New IT training requirements, new business opportunities

IT training is evolving and moving away from its origins as a merely theoretical discipline. In fact, it is increasingly oriented towards supporting management and decision-making.

In recent years, there has been an upward trend in our clients’ demand for technical training. Surely, foundation training is still the star product. But IT managers and middle managers are more and more interested in training in management, interpretation, and analysis.

The evolution of IT training

Until now, IT training had focused on explaining the key concepts of a given technology, methodology or framework, as well as its implementation and subsequent operation. The new perceivable paradigm assumes that implementation has already occurred successfully in the organization, and that the operation is carried out correctly. Therefore, the focus is now on how to take advantage of daily work. In other words, an additional layer of management, interpretation and analysis is being added. The goal is no longer the implementation itself, but the use of what is already there in order to support decision-making.

At Ozona Consulting, we have polished our training portfolio in response to this new trend. Until 2014, the fundamentals of service management, security management and continuity management were the pillars of our training. If something, those with responsibilities in the implementation or operation of management systems would complete them with advanced training. By delving deeper into the application of these concepts, students acquired a higher level of knowledge. However, this knowledge did not necessarily translate into a better use of the information available in the organization.

Ozona’s workshops: Focused on meeting current needs

For this reason, at the end of 2013, we began to develop other types of training. The first one, about ITSM KPI models, has had 15 editions already. Available in Spanish, Portuguese and English, it has been taught in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Palma, Andorra, Quebec or Mexico City.

Organizations with a certain level of maturity in the implementation of ITSM processes tend to focus their efforts on service desk. They also pay special attention to the ISO 20000 resolution and control processes (incident, request, problem, change, configuration and delivery management). These are the so-called service operation and transition processes, according to ITIL.

However, it is much less common to develop service provision processes (availability, capacity, service levels, risk management, etc.). Sometimes, there are activities around these areas (monitoring, security and/or continuity risk analysis, basic metrics and reports, etc.). Still, these activities are seldom mature enough to truly consider them processes. Certainly, their degree of implementation cannot compare with that of the previously mentioned processes, much more mature.

Ozona’s workshop features an ITSM indicator model based on ISO 20000 processes and its practical application for the interpretation of dashboards and reports. Through practical scenarios, this 8-hour-long workshop shows how to draw useful management conclusions from information already available in the organization. In most cases, organizations exploit this information is only at a technical operations level. However it can become useful knowledge for management and analysis if processed properly.

Other IT training options

In addition to these workshops, Ozona is preparing other training opportunities on equally “dark” aspects of IT service management. These include, to name a few, internal audit, IT balanced scorecard, financial services management or risk management. Just like the existing training courses, these will also focus on contributing to greater management control, rather than merely explaining theoretical concepts.

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