IvorMacfarlane
In 23 years working for the UK government, Ivor Macfarlane moved from forestry to ITSM via prison, stores and training. He has worked as a Service Management trainer, consultant and writer since going freelance in 1999 and then after a 7 year spell with IBM he is now independent again working through MacfPartners to deliver training and consultancy to customers. He was an author for ITIL (versions 1,2 & 3), ISO20000 and ITSM library and an ITIL examiner since 1991. He is well known at ITSM events having presented at many around the world (39 countries so far) and is an active contributor to social media.
Latest from IvorMacfarlane
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Governance shouldn’t be ‘Us & Them’
My last blog on this site was linking sports – total football in that case – to the ideas behind DevOps. Maybe that got me thinking about sports and ITSM topics. Whatever the reason, an allusion came to me in a recent training course when a discussion opened up around governance. One of the delegates
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Devops, Johan Cruyff, Total football – and Total IT?
DevOps and Football – where is the connection? We recently lost Johan Cruyff, one of the few true greats of modern football (read soccer if you hail from west of the Atlantic). Looking back on how Cruyff, and coach Rinus Michels’s innovation changed football and how that then evolved into the modern playing style made
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Service Management and fitted kitchens
But you’ve done this before haven’t you? Everyone who’s worked as an ITSM consultant – external or internal – is familiar with the ‘just do ITSM for me’ line. The customer has decided to ‘do’ ITIL (or COBIT or ISO2000, choose your framework). They expect to take processes drafted elsewhere and apply these to their
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Joining things up = progress: a connection between Physics and DevOps?
It sometimes seems IT is just one endless stream of brand new things; service management tempers that a little. Service is an old concept, one that has been delivering customer outcomes for centuries. New things are supposed to be better than old ones, seeing similarities to the past can help us avoid repeating mistakes and
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The Model Train-set Syndrome
Getting the layout right When I was a boy, like everyone else I knew, I had a model train set. It was fun to watch the train go round past my few random pieces of supporting infrastructure: station platform, signal box and a footbridge. I recall occasional fantasies of building a ‘proper’ layout with multiple
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Service Management – A whole thing that just works is often better than perfect pieces
Service Management – Old isn’t always out of date Things have always changed, but for human society the rate of change over the past 40 years has been an exponential zoom into the unknown and the unpredicted. You would presume, therefore, that anything we learned more than a few years back is no longer valid.
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A journey from Service Management to Service Management via IT
One of the things about staying around an industry space long enough to get old is that you see things change so much they come back – sort of – to where they were before. In 1982 I joined a team of enthusiastic folks in UK Government employ called ‘Services Group’ as their stores training
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From mad risk and excitement to unremarkable everyday routine
There was about 80 years between the brave and foolhardy heroics of Santos-Dumont and the Wright brothers in creating serious aviation and the tedious routine of modern plane travel. That, of course, was mechanical engineering and the 20th Century – IT and the 21st can do that kind of thing much faster. That aircraft journey
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