Presentation and paper topics - Small organizations

[aatencio]

I would like to use this message thread as a tool to generate ideas for future conference presentations, possible white papers, and even possible discussion topics on this message forum.

I would like to limit this thread to discussions about these items as the relate to small organizations. Please see my follow-up post as it relates to trying to defining small organizations.

Thank you for participating and I will do my best to keep us on topic.


Andy Atencio

[aatencio]

So how do we define small organization? First we have to make sure that we are defining both words.

As Beverly stated at the St. Louis conference there was a “small company” presentation. When I attended, the organization being used as the model was a company that had well over 5000 employees, 17 North American facilities and sales offices world wide. I don’t personally consider this a small organization. It might be considered a small company, but I am trying to draw a distinction between companies and organizations here. The reason for this is an organization can be anything from an incorporated company to a non-profit to a government agency. I am not talking only about companies. My mission is to evangelize the importance and value of ITSM to organizations, not companies.

So now what do we mean by small? The first thing is when I, and a number of people that I met at the St. Louis and DC conference, talk about small organizations the number seems to hover around 1000 employees. Everyone that I talked to at both conferences talked about defining their organization based on size not revenue (many government agencies and non-profits don’t even have revenue as most would define it). To me this is because it is pretty typical for IT professionals to think of the size of their organization in terms of number of computers, number of network connections, or number of users they have to support. Most IT managers don’t define their services based on the amount of revenue the organization takes in, but rather on size. I have taken this number (1000) and started to develop some strategies for ITSM around it and even presented one of them at the DC conference for small government agencies.

If others have a differing opinion please lets discuss and see if we can get to a common frame of reference. As others have stated if we can’t get to a common frame of reference, then trying to define presentation and paper topics for the future becomes almost impossible.

Thank you,
Andy Atencio

[bmwpratt]

I have been networking with "small" Managed Service Providers through the Global MSP Network (http://www.globalmspnetwork.com - that was a plug!) since November of 2001. I am happy to report, they are all still in business, which says a lot about their internal quality metrics and "home-grown" processes.

They graciously sat through ITIL sessions at the twice annual conferences and guess what? ITIL makes sense and they are heading down that path.

Now the question is, what is the path, how can we make it easy and affordable to perform an assessment, put together a roadmap and build an effective and inexpensive mentoring program.

If anybody would like to work on this, shall we meet formally (electronically) and see what we can come up with?

Beverly

[bmwpratt]

In St. Louis, we had a session in track 2 that was called "An ITIL Journey for the Small Company". It was well attended, but the disappointment for those in the crowd was Julius' small business has 5000 employees.

Since that time some "small" business practitioners have surfaced and are participating through sessions (such as at the recent past itSMF Gov't conference), articles, and will be present at the upcoming itSMF conference in September (however sessions have not been selected).

We had a Breakfast Roundtable in DC: A Logical Approach to IT Service Management in Smaller Agencies, and hope to be able to have one in Long Beach. Maybe this would be a good way to launch the small business package.

What do you think?

Beverly

[josephmi]

Obviously there is a lot of debate over exactly how "small" is "small" so I think that it is very important to begin this type of discussion by classifying organizations into various categories so that an understanding of "IT Dependence" emerges. I think that you may find that this is the true mark of need for ITSM, not number of employees.

I have worked in small organizations that had anywhere from 15 to 250 people. I've worked with organizations that consisted of 2 people. In all of these cases, they all had a certain need to understand specific concepts with regards to ITSM. For the 2 person office, they needed to understand Service Level Management at a high level so that they could speak to their vendors intelleigently. For the 250 person organization, we had need for all parts of ITSM in varying degrees because everything the organization did went through the IT systems.

I could go on and on about this, but I think I will just throw this out there first....