When: Wednesday, February 15th, 10:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM EST

Why Attend:

• Understand how Service Catalog can help identify the cost of IT for your organization.
• Learn from practical experience of a real service catalog and self-service implementation.
• Improve the customer experience, shorten time to implementation and reduce cost of redundant and outdated services.

Register: Space is limited.  To reserve your webinar seat: REGISTER HERE

Speakers:
Paul Solis, ITIL Certified TIPA Assessor – ITSM Practice Associate at Cask, LLC
Kelly Lowe, ITIL Expert – VP of Employee Technology Services at LPL Financial

With less money available, defense managers will have to make difficult choices in funding existing programs and making future investments and divestments within acquisition portfolios.

Total cost is no longer the singular driver of defense acquisition program economic decision-making. Defense programs must be evaluated according to their contributions to the overall capabilities of a Family of Systems (FoS), System of Systems (SoS) or as a part of a portfolio of products that together meet operational or administrative requirements.

A clear-cut, objective process for analyzing portfolios of acquisition programs can assist defense managers in making the tough choices in the face of impending funding cuts. Analysis from a portfolio perspective will account for the capabilities required to meet warfighter needs while minimizing redundancies, which will reduce costs and increase return on investment (ROI).

A Capabilities Based Portfolio Assessment (CBPA) methodology can be used to evaluate the relative contributions of a given program with respect to defined requirements and strategic goals. This approach combines the analytic disciplines of cost, benefit, risk, requirements and decision analysis.

A CBPA methodology applies the appropriate decision support skills to frame portfolio decisions and draws upon processes, analytics and tools needed to: prioritize investments; prioritize divestments; allocate resources; reduce decision-making uncertainty; and illuminate underlying decision rationale.

About Ariba

The Ariba Commerce Cloud connects over 730,000 companies with just a click, including over half of the Fortune 500. Numerous companies continue to join in order to control supply chain cost and minimize risk while increasing sales and enhancing cash flow and operations. This is done through the applications for spend management, collaborative finance management and sales acceleration management. Billions of dollars are transacted weekly as a result of the instantaneous connectivity between buyers and sellers to conduct business on the network.

Over the next 24 hours in the Ariba Commerce Cloud, businesses around the world will:

• Buy and sell nearly $548 million worth of goods and services.
• Conduct more than 100,000 transactions.
• Process more than 60,000 invoices and payments.
• And, manage a whole host of other commerce collaborations, from discovering new business opportunities to negotiating contracts to securing financing.

LEARN MORE

This event will bring together military and intelligence professionals, academia, and private industry to build new relationships, discuss future challenges, and discuss how best to re-focus European intelligence on global security and stability.

Areas for Discussion Include

• Deliberate planning for information systems integration amongst partners.
• Multinational cooperation in the cyber environment.
• Enabling biometrics information sharing.
• Futures analysis and trends assessment.
• Stronger Together: Solving problems through partnering.

LEARN MORE about the conference.

Sign up early to reserve a 30 minute complimentary consultation with a Cask ITIL Expert.  CLICK HERE or email jennifer.guba@caskllc.com.

Stop by our booth and sign up to win a $150 Amazon gift card and you might also win a bottle of Cask Cabernet!

About Pink 2012: “Now in its 16th hugely successful year, the annual event is widely recognized as ”the world’s best IT Service Management conference.” The program is content rich and comprehensive – 15 tracks, 160+ sessions – covering a vast array of subjects from all across the ITSM spectrum. There is something for everyone – strategic, tactical, and operational.”  Build your business case for attending HERE.

However, keep this in mind….a Service Catalog is simply what it is. It’s an artifact…a tool. There is quite a bit of pre-work to develop a successful catalog. One of the key pre-requisites for your Service-oriented initiative is to take the time to develop a Service Portfolio and a process to manage the services within the portfolio. Think of your Service Portfolio as a requirement foundation that lays the groundwork for you to develop your Service Catalog. ITIL says the Service Catalog is a subset of the Service Portfolio and it surely is…it’s the one you market to your internal customers. Would Apple provide services or products through it’s app store prior to them being vetted? Probably not. When building your Service Portfolio it is important to:

1) Set goals for your portfolio
2) Evaluate customer demand
3) Determine your organization’s core competencies to meet demand
4) Research competing services (i.e. cloud, outsourcing, etc)
5) Identify revenue and costs associated with core services
6) Develop a process-to-service map for increased confidence to deliver services (this will require previous development of key processes)

After you complete these exercises (keeping in mind that this can be done iteratively for service groups at a time) you can work on your first version of your Service Catalog. I also do realize that we do not live in a perfect world and you may have started your catalog prior to your portfolio. That’s okay. It’s never too late to begin your portfolio project and map it back to the services you have already developed in your catalog. After all, these two are highly related and dependent upon one another.

