explain what is being done at that stage of the workflow. Annotations can provide additional information, but they can also take up a lot of additional room on the canvas. Because annotations are not necessarily required in a workflow, there are a few modes of use:  always visible, visible if the mouse is over a particular element or icon (also known as “tool tips”), or toggled on and off as the user requires through a button or similar mode of use.

Events –Events, denoted by circles, signal “something happening,” such as an email notification, a scheduled meeting, or the end of a particular process. Icons may be present inside the circle, such as an email icon or a clock picture. Though a user will immediately know the type of an event by the icon or color of the circle, the user will not know exactly what transpired during that event. Annotations may be added for clarity, which will result in a workflow with more elements.

Activities –Activities, such as meeting requests and task assignments, are sometimes represented as rounded rectangles with small icons. However, these icons only tell the user that “something” is happening at that point; the user will not necessarily know exactly what happened at a meeting, who is involved, what was said in an email, etc. Having more information about the activities can be useful, but it creates additional design elements in the workflow.

Question:  If you are assigning the same task to multiple individuals, should workflow designers use one task element to represent this activity? Or should the designers use multiple elements?

Gateways – These are elements that take transitions from the output(s) of elements and then transition them to the input(s) of others. There are two main types of gateways: combiners (fork/join) and multipliers (inclusive decision/merge). A combiner takes multiple inputs and creates a single output, while a multiplier takes a single input and creates multiple output transitions. These elements are not required in a process. However if the goal is to show as much detail as possible about the events of a workflow, they can be very useful.

Question:  Should a gateway that has internal logic denote that to the observers of the workflow?

Swimlanes – Represented as horizontal or vertical lanes (often different colors), swimlanes help teams and designers to keep track of what work is done by which department or what category the work falls under. These can add complexity to the layout and design of the workflow.  

There are many more elements within the BPMN standard that can be added to a workflow. Again, however, we must ask the question: which elements are the most important? By utilizing a large variety of geometrical icons, will the workflow become too cluttered, hindering the understanding of the user?

The team here at Elsinore has spent quite a bit of time this past week reviewing how workflows should look and feel to users.  We thought it would be great to hear our customers’ and visitors’ opinions on workflow design usages.

For the purpose of this blog we will focus specifically on business processes, though the principles could apply to any type of organization. A typical workflow diagram will have geometrical elements (such as rectangles, diamonds, and triangles), each representing or describing some action, activity, or decision that has to be made during the process. Most of these elements will typically have a one or two word label to help observers keep track of the flow. These elements are however only a few of the possible graphical and text representations available.

The amount of detail provided by a workflow diagram is determined by the workflow designer. Workflows can be designed at a high level, only outlining the general scope of the process and keeping the layout simple. On the other hand, workflows can be very detailed, showing exactly what activities are being performed, to whom the emails are sent, what divisions are doing the work, who is responsible for scheduling a meeting, etc. The information is all available but the key is balance. When we consider these and other elements that could be represented, are they useful or do they add clutter to the workflow canvas? What elements do you think are important?  And should workflow designers err on the side of simplicity, or should they strive to display as much information as possible?

It’s a difficult philosophy to capture in a single blog, so in the next installment we’ll capture a few of the most common design elements of a workflow and discuss some of their pros and cons as graphical representations on a workflow.

According to the UK’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Version 2 (v2) is finally being laid to rest. ITIL v2 was lauded as the “most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.” In 2007 ITIL v3 was launched with, a few major changes, possibly most significant a key shift in methodology by encouraging inter-department communication between IT and business teams. Having worked on both sides of this equation in different careers, I can attest that improved communication between these departments definitely needed addressing. But as we move into this new decade, let’s look back at some of the stats and the history of ITIL v2. 

• Some general ITIL Information
• A Google search for ITIL v2 returns over 353,000 results
• ITIL v2 was launched in tandem with BS 15000 which later became ISO/IEC 20000
• A Google search for ISO/IEC 20000 returns 226,000 results
• Some notable ITIL adopters: Microsoft, IBM, Cat,and Boeing

The blog IT Skeptic has worked out the cost to obtain full ITIL certification: $60k. This includes hourly rates for your time,travel, etc.  The actual cost, should you choose to obtain just the certification, is probably closer to $20k-30k.

