About Cask

Cask provides expert IT Service Management advisory services including an agile approach to service design and process development, governance strategy, resource planning, process improvement, cost and performance measurement, maturity assessments and outsourcing valuation. Cask utilizes a combination of IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks and standards to provide services that utilize proven best practices. Cask’s hands-on advisors have an average of 16 years experience and are certified ITIL® Experts, TIPA Assessors and Lean Six Sigma Black Belts. For more information, please visit www.caskllc.com

About Techport Thirteen

Techport Thirteen offers their team of U.S.-based, ITIL® certified personnel who will guide you on best practices to get your service, asset, and alert management solutions up and running, while tailoring them to meet your business and functional requirements. Post go-live, we possess the expertise to support, refine, and enhance those systems for months and years to come, as your business grows and your needs mature. With the most highly qualified, personable, and experienced consultants within our field, Techport Thirteen will enable you to save time and money, and eliminate the frustrations of bringing your enterprise up to speed with the latest ITSM technologies. For more information, please visit www.techportthirteen.com

Learn how to:

• Design a governance strategy that supports Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Enable increased employee productivity while preventing increased support costs
• Use these same mobile devices to streamline service desk support and reduce cost
• Leverage ITIL best practices such as Service Portfolio, Service Catalog, Request Fulfillment and Configuration Management to support a mobile governance policy

When: May 24th from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Where: KPMG – 4747 Executive Drive, Suite 600, San Diego, CA 92121

Cost: Free (first time attendees please RSVP to itsmfsd@gmail.com); $10 (non-members)

REGISTER HERE

• Better informs decision making and optimizes resources
• Ensures that investments are managed collectively as capabilities
• Aligns investments with strategy
• Helps determine the best mix of investments based on cost and effectiveness.

About the Conference

For more information about the conference LEARN HERE

Abstract

Total cost is no longer the singular driver of defense acquisition program economic decision-making. Defense programs and projects must be evaluated according to their contributions to overall monetary and non-monetary Return on Investment (ROI) relative to the capabilities of a Family of Systems (FoS), System of Systems (SoS) or as a part of a portfolio of products that together meet documented operational requirements. This is needed because future defense strategies, including Smart Defense are being driven by budget cuts. With less money available, decision makers have to make difficult funding choices for existing programs as well as for future investments and divestments within acquisition portfolios. A clear-cut, objective process for analyzing acquisition program portfolios can assist acquisition 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 ROI. We propose a Capabilities Based Portfolio Analysis (CBPA) methodology 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 that accomplish the following: better informs decision making and optimizes resources; ensures that investments are managed collectively as capabilities; aligns investments with strategy; and helps determine the best mix of investments based on cost and effectiveness.

 REQUEST ARTICLE HERE

Would you believe… the Federal Government employs someone at the General Services Administration (GSA) as “Plain Language Launcher?”  The job was created in answer to the “Plain Language Act of 2010”

The “Launcher’s” name is Katherine Spivey.  Previous to her appointment as official purveyor of plain language, Ms. Spivey served as a web editor at GSA.  She says that she would have preferred the moniker “user experience evangelist,” but (sadly) someone has occupied that “new media” position since 2006.

Ms. Spivey spreads the plain language gospel while we strive to write more accessible prose.  Each executive department appointed high ranking overseers (GS-15 level or higher) for their departmental efforts.  The law covers all publicly created documents except for regulations and orders.  Follow-on Executive Orders work on more openness for regulation formulation.

Michael Rhodes, Department of Defense (DoD) Director for Administration and Management, said (on November 22, 2011): “The Act requires each Federal agency to use plain language in every non-regulatory letter, publication, form, notice, or instruction… to the public”

“The public,” he continued, “means anticipated readers or recipients with whom you communicate, including any affected external stakeholders.”

The annual DoD Congressionally required compliance report dated April 13, 2012 reports progress towards plain writing from DoD components.  “Internal organizations are each doing their part to make sure plain language will be used during the development and distribution of all new communications.”

Guidelines and specific preferred usages are available on government websites.   At first blush, instructions infer that some technical documents written to satisfy regulatory requirements are included, even if regulations themselves are not.
Following articles will detail more on the government’s plain language initiative, but for those anxious to access guidelines on-line may refer to: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/plainlanguage.html or http://www.plainlanguage.gov.

