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Assessment Methodology Transfer Case

FITT

(Fostering Interregional Exchange in ICT Technology Transfer)

2 | 25.12.2009 Assessment methodology transfer case

Assessment Methodology Transfer in brief

• Case illustrates an example of Knowledge Transfer of a methodology

• Started from research outputs to commercialisation (still in process)

• Case highlights the difficulties of Technology Transfer in the case of hard to protect intellectual property (IP) like a methodology

• especially when building on protected IP (ITIL ® and ISO standards)

ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the United Kingdom and other countries.

IT Infrastructure Library® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries.


TIPA® – Introduction

Tudor’s ITSM Process Assessment:

• Methodology to perform a process assessment of IT Service Management (ITSM)

• Based on the ISO Standard 15504 and ITIL ® (and ISO 20000)

ISO/IEC15504 ITIL® / ISO 20000

(Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination) SPICEGuide to process assessment

Best Practices in ITSM

Little known outside the automotive industry Used around the world

Basic function: Process assessment of Software development

Basic Function: Improve the alignment of IT services with the business requirement of an enterprise and the end users (mostly internal ones)


TIPA – History - Background

• TIPA project run in parallel with our involvement in the ISO/IEC15504 and

ISO/IEC20000

• CRP Henri Tudor involved in various ISO committees

• Interesting for researchers:

• Contribute to new standards

• Build a network in their field of expertise

• Have access to the work in progress

• Co-editor of the future part 5 and 7 of the ISO/IEC20000 (IT Service

Management standard)

• Active participant in the development of the ISO/IEC15504 (Process

Assessment standard)


Situation before involvement of the TTO (1)

• Most of the research work done prior to 2006 (2 years before) with few commercial exploitation

• Methodology tested with consultants in private companies

• Knowledge transfer done:

• Mainly through consulting (performing the assessment for others)

• Training (but offered only in our offices in Luxembourg)



Intellectual Property – Licensing in

• Work based on ITIL and ISO standard but

• Never checked if we could use the trademark

• No idea what copyrighted material we had the right to use

• No idea if we were reusing copyrighted material

• Ex. Is using the vocabulary a copyright infringement?

• A Tudor’s jurist had inform them that they might infringe on third party IP and could be expensive if not solved

• To solve the problem it was decided to stop using and working on ITIL



Intellectual Property – Licensing out

• Tudor was contacted by one of the Big four interested in the model and tools

• Became apparent we had little to transfer out

• Bulk of know-how and methodology was saved in a few researchers’ brains

• Transfer model used before – training, coaching and supervision of an assessment was not acceptable to a multinational consulting company

• No support material to the training

• Hope to used the trademark as a hook to cash in a bit on the methodology

• Trademark on AIDA – the project name – was pending at European level

• Problem: internationally the AIDA trademark was already subject to a legal fight? between Aida Cruise (Germany) and Disney Corp (yes the Mickey Mouse one!)



Market and business model

• No assessment of the market ever made

• No idea about its size, potential partners, competitors, what customers wanted, etc.

• Understanding the customers needs not seen as part of our job

• Either the buyers know why he is buying or the consultants knows what he his selling

• Surprised by questions from consultants: “How to sell this?”

Answer: “You should know!”

• Target market limited to Luxembourg

• Even though assessments were made internationally thanks to local contacts it was assumed that there could be an international interest

• Reason: current business model was resources intensive – covering the needs of Luxembourg was enough strain on the competent employees


Involvement of the TTO (1)

• Project identified after contact external inquiry by a Big Four

• TTO identified the previous problems and highlighted the lack of transferable product

• The Knowledge transfer consisted of a resource consuming:

• 5 days face to face training

• Participation in an assessment lead by Tudor (of course they had to come up with the assessment to perform

• Leading an assessment under the monitoring of Tudor

• No book, no manual, no solid training slides that could be reused by third party

• First step of the TTO – Understanding the market


Involvement of the TTO (2) – Market Quantitative look

Demand growing fast:

In 2006, 100,000 people were certified annually internationally

In the year 2008, over 350,000 people were certified

growth rate of over 150% per year over the 2 previous years

More than a million people were ITIL certified

The HR needs in the field were also growing very fast, see graph

Exponentiel growth in HR ITIL® expertise needs

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

janv.-04 janv.-05 janv.-06 janv.-07 janv.-08

Market demand in Australia on it.seek.com.au (leading IT Job site) in the last 30 days

Market demand in Australia on it.seek.com.au (leading IT Job site) in the last 30 days

Expon. (Market demand in Australia on it.seek.com.au (leading IT Job site) in the last 30 days)