ITIL began with a decision from the UK government recognized a need for a set of standards for IT infrastructure and management.  The original group formed to address this issue was the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA). The CCTA then produced the Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management (GITIM). Yes, that’s a lot of acronyms, but stay with us! So the GITIM lost the G and the M, improvised with library, and the ITIL was born.

History

1989 – ITIL v1, thirty volumes long, is released. 

2000/2001 – CCTA becomes the OGC, which is under the office of the UK Treasury. Perhaps the government suspected that IT service management would yield lots of revenue!

2000/2001 - ITIL v2 is released at a trim eight volumes long, since thirty volumes is a heavy load for a bookshelf!

2006 – The ITIL Glossary is released.

2007 – ITIL v3 is released. It is five volumes long, with a focus on communication with business teams. 

2009 – OGC announces the end of ITIL v2, and there will be no more books or certifications.

2010 – 1 year notification/warning from OGC

June 30, 2011 – RIP ITIL v2

With the transition from ITIL Version 2.0 to 3.0 and the increasing exposure of Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) the terminology and organization of the terminology used in the industry is changing and evolving.  But am I confusing my customers when I use the old ITIL terms or am I confusing them worse using the new terms they have less experience with? I need a way to figure out what is still the same and what is different in ITIL version 2 and version 3.

So I looked out to the web to see if anyone had done a direct comparison of the terms and books of ITIL v2 and v3.  I found where someone had done a pretty nice write up and several other sources plagiarized the work; but, it was still all written comparisons and I wanted more of a diagram, a drawing, something with arrows!  I never found what I was looking for so between episodes of NCIS last night I resolved my problem.

So without delay here is the Elsinore Technologies ITIL v2 vs. v3 comparison diagram.  If you note any mistakes on my part please let me know and I will correct my oversight immediately.  Regarding the diagram ITIL v2 books are broken out on the left and v3 on the right, the type of arrow doesn’t matter I used a few different styles for aesthetics only, also I added the service desk and variations thereof to the Service Operations book of ITIL v3.

A higher resolution version can be downloaded from our Oversight website at:

ITILv2-vs-v3-Diagram

It doesn’t take but a few hours of searching the web to find that there are quite a few players in the world of certification and IT Operations Frameworks.  The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) developed in the UK in 1989 by CCTA which now resides under the ownership of the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) was one of the first attempts at documenting the concepts, policies, and best practices for managing information technology (IT) infrastructure.  Over the past few decades IT departments have seen the development of websites, blogs, certification processes, revision changes of ITIL strategies, and teams of consultants grow at staggering rates.  A lot of this could be contributed to many economic factors but I believe the biggest changes are contributed to IT alignment with business units.  As IT services becomes more measurable in conjunction with business unit profitability, company executives can better see the bottom line revenue potential of investing in their IT department processes, training, and service management; not just the hardware and software assets.  With this shift in visibility IT departments go from black boxes which few executives understood to glass boxes that play an immediate role in productivity, revenue generation, and customer satisfaction visible to everyone.  And with this visibility comes money and as companies start spending more of it the private sector reacts providing an increasing number of services and solutions to help fill the needs.

Since its inception both formally and informally the playing field has changed and grown springing up new players such as ITSMF International, ITSMPA.org, ISACA, COBIT, ISO 20000, and Microsoft Operations Framework just to name a few.  These companies coupled with mandated compliances such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, and SOX have made IT operations a huge growth area for companies of all types who want to provide their touch, insight, and experience to this unquestionably fast moving and high growth business segment.

But with all of these new players and the push by companies like Microsoft into the market defining new terms and best practices which organizations and sectors of this model will be the industry leaders moving forward.  The direction of operations is changing, in the past few years we have seen the process driven ITIL version 2.0 replaced with a business aligned version 3.0.  And now Microsoft is providing their version of operations framework which is similar to ITIL but has its own unique twists.  So who is going to jump into the mix next?  One thing is for sure competition sparks productivity, new ideas, and new ways of approaching problems.  All though I would like to see continued alignment in terminology I like the idea of new companies pushing the incumbents, if nothing else it gives me something to blog about!