IT Service Management
Experience
I am working in IT Service Management for almost 28 years now with
great companies such as Hewlett Packard, Remedy Corporation (BMC), Fox
IT and recently as a contractor with my own structure called YCDINOW
(You Can Do It Now).
Service Architecture
Combining all the expertise acquired in all ITIL Processes, I design
the perfect solution for your organisation, taking in account the
different stakeholders, would they be internal teams form different
Business Units or external such as outsourcers or other Service
Providers off shore or not.
This consist in interviewing as many people as necessary because
stakeholders can be outside of the IT organisation such HR, Procurement,
etc. The point is not to exclude any inputs because, by experience, they
will suddenly emerge with great force at the most unlikely moment on the
project.
Liaising with the Enterprise Architects is also a vital part of
defining a Service Architecture and gaining approval by Senior
Management is the main focus.
It's more about what all actors and users want rather than a
sophisticated technical solution that may be rejected after a creation
time in operations. For that Leadership and Communication Skills become
paramount for the success of the project.
With Centrica, the total number of stakeholders was about 120 and
counting. All interviews have led to over 1000 requirements across all
the BUs and Service Providers. The solution addresses over 14 processes
(not all of them being ITIL).
Within this role, I have design innovative solution that covers:
Service Catalogue and Portfolio
Request Fulfilment
Resource Management
Software As A Service
Service Asset and Configuration Management (FoxIT)
I built my expertise in that domain for over than 15 years. The first
being when designing selective outsourcing with an old product called
Parc Manager that became Asset Center. The French were the first to be
concerned by the necessity of Asset Management as the professional tax
had to be paid yearly on all equipment owned by a company. So there was
a big pressure to get the assets right.
Later, I worked on Configuration Management projects as inventories
and asset management revealed to be only a part of the picture. There
was a need to understand how these assets were related to each other and
understand their role in the infrastructure.
In Digital Media, this is also the case as a lot of metadata needs to
be attached to every "assets", would be a piece of film or sound or
camera, etc.
At FoxIT, I became a recognised expert in that domain after the
success of my assignment with Centrica (1000000 CIs dealt with by a team
of only 4 people). I gave conferences on the subject that you can watch
on the right side of this page. Later, I refined the model to address
virtualisation and cloud computing environments along with Change and
Updates Management (special for IPTV solution at BT Vision).
ITSM Principal Consultant(FoxIT)
I officialised my ITSM specialisation as an ITIL Manager Red Badge
with Fox IT as well as ISO20000 certification and CoBIT.
I worked on many assignments with different large organisations in
the UK. My characteristic was being able to join the processes
definition to their implementation up to the Operations phase. I got
reputation for designing innovative models that led to elegant solutions
in different ITIL speciality.
I also get certified as a IT Service Continuity Practitioner from my
experience in that domain from my Outsourcing background. I designed MOF
processes as well at Microsoft as a SMS expert.
My main focus at Fox was on HP Openview Service Desk customers but I
also used my background in Product Marketing and my knowledge of the
ITSM competition from different Software vendors (BMC, IBM, Infra, etc).
I worked with Steria on a big outsourcing project for the UK
Government (NOMS) in charge of defining their Service Desk,
Configuration, Change and problem Management processes.
EMEA Product Marketing Manager (ITSM - Remedy)
An extremely exciting part of my career as I got the position of EMEA
Product Marketing Manager for Remedy (now BMC).
In this role, I was travelling extensively through Europe to work
with the local Sales team in order to boost the sales for their newly
defined ITSM solution. I had to evangelise the internal consulting,
support and training teams about the wonders of ITIL as well as the
partners.
I worked in close relationship with the Remedy labs in the US on
different aspects not well understood of ITIL such as Asset Management
and Service Level Management. I was also in charge of the localisation
of the product suite in French, Spanish, Italian and German
working with partners in the respective countries.
Dealing with journalists and market analysts was also an important
part of my job at that time which I enjoyed very much. I gave me the
opportunity to study the competition in Europe and devise action plans
to counter them.