Source: Cater-Steel, Aileen and Toleman, Mark (2007). The Role of universities in IT service management education. In: Felix B. Tan and James Thong and Lech J. Janczewski (Eds.). PACIS 2007: Managing Diversity in Digital Enterprises, http://eprints.usq.edu.au


Involvement of the TTO (3) – Market Qualitative look

Two Focus Groups made consisting of IT Managers and IT consultants:

• First group consisted of users, findings:

• Very high satisfaction of end users with TIPA

• Provided the tools required

• Filled a business need for which there was no solution on the market

• Second group consisted of people unfamiliar with TIPA:

• Couldn’t see any added value to the methodology

• Couldn’t understand the purpose of TIPA

• Unhappy that we couldn’t give an overview in a few words

• Discrepancy between two groups highlight communication deficiency

• Basically to understand the purpose of the methodology you had to take a 5 days course

• Lack of a commercial wrap in our communication (too technical, too much attention to details – can’t see the forest from the trees)


Involvement of the TTO (4) – Market a look at the competitors

Process assessment in IT offered by most consulting firms but:

• Lack of common standard

• Impossible to do benchmarking

• No firm wanted to adopt a standard developed by a competitor

• Assessments performed under black box scheme

• Impossible to know who has a solid assessment and who built it overnight

• Impossible to say if assessment made by two different employees in the same firm were comparable

• No trainings on the market on how to perform an assessment

• Firms make more money charging for assessments than sharing knowledge

• Consulting firms would welcome an open standard


Involvement of the TTO (5) – Business model

• TIPA needed to be developed into a product (i.e. Book, trainings, tools) as too much of it was based on competence that could not be transferred per se

• Also diminish the risk of loosing the know-how with the employees

• TIPA always have some added value as an assessment tool, but greatest added value will be achieved if it becomes a standard in the industry

• Network effect

• Goal of the valorisation effort: make TIPA the de facto standard in ITSM Assessment around the world



Two major options were looked at:

• Open source: Free and available to everyone (preferred by the researchers):

• Will it help to achieve our global domination goal?

• Who will put the money into marketing and communication?

• Us? Do we want to spend Research money on marketing?

• Distributed freely on our website?

• Free is nice but if you don’t know it exists, you will prefer the paying version. And in the case of innovative solution, if you don’t know about it you might not even realise there is a problem...

• Not free but ‘open’...

• If people can make money from promoting TIPA, they will.

• If we can make money with it, it ensures a steady flow of research money for the research programme



After consulting potential partners:

• Opted for the “Not free” option

• Deal with the main international editor in the field (Van Haren Publishing)

• Looking for partners for training and certification of people

• Keeping the tools required to perform an assessment very cheap (or free as they are mostly useless without the book or training)


TTO in action (1) – IP

• Solved the licensing in issues

• Cancelled a previous trademark registration under the AIDA name

• Rebranded the AIDA project into Tudor ITSM Process Assessment (TIPA) and registered the trademark

• Tudor inclusion in the name builds our public research centre’s brand

• Name is descriptive (important for business users and search engines)

• Not competing for ranking on the web with Verdi’s famous opera!


TTO in action (2) – Getting management support

• Research results not ready to be sold

• Require more budget to “package” the results into a product

• TTO got the management support and the budget to do a knowledge transfer operation

• Project should make money

• In the meantime the financial crisis had a huge impact on the partners and ITSM market, but risk is part of any business


Valorisation in action (3) – Interpret between science and business

Basically doing the job of a product manager in a first time and a business developer in a second one:

• Product planning (Identifying new product candidates; Gathering market requirements; Determine business-case and feasibility; Scoping and defining new products at high level, Evangelizing new products within the company)

• Product marketing (Product positioning and outbound messaging; Promoting the product externally with press, customers, and partners; Bringing new products to market; Monitoring the competition)

• Finding and negotiating with partners

• Networking


Conclusion on Risk Management

Risk Management was probably the biggest internal hindrance to this project

Any commercialisation involve a part of risk:

• You can never plan the next financial crisis or virulent disease

• Accepting only the ‘riskless’ project means a high risk of missing opportunities

• Luck is involved in most products, even big companies have a high project failing grade. Many die in the last stage either before or after being put on the shelves

• Risk taking should be proportional to potential gain

• Don’t forget to the factor in the non monetary gain (reputation, branding, employees’ satisfaction, etc) when taking a go/no-go decision


Future

• Book now in sales

• In negotiation with international training organisations

• Developing an exam and people certification

• Tools to support an assessment online (free for now – will probably have a premium paying one later)

• Looking for further product development (and associated research opportunities) using the ISO/IEC 15504

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