for J. William Bennett

William Wrigley, Jr. (1861-1932) once said "When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary."  Without experiential deliberation there can be no change. Without change there can be no progress.  Doing something "the way its always been done" or finding no fault in a faulty process, is as common today as it was in Wrigley's day. Not addressing such issues can render your business unnecessary.

Professional Experiential  Portfolio

for

J. William Bennett

What is Best Practice engineering?  It has many definitions and means something slightly different to each IT discipline.  Approaches to best practices are often defined by the particular challenge facing the individual or the enterprise.

For the CIO or COO, best practices are often based on costs. 

• What are the most effective and efficient IT practitioners in the industry investing in IT? 
• What is their total cost of ownership (TCO) valuations on COTS systems, CRM, ERP, JIT, et al? 
• How can IT best provide value to the enterprise and therefore value to the stakeholders?

For the IT Executive manager or CTO, best practices are based on such things as performance, error rates and availability. 

• What practices result in the least amount of failures?
• What are the best network or data base performance practices, policies and vendors?
• What business process reengineering (BPR) solutions should we be reviewing (SOA, ASP, server consolidation, etc)?
• How can technology be applied to business requirements and objectives?

For the IT Professional, best practices often focus on state-of-the art systems, software and administrative practices.

• What development and management tools and techniques are most productive? 
• Which features and functions do I need in my software and hardware infrastructure to be successful? 
• What training is needed to exploit today's most advanced technologies?

I have seen everything from consolidations to downsizing justified on some best practice metric.  The KPMG Advanced Technologies Group of which I was a Manager, offered benchmarking as a measure of best practice proximity and analysis.  I have had engagements where operations automation projects were justified on a best practice review. Best Practice is an extremely relative term.

Almost any IT systems management control (ITSM) discipline has a best practice metric touted by someone somewhere.  ITSM disciplines and the metrics for best practices include:

• Problem Management (metrics include: problem reporting, resolution, root cause analysis, reoccurrence rates, help desk practices, call center mgmt, escalation mgmt, alert automation,..)
• Change Management (metrics include: change control, change scheduling, change-to-problem interfaces, change automation, version and level control, collaborative development standards, configuration management, CASE tools,...)
• Security Management (metrics include: access, intrusion, verification, audit management, certification levels, data privacy practices, measurement and reporting ...)
• Performance Management (metrics include: systems, applications, networks, monitors, reporting, service levels [SLO, SLA], availability, alert automation, response time, mean time to correction, interfaces to problem management, modeling and prevention,...)
• Project Management (metrics include: coordination, completion, target compliance, schedule compliance, budget compliance, earned value,...)
• Operations Management (metrics include: automation, schedule compliance, response times, monitoring methods and tools, alert processing,...)
• Business Continuity (metrics include: disaster recovery, business recovery, backup systems, restoration processes, applications recovery, data recovery,...)
• Data Management (metrics include: storage systems (disk, tape, CD) management, interfaces to security & business continuity systems, procurement practices, requirements analysis, fulfillment practices,....)

I have applied experience in all of these ITSM disciplines. Some more than others. For instance; performance, operations automation and problem management, have all been cornerstone disciplines in my career.  ITSM itself is included in a 'best practice' framework, the IT Information Library (ITIL) initiative.  Developed in England in the 1980s, ITIL has been adopted more widely and has led to a number of standards.  As a set of guidelines taken from past experience, the ITIL has considerable value.

Other best practice frameworks include: The Information Services Procurement Library (ISPL), the Application Services Library (ASL), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), the Capability Maturity Model (CMM/CMMI), and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT).

My former company, BGI, offered a best practice engineering service that was based on KPMG benchmarking and workflow methodologies and supported by The Meta Group's (acquired by Gartner) standardized metrics [see BPRS].  I sold the assets of BGI  some time ago, but the methodology and practices evolved in this service are still applicable to managing most of today's IT infrastructure.

Additionally. there are over 100,000 software titles for the enterprise server environment (Unix, Wintel & Linux) and many will claim that they are 'best practice' solutions.  Best practice software and service evaluation is becoming a science in itself.  There are several independent services dedicated to technology evaluation based on your business process model (BPM).  These services are going to become indispensable in years to come.

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