 Hi everyone and welcome to the All Things ITSM Global Podcast, we're coming to you from ITSM 15 in London. I'm Kirsty McGowan, I'm here with Rob Strout. Hi there. Berkeley Ray. Hi Kirsty. And it's absolutely to be chatting with Tony Price from Hewlett Hey, int Price. Hi Tony. Hi. Nice to meet you. So Tony, tell us a little bit, I know that you've started to get involved with IT for IT in your practise. If people out there don't know what that is, we'll give us a quick sketch. Ok, so in October this year, at the Open Group event in Edinburgh, IT for IT was formally launched as a vendor neutral standard. And for me personally, I think it's one of the biggest things that's hit our industry for some time. I'm really, really excited about it. I think IT for IT brings a missing component, which we've never had. That's a reference architecture for running the business of IT. And the whole concept of bringing in value chain and value stream thinking is something which is quite unique, which I've never seen before. And personally, I just think it's a work of genius that they've actually put something into a reference architecture which makes us all focus on value. So just for the uninitiated, what is value stream and value chain? So Porter's value chain thinking was applied to a reference architecture. So looking at IT as a single value chain, a value chain which is supported by various functions but broken down into four very fundamental value streams. Value streams are detector corrects, request to fulfil, requirements to deploy and strategy to portfolio. So if I take the first one, detector corrects an easy one to start with. And for years, we've been doing work around incident management, problem management, monitoring, alerting. But at last, it looks at a lifecycle of bringing detector correct everything together. So why am I excited about it? Well, that's because my clients, my people that I've been working with, the ITAL world I've been part of for years, we've all been doing this. But now we've now got a language which we can use, which steps us up at that level. But more importantly, when we start looking at detector correct as a value stream, we see where we've got broken value streams because there'll be something missing. So it might be an integration, it might be a lack of process, or it could be somebody that's not got an accountability or a responsibility. And by looking at that, instead of just picking on a tool and saying, I'm going to have the best in the world, we can now suddenly say, well, actually there's not quite even the best in the world because if it breaks the value stream, let's look at that. So I was listening to a webcast the other day about IT for IT and it's available now if anybody wants to visit the open group, they can of course listen to it. But who else was involved in the development of IT for IT besides yourselves? There's some other big names. Yeah, some very big names. So there's not one organisation can claim a total sort of they created it, which is again a good thing for IT for IT. So a number of big organisations shall from a vendor, sorry, a non-vendor, a customer perspective, probably the most instrumental in getting an IT variety where it is today. But other organisations like ACMEI are a big insurance company in the Netherlands, heavily involved in this. But also if you look at now the founding sort of organisations, Accenture were involved, HP obviously have been involved in this, and a number of other vendors, so there's no one big organisation who's got a monopoly on it. And the beauty of the open group by nature is they created everything which is open, so now any other organisation can use it. So there's now over 70 members of the IT for IT forum now. Have you had much feedback since the launch in England? Yeah, personally, which is really nice for me. We've won a big chunk of work down in Australia, which is all based on IT for IT. So clients are using it, it's not theoretical. People are actually using this. And today, just speaking at this event, the more people I speak to, the more people say the language, the vocabulary, it's like when they first found ITIL, they look at it and go, wow, where did this come from? And I actually really applaud the open group for what they've done. I think it's some excellent work they've done in there. And I think that collaboration between a number of vendors, a number of user organisations that's created something quite unique. Briefly, how does it tie in with things like ITIL and COVID and other existing models, frameworks, whatever you want to call them? So, very good question. I think, again, the open group have been both very professional and quite clever in that they haven't tried to replace things like ITIL. They've basically acknowledged formally that ITIL, COVID, and various other approaches, and certainly people like the Togaf guys. The Togaf people will all recognise where Togaf fits and things like that. So instead of replacing everything, they've acknowledged them and used them so within the framework, anybody who's got existing investments in ITIL or COVID, they're not throwing any of this away. They're building on it. And they've