Service Management

Another ex-colleague from Altana Pharma / Nycomed got back in touch. He is now working as a consultant in the Service Management area.

That made me think about a proposal I am working on. The client has established ITIL-processes and they seem to work well, but still there are issues regarding the collaboration with the business side.

It seems that the client, and for this matter also many other organizations, has invested considerable resources in establishing Service Management processes, but mainly on the deliver side. The demand management side seems to have been largely ignored, i.e. the entire part from demand to project/service is not really covered and thus still a potential subject to misperception.

Conclusion: Proper Service Management must cover the complete process from demand generation to service delivery and not only parts of it.

Social Networking vs IRL meetings

Today, I received a Xing message from a former colleague at Nycomed/Altana Pharma. It was nice, because he did not send a simple connect request, but a longer message that also contained some interesting thoughts on social networking.

This, in turn, made me think of a phenomenon I could observe over the last 2 days. My son (age 16) spend quite some time video-chatting with a female class-mate. The interesting thing is that the walking distance is just 10 minutes.

Clearly, social networking can enable reconnects with old friends. The "cheers to absent friends" might become less frequent, if you can connect them remotely. I use Skye, Facebook etc. to keep in touch.

On the other hand, social networking on the net also has a potential to change social patterns. Instead of visiting each other, we could chat or skype. This reminds me of the book Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov, in which the human spacer branch lives more or less individually and IRL visits are kept at a minimum.

Well, regarding my son, I believe that there's no overly risk that he will totally disappear into the online world, as long as he can't sit there with his friends and have a beer. :-)

Anonymous vs Scientology - 10th Feb protests

On Sunday, IRL protests took place at various CoS centers around the globe. It is difficult to say how many people actually were engaged and what impact the protests had. There are several media reports, but it is difficult to get a holistic picture. Some press coverage is collected on the German Chanology website.

When looking for some info on the protests, I stumbled upon this picture:


Source: media.de.indymedia.org

I also seems that more activities are planned for March 15.