About

Nickname Origin:  'The Commish' (from Batman)

With my the last name of Gordon, a co-worker one day called me "the Commish" after Commissioner Gordon in the Batman comics... and the name stuck I guess.  I named this Blog "Ask The Commish" because I would like to interact with all practitioners, experts and newbies to service management and encourage you the reader to ask questions and share.

Background:  ITSM Guru

I've been working in Technology organizations since the early 90's that have spanned many industries such as Financial, Travel, State Government, a large .dot com, and as of most recent, Publishing & Broadcasting.  

I have always had a real passion for process design, and first got into Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning for several of my early career jobs (no one else wanted to be involved with DR/BC because it is very complex!).  I learned everything about how Operations ran, and how to rebuild and recover critical service operations.  I was drawn into any crisis, whether it was a system or hardware crash, network outage, late delivery of batch processing and became a real pro at Incident escalation, crisis management and also Problem management.  

In the mid-90's very few people even heard of the term "ITIL" and there was no industry buzz yet.  At that time I was doing a lot of research on Gartner and kept running into the ITIL term and eventually I saved up the $175.00 to buy one of the ITIL V.2 books on Service Operation.  Ever since then I have been hooked on ITIL and own all the V2 and V3 books, spending a lot of time memorizing a lot of the material on my own.  In fact, I obsess over reading anything and everything insightful to best practices and have a deep understanding of COBIT, MOF (Microsoft's take on ITIL), ISO, TQM, BPM, Six-Sigma, Lean/Kaizen and even Group Dynamics, Training, Project Management and things not covered in ITIL.  I also love reading books on Management, Organizational Change, Building Effective Teams, etc. (Jim Collins, Peter Drucker & John Kotter are my fave authors).

It was also in the mid-90's I worked for a company that had just brought back their IT Operations in-house from being outsourced for many years and learned about building and transforming IT to be run as a shared service or service provider.  Learning how to build an IT service operation from ground zero was a real turning point in my career and challenged me in all areas of service management.  

ITSM Tools:  Remedy, Service-Now and Beyond...

As I became a highly experienced service management process and execution guru, the world of IT Service Management drew me into the tool side of the house.  I became the product owner and process owner for ITSM as a whole and when it came time to build out a brand new toolset, I was front and center.  Building out new solutions and tools for ITSM has been my primary focus for the last 10 years, and I have worked in most of the big name products including:  Remedy, Front Range, CA, Microsoft System Center and Service-Now.  Although I prefer this Blog to be more process driven, I will also add some insights on the tools I have built out and worked with and guidance for practitioners on the key to effective ITSM tool implementation projects.  

My Commitment:  Blog and Share Ideas

I am hoping this Blog to be a return to my roots, which is exploring the concepts and elements of how to design, build, expand and transform process and influence the minds of those involved across large Technology organizations who manage and follow these processes for service management.

I truly believe that as a practitioner of good process design that my knowledge and skill will continue to grow and expand.  In the same way that Technology is also evolving to embrace a more lean and agile approach, I also see that keeping process simple and nimble is really important for survival.  These are the things I would like to share with you in this Blog.  I also love hearing back from other seasoned practitioners out there, so that everyone can also learn from your valuable experiences.

I really encourage you to dive into the posts here and to share your own experiences, lessons learned, tips and tricks, or for those who are getting into the swing of all things good practice with Service Management -- please DO ask the Commish and seek the same answers I have been searching for many years.  

- CHRIS GORDON  |  The Commish