My biggest focus was on Peregrine until they finally bought Remedy.
Collecting competitive information, I worked with my US counterparts to
define the best strategy. Until it was not necessary anymore.....
ITSM Champion Consultant (HP)
As I got consequent experience and expertise in IT Service Management
and as HP decided to cerate a HP Openview Sales Force on the newly
acquired Prolin ITSM suite (transformed as HP Openview Service Desk), I
took this opportunity to work as pre-sales and later became the French
ITSM Champion Consultant for the HP ITIL strategy.
In this role, I worked mainly on new products, some of them being
removed from the market just before their official launch. I was
liaising with the HP Division in Germany and in the US and was in charge
of passing by all information to my colleagues, the Sales people and the
general HP Consulting groups.
I had also to work with the early adopters customers and gather their
feedback to present back to the labs for product improvements and
debugging. Most of these early adopters were major accounts for HP.
An important part was the close relationship with the Marketing and
Sales team as we were all implicated in the success of the HP Openview
Sales Force. I worked actively with the Channel Sales force to ensure
the partners were up to date and to boost their sales. Occasionally
working with journalists and Market analysts on the French Market.
Outsourcing: Managed Services for SAP
This passion became evident when I joined the HP Outsourcing Division
back in 1993. I was Software Support Engineer at the time and I was
willing to get closer to my customers, understand their business and
their daily issues. As a Software Engineer, I could not really build a
strong relationship with my customers as I was spending only a few days
with each of them. I met with a Project Manager at Perrot Systems and he
explained what they were doing at the time with Europcar and this was an
amazing discovery. They were providing Global Outsourcing services and
therefore were completely involved in the Business of their customer.
Coincidently, HP decided to create their Managed Services Division and I
jumped on the opportunity.
My first deal was with Bridgestone/Firestone who were moving from
SAP-R2 on mainframe to SAP-R3 on HP-UX. Their internal IT were not in
favour to leave the mainframe environment. So the CIO asked us to host
their HP-UX architecture and provide full support for it (hardware,
software, help desk, change management). I designed the service for them
as no one else was proposing that as SAP-R/3 was too new at the time.
This was a success with the help of the customer and some partners. The
service was later fully defined so it could be reproduced and sold to
other customers. With 3 years, I won 6 new SAP customers for HP and got
a reputation of someone who can create services that others would be too
frightened to take the risk.
Outsourcing: Managed Services for NT
I then started to work on the design of Outsourcing Managed Services
for NT environments. My first customer was Credit Lyonnais (French
Bank). Their historical offices in Paris had burnt down and the
regulation there were preventing them to use any network as it could
have affected the historical building. They were forced to move to a
tower in La Defense and the CIO at the time wanted to implement modern
PC environment. Their internal IT were again mainframe oriented and they
were not willing to consider any PC related services. I started with 900
PCs and 10 servers. I designed with some colleagues the Network
Services, Servers and Workstations services as well as the
coordination of the education for the users as they never used a
network before. The services for the workstations included
Inventory, Software Distribution, Help Desk support with Remote
Control, Network support, backups, etc. All these services were
provided remotely from HP Grenoble.
The services were so successful that a number of organisations within
Credit Lyonnais joined the project and grew to 50000 end users within 3
years. The managed services were sold to more than 30 customers in the
same period. I was collaborating with other European countries in HP to
help them design and refine the service offering.
Global Service Desk for HP
With the success of the Managed Services, the number of end
users supported by HP was growing fast. I had designed a Service
Desk solution based on Remedy for 3 customers, the rest being
dealt with using an internal ad-hoc solution which appeared not
fit for purpose as the number of calls and the diversity of the
requests increased. The Help Desk Manager asked me to develop my
original Remedy solution to incorporate all customers and to be
scalable and flexible to accept any new customers. That was done
successfully within 6 months using a French Remedy partner for
the development. I them worked with the US teams to expand the
solution into a follow the sun architecture as they were using a
very similar approach. When I left the Outsourcing Division ,
the French Help Desk hub was supporting over 30000 users.
