Bob Anderson

Director of Product Development & Quality Assurance

E-mail: bob_anderson@compaid.com (bob_anderson@compaid.com)

Phone: 717-701-2328

Bob Anderson has been with Computer Aid, Inc. since 1988.  With more than 38 years of IT experience, Bob is responsible for the product development and quality assurance for CAI’s Legacy Application Support service offering (Managed Maintenance and Tracer).  Most of Anderson’s IT career had been spent as a senior executive in large IT organizations with a particular focus on process re-engineering, process management and managing by metrics.

Most recently, Anderson was published in the December, 2008 and the February, 2007 issues of Computerworld as well as several inter-national publications. His articles generated favorable responses from readers around the world.  Bob Anderson also authored eighteen process guides and training manuals on all aspects of “Out-sourcing Application Support,” i.e. Environment Assessment, Transition, Work Flow Processing, Operations Management, IT Support Quality Assurance.

Bob and his team insure that CAI’s Legacy Application Support processes are compliant with both CMMI Level 4 and the ITIL V3 Service Management Lifecycle.

Bob is the principal architect of CAI’s IT Service Management Tool: Tracer.  This software tool works in conjunction with CAI’s Legacy Application Support service… insuring process compliance within the support team. The “Tracer” tool tracks service performance and contains defined processes for all IT support work events. While Tracer enforces process compliance, it also measures and reports on all work, resource, time distribution and service level performance (SLA) information.

Bob Anderson has a degree in Computer Science.  He and wife, Laura have two grown daughters. Bob and Laura live on a mountain in Boiling Springs, PA.

He is a decorated United States Marine with two combat tours in Vietnam. Bob was a UH1-E door gunner, providing close air support for Marine ground units and forward fire bases.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

IT organizations deliver a wide variety of services to the business.  These services include infrastructure support, application development, and application support.  Increasingly, IT organizations are seeking to improve the quality of the services that they provide to the business.

The rendering of service is a different activity than the making of products.  Many approaches (CMMI, RAD Methodology, AGILE) focus on the development of software.  However, ITIL is the only definitive approach that focuses exclusively on Service Management.

ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is the flagship standard for IT Service Management (ITSM).  ITIL was developed by the Central Computer Telecommunications Agency (now called the Office of Government Commerce) in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.  ITIL is considered to be a framework of ITSM good practices that covers all activities of IT service organizations.  The Crown holds copyright and owns the names ITIL and Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

ITIL’s focus is on the management of services that are used to deliver value to the business.  This approach differs from the product development approach that is traditionally associated with IT organizations.  Service management is concerned with delivering service outcomes that are valuable to the business whereas product development focuses on the delivery of a product.

Previous versions of ITIL described processes that were primarily the responsibility of operations groups and were used to manage infrastructure services.  In an effort to align with these previous versions, helpdesk software vendors began incorporating these infrastructure-focused ITIL concepts into their tools.

The current version of ITIL, version 3, introduces a service management lifecycle that highlights outcomes that must be achieved in order to successfully implement and manage IT services.  This lifecycle orientation serves as a standard for managing Application Support services.