Allow me to make a couple of observations that can help:

• The key to making CAIV work is the willingness to make requirements trade-offs and anyone who has worked in support of a DoD acquisition program knows that rarely, if ever, is there a formal process for making this happen. End users and engineers must be involved in analyzing the cost trade space from a user requirements perspective and a technical requirements perspective.

So much discussion revolves around user requirements; however, technical requirements can be the source for several smaller cost-trade-offs that add up to significant savings. Consider the $25 power transistor for the Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) program. In this case, an original 2,500 lbs. torque requirement was changed to 1,600 lbs. Along with another change to incorporate a commercial product (rather than building something custom for DoD) netted a power transistor cost of $4.05. The resulting savings across 34 transistors in the system coupled with the 74,000 units to be procured equaled $37.2M in program savings.

• Start as early as possible in the acquisition phase of a program (i.e. pre-milestone A). Reasonable cost goals should be established early-on with cost driving performance and technical requirements rather than the other way around. Requirements will be refined as the program matures at which point an Integrated Product Team (IPT) comprised of cost analysts, engineers and program office staff working together to establish cost targets to which the program should be managed throughout its life cycle.

Steve Wozniak was brilliant in leading a continual technical evaluation of design, technical effectiveness, and cost trade-offs that ultimately led him to need only 8 chips versus the traditional 35 chips (at the time) for making a floppy disc drive controller in what would become the first-ever personal computer. This same approach can be implemented today in DoD acquisition programs but it requires the early-on involvement of end users, engineers, program office staff and cost analysts to set realistic cost objectives that can be used to save DoD substantial sums of money on acquiring weapon systems and information systems for today’s military.

Cask is a supplier through NC3A to all NATO entities under contract NC3A/BOA/13341. NATO C3 Agency Basic Ordering Agreements (BOAs) are acquisition instruments negotiated between suppliers of products or services and NATO C3 Agency on behalf of NATO in accordance with the referential NATO guidelines and procedures. Under their Charter, NATO C3 Agency roles consist of central planning, systems integration, design, systems engineering, technical support and configuration control for NATO C3 systems and installations. LEARN MORE

About Cask

Cask’s “Acquisition Engineering” approach utilizes a process and portfolio view to ensure all aspects and impacts are considered early. This includes cost, estimation, business case, statutory & regulatory guidelines, organization, process and resources. Whether in country or CONUS, Cask has the capabilities and experience to guarantee results, and ensure a content and prepared US partner nation. Leveraging Cask’s expertise ensures that every step in the process is completed thoroughly, accurately, on time, and in the prescribed method, as directed by the MILDEP, DoD, and the USG.

An assessment using ISO/IEC 15504 gives a great maturity baseline for any process. Focusing on ITSM, the Tudor ITSM Process Assessment (TIPA) methodology was actually built using ISO/IEC 15504 and ITIL as the foundation. We have done other assessments focused on project management maturity, onboarding maturity and other business processes using ISO/IEC 15504 which have proven to provide insight on how to reduce cost for those customers and improve customer satisfaction.

When evaluating organizations to perform an assessment make sure you ask these 5 questions:

1) How many assessments have you done? What were the size and scope of the assessments you have done?

2) Is the organization or individuals within the organization you are considering to perform assessments certified in a methodology or are they using something proprietary to their company? Proprietary assessment methodologies may focus on areas where the consulting firm is able to obtain more billable hours for improvement services, rather than the areas where your organization actually needs help.

3) Is the organization going to have group interviews or 1-on-1′s? There is a place for both, but it is important that the operators of the process are interviewed 1-on-1 and that their conversations are +kept confidential. You want the down and dirty and not hear “everything’s fine.”

4) Is the company going to interview customers of each process? At the end of the day the process is for the customers and it is important to get their feedback.

5) What do we get at the end of the assessment? You should get a maturity rating for each process assessed, a gap analysis, and implementable recommendations. This may or may not include a roadmap. A more complete assessment will include a roadmap or timeline.

A suitable heuristic in cost estimating is that more parameters increase the explanatory power of a cost model; however, too many parameters make the model too complex, unwieldy and difficult to calibrate.

Therefore, when deciding on how to construct a cost estimate, the challenge is how to determine the appropriate number of parameters that accomplish two goals, which are paramount in developing quality cost models:

1. Have the best explanatory power possible
2. Be logically the most appropriate for representing the system’s or process’ cost

More is not necessarily better with respect to cost model complexity. Rather, it’s the fine balance between complexity and adequate representation of the problem facing the cost analyst that is important when estimating cost.