About Cask

Cask provides expert IT Service Management advisory services including an agile approach to service design and process development, governance strategy, resource planning, process improvement, cost and performance measurement, maturity assessments and outsourcing valuation. Cask utilizes a combination of IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks and standards to provide services that utilize proven best practices. Cask’s hands-on advisors have an average of 16 years experience and are certified ITIL Experts, TIPA Assessors and Lean Six Sigma Black Belts.  For more information, please visit our IT Asset Management page or contact jennifer.guba@caskllc.com.

About Blazent

Blazent provides visibility & intelligence solutions to help companies uncover hidden opportunities to optimize IT operations, lower costs and reduce risks. By integrating data from disparate systems and applying built-in best practices, Blazent’s solutions deliver complete, accurate and trusted views into a company’s entire IT environment, regardless of whether it’s internal or outsourced. To date, Blazent solutions are deployed at some of the world’s largest, most complex IT organizations to manage more than 1.5 million desktop computers, servers and network assets. For more information, visit www.blazent.com or call 855-282-8571.

Foundations First
When working with our customers many of the symptoms have come from their inability to track mobile devices even when they were owned by the enterprise. This is the best starting point. If you can’t manage what you own, how can you expect to manage what you don’t own? Once you have a good way to manage organization managed services in a portfolio and catalog, the accompanying owned assets and have established policies with end users you are ready to get started. If you are not there yet, this should be your main focus.

Governance Framework Next
The key 6 areas to look at when developing any mobile service governance policy include:
1) User - Start here. Ultimately you need to understand your customer prior to defining services in a portfolio and enabling users to order them via a catalog.
2) Risk and Security – Understand your organization’s core services, intellectual property, risks, liabilities and security posture.
3) Privacy - The customer is going to expect you are protecting their information, but what about your company’s and your end customers?
4) Financial – What costs are associated with a BYOD policy, are there cost savings involved, tax implications?
5) Support – How are the support of additional devices such as iPads, other tablets, etc going to impact your Service Desk’s ability to support the customer.
6) Applications – Are you just supporting email? Guess what, the customer is going to expect you to support more in due time.

Once you have a governance framework and associated policies defined, you are ready to develop your BYOD service offering(s) in your Service Portfolio. This again should involve your customers and ultimately lead to a customer-facing Service Catalog where they can order specific BYOD services from (i.e. mail, access to CRM applications, etc).

So easy, right? Remember, even buy a mobile device management application by itself is not going to solve your problems. Do your due diligence and have a structured way of governing your BYOD services prior to wasting your money buying an application that will be another piece of shelf-ware.

Brad Ellis and Paul Gvoth are industry experts who will provide attendees with the opportunity to discuss best practices and lessons learned. They will be focusing on the Capabilities Based Portfolio Assessment™ (CBPA™) methodology for balancing total defense capability through better acquisition decision making. Total cost is no longer the singular driver of defense acquisition program economic decision-making. A clear-cut, objective process for analyzing portfolios of acquisition programs can assist acquisition managers in making the tough choices in the face of impending funding cuts.

LEARN MORE about CBPA™ in Brad Ellis’s latest blog.

A good BCA can aid decision makers to evaluate and rank projects and alternative technologies, actions, etc. It can be used to ascertain likely costs, outcomes, and consequences of a particular investment.

Further, a good BCA is a living document. To achieve maximum value, It must evolve in an iterative fashion from concept to planning to implementation to operation to disposal.

Less than two months after most folks have received their annual funding (6 months after the beginning of the year) most of them now face the challenge of explaining why they haven’t executed in two months funding which was expected (wink, wink) to be in their coffers back in October.  When I say expected, I mean in a theoretical sense.  Kind of like the 21 year old, despite all the evidence to the contrary, expects tonight’s binge will not result in tomorrow’s headache.  Every year seems to serve as a mounting example of the need for Congress to consider expanding operations and maintenance beyond one year.  I understand the desire for Congress to control the purse strings and to ensure the Defense Department isn’t siphoning too much money for laser pointers and motivational coffee mugs.  However, their continued inability and/or unwillingness to pass a budget in time to start the fiscal year ironically ensures funding will be spent less effectively than it could be.   The dynamics are really rather simple.  Given a year’s worth of funding and twelve months in which to use it, organizations will make decisions regarding timing and amount that will make the most of their limited dollars.  However, spoon-feed them for five to six months before passing a budget and, logically, the timing element now significantly alters their decision matrix.  They have roughly three months (end of June) before they will be under close scrutiny for executing their annual budget…a budget which they have likely had, in its entirety, for only four months.

