Bader’s Bits

It certainly was a great event for the community, and that’s what counts. I felt a sense of optimism that I haven’t experienced in many years about the growth in our “innovation economy”.

We’re very proud to be the Presenting Sponsor for the event this year, and hope that you found it worth your time as well. Leave some comments or email me to let me know what you thought and how we could improve things for next year.

For those of you that would like copies of the presentations, here they are:

• Open source economic development strategy.ppt This is the complete presentation that includes more specific programs and activities.
• Rethink Your Network (Updated pdf with graphics) For anyone with at least a T-1 to the Internet, or looking to put more infrastructure in a data center (like ours!), check out this presentation that describes metro area Ethernet services and how they enable better network deployments.
• Voice Over IP panel A brief overview of the voice over IP market, and why we think VoIP is a matter of “when” not “if” for just about every business.

Tis the season for local industry events. Innotech is shaping up as the premier innovation and high tech event in Portland.

EasyStreet is pulling out all the stops in support of the conference. I’ll be on so many panels that my handlers are worried about overexposure. Our booth theme is: EasyStreet 2.0–Bigger, better, faster, and more. Make sure you stop by to find out why. Need another reason? We’ve got the Starbucks coffee wagon in our booth first thing in the morning. Getcha free latte’s here! And we won’t bug you while you’re trying to wake up.

Sean Lowery, Innotech’s director, tells us registation is running 2x over where the conference was a year ago. All your buds are going be there. You should too. And you can get in for free. Click here and enter the magic discount code: ESP305

See you there!

EasyStreet does. What is it? ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Still not clear? ITIL is the result of the British Government’s extensive industry survey to determine IT best practices. In fact, it is a collection of schema, definitions, and functional and organizational relationships that are common to all high maturity IT shops. Implementation, is as they say, an exercise for the users (and the consultants!).

Most organizatons that embark on ITIL are large, publicly traded enterprises. They are driven to ITIL for increased services availability, and often these days for government regulatory compliance (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.).

EasyStreet is privately held, and our service availability is 99+% already. Fortunately, as ITIL’s popularity spreads, the key software packages needed to implement it are becoming more affordable. Our motivations include:

• Building in better organizational scalability as we grow, while maintaining high service availability
• Improved measurability of our performance against SLAs (and the internal Operational Level Agreements, OLAs) for system availability and service desk/trouble ticket responses
• Create new and improved services using the “service management” approach to better integrate our services with our customers operations

We began our ITIL journey with some classes sponsored by the SAO’s Oregon Training Network, offered by Pink Elephant. Virtually all EasyStreet employees attended a 2-day overview class, and three employees have earned the Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. We immediately put training into practice by establishing a change control process for some key customer services, and as a sign of its value, the process was spontaneously embraced by the technical staff for all changes, virtually eliminating the famous last words: “This change shouldn’t affect anything…oops, what happened?”

We are now well along in our next phase: a new service desk automation system. We selected Footprints by Unipress. It’s got a great feature set, is web based, and is ITIL compliant; which means it helps implement ITIL concepts and integrates more easily with other ITIL compliant packages (we hope).

We’ve still got years to go before we become a high maturity ITIL shop, but we’re on our way and the positive experiences so far are helping with the inevitable cultural changes.

Sound interesting? There’s a international organization dedicated to ITIL implementation known as ITSMF, the IT Service Management Forum. A local Portland chapter is just starting up. Here’s the invite to the upcoming meeting, courtesy of Leslie Rohrs of the BPM Group. She hosts an IT breakfast group (attendance at the breakfast is by invitation only from Leslie). Leslie’s recent breakfast featured a consultant from CA educating us about ITIL implementation issues.