not tried to replace it and say throw everything away and start again. So this is the way you can get ITIL guys and Togaf guys? Absolutely. We can talk to each other. I'm yet to find an environment where I can't apply IT writing. And the beauty of it for me is I can go and speak to an architect and I can lift it up from an architectural perspective. I can go and speak to the business. I can take it down into IT. I can go and speak to the security analysts and the security risk guys. I can go and speak to the COVID guys. I can speak to the auditors. And it gives me a language which I can bring us all together based on that common reference architecture. Something I've never had before. And that's why I'm being very, very excited by it. So the next question is for us. I've looked at the model very closely. And as we look at the changing, evolving world now of IT consumption, let's be clear, we're rapidly moving to a hybrid world where we're part of our load. One of the estimates of 36% of production workload now is public cloud, right? Not in-house, not managed service provider. How can the model be applied in those sorts of hybrid environments where workloads are running about the place? So in various different ways. For the cloud providers themselves, there's a way of applying it and using it. For the consumers, there's a way of using elements of it as well. Give you an example. In a cloud, if something fails, somebody still has to detect it and correct it. Somebody still has to do it. A lot of stuff in cloud is about provisioning and faster provisioning so we can consume. That whole request of fulfil is just as important. So I'm taking you through the value streams. Obviously, as a consumer, I want that fulfilment. I also want to put requirements and get them deployed so that it applies just as much for the cloud provider and the cloud consumer. And again, it's the strength of the IT for IT reference architecture, which I like. And what it's not tried to do is make itself specific for one specific type of delivery such as cloud. It's been generic and it allows you to think then about the velocity issues that you've got to have in the cloud. It doesn't describe the velocity issues. It doesn't describe how you do that. It gives you the components that you need so that then you can do them. One thing then that's occurring to me. I mean, it's called IT for IT, so I'm guessing it's for IT. It's not for business people, is it? Because the language of the value streams does sound more to me potentially acceptable than incident problem configured. I mean, what kind of interaction do you have with business people on this, or are you just selling it to enterprise IT people? For once now, I can stand in front of the business and have a conversation in which they can understand. And if I take the value streams again and I'll start with detector correct, if I can say to the business, I want IT to fix something before you know about it. Straight away the business goes, that's exactly what I want. I was talking about an example, a particular customer I was talking to when the IT department was talking about a single pane of glass. The customer had no idea what IT was talking about. What we did was we talked about the fact that it was requested for film. So yes, you're right. The name IT for IT, it's the name. That's what it's called. It's the bit that worries me a little bit. It's just the fact that it is IT. It can give people the wrong view. Yeah, we're sort of trying to preach the whole ITs in everything. IT is just part of the business. And then this comes out and it sort of almost seems to be picking IT up again and moving it over to the side. And the way I always open my descriptions of it is to say a vendor neutral reference architecture for running the business of IT. I deliberately state that and that's what the open group will state as well. Because it's not just about internal IT. It is about running the business. So I agree with that statement. It's not just about internal IT. Like Mark Lee, I share some concerns over the name. But if I go look at my data at Forrester, what tells me and the vendor announcements I'm starting to see out there now, very soon we're going to have this notion of end user development. Where end users are actually going to be able to plug and build end user applications that run on cloud platforms or even hybrid platforms. So I'm not sure. And by the way, the framework is definitely applicable in that scenario. The name, if you go and mention it to a bit, end user looking to put out an app is probably not going to worry about it too much. I would say it doesn't consume me. It's just IT. I can only agree with you there. I do think the name is going to be an interesting challenge. I'm sure the open group will tell you lots more about why they debated it, some of which was probably less appropriate than the names that they came to. So the name it is at the moment is the name it is. We wish you had a debate on that one. It was only like ITAL was getting the original amount. We remember that. Well, thanks a lot for your time this afternoon, Tony. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you very much.