Let’s compare this to our college student who, remembering his F in Physics, is panicking about his final exam.  Anticipating this subject be a struggle, his benevolent mom had promised him $100 month for tutoring starting in September.  Subsequently, however, Coach purses went on sale and mom used all the budgeted tutoring money on designer handbags.  Fortunately, with a tax return on the way, she plans to provide the entire $800 in April.  Clearly, tutoring from September through March is now overcome by events and that portion of the money must be “reprogrammed”.  After much thought, our bright young lad decides he will pay for one month of tutoring ($100), pray for a D, and use the other $700 for the next thing on his unfunded list.  That, of course, includes splurging on name brand tequila for body shots with the woman who is sure to be the mother of his future children.

Defense financiers, while thankfully wearing much more clothing, are similarly motivated.  Not wanting to risk next year’s funding, they will now press to spend this year’s money, not on the highest priority items, but on the items which can be executed in a timely manner.  This isn’t to say the funding is wasted since most organizations have a long list of unfunded requirements.  However, “not wasted” seems a low bar to set during austere times.  We can do better and the options are not complicated.  Option one would be to pass the budget on time.  If we can’t, and it seems about as likely as passing Physics, option two would be for Congress to extend the timing for the appropriation beyond one year.  This would allow organizations, and the taxpayers they support, a little extra time to get the most from every dollar.  It may allow us to pay for tutoring and still have something left over to find the mother of our children.

Secretary Gates concluded that there was a need for closer cooperation with partners and non-military multinational organizations, especially as it relates to doctrine, organization, and institutional processes:

“One of the lessons of Kosovo and Afghanistan is that the missions we are most likely to undertake require a comprehensive approach that leverages both military and civilian capabilities. In recent years, there has been recognition that the EU will not supplant NATO nor vice versa – but that both organizations have unique skill-sets that can, if used properly, add up to more than the sum of their individual parts.”

Therefore, government leaders must commit to maintaining the forces and weapons needed to defend themselves and each other, while maintaining situational awareness on economic stability and continuing to foster the industrial base.

“This may require developing new ways to maintain capabilities through multinational procurement, more common funding, or reallocating resources based on collective rather than national priorities – as the Danes have done by eliminating their submarine fleet in order to double their expeditionary forces. At a time of financial scarcity at home, increased reliance on collective efforts is one way to do more with less.”

In a reiteration of Secretary Gates’ message, in September 2011, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated,

“I know that in an age of austerity, we cannot spend more.  But neither should we spend less. So the answer is to spend better. And to get better value for money. To help nations to preserve capabilities and to deliver new ones. This means we must prioritize, we must specialize, and we must seek multinational solutions. Taken together, this is what I call Smart Defense.”

The overwhelming message is that Europe’s defense community must do more with less, maximize resources, collaborate, and streamline processes.  But for that to happen, Europe – as a whole – needs to understand each nation’s current and future capabilities; define roles; set policy; as well as have a complete understanding of the DTIB in each country, to include current capabilities, capability gaps, and their competitiveness, both technologically and economically.  European leaders must also reassess the strategic environment and introduce new efforts to combine defense and DTIB resources.

In order to Pool and Share (P&S) resources, which is likely the best way for Europe to provide common security strategy during periods of austerity, there has to be a clear and concise understanding of what resources are available, as well as what industrial capabilities can be leveraged.

While it is clear that European defense budgets will inevitably continue to contract, the question now is how to move forward.  Capabilities-Based Planning is the core of both NATO’s Smart Defense and the EDA’s Effective Procurement Methodology and is the first step in analyzing and defining each nation’s defense resources and capabilities.

Cask’s Capabilities Based Portfolio Assessment (CBPA) is a methodology that decision and policy makers can use to reduce spending and gain efficiencies while balancing capability across their portfolios.    This is the core principal of NATO’s Smart Defense and can be applied at a multinational level (ie, NATO and/or EU measured jointly) as well as to each individual nation.