Louis Stanford

Identity

Name
Louis Stanford
Website
http://www.clearspace.co.za
Country
South Africa
Organisation
ClearSpace Consulting
About you

As a young boy, I was a rather nerdish observer of systems, trying to understand how our world achieves balance. I created spreadsheets to record observable facts about restaurants: number of seats, waiters, kitchen staff along with certain assumptions: the average value per order, patterns of demand and cost of rental. Unsurprisingly, my very first job landed me in the catering trade, which is where I quickly learnt that a business cannot be run on ratios.

I've worn many hats in my 15 year career in IT: Data-center Cowboy, Infrastructure Architect, Web Application Architect, Firewall Manager, Digital Forensics expert, Service Manager, Risk Manager, Change Manager, Release Manager, IT Governance specialist, ITIL Consultant & Trainer. This has given me a deep appreciation of what makes IT folk tick.

As an experienced, prolific lecturer in the field of IT Service Management & IT Governance, I'm well versed with the theoretical and practical aspects of the ITIL, COBIT and ISO20000 frameworks.

Today, I help IT Managers to understand and address their management challenges:
* aligning IT activities to business needs
* skills development
* implementing processes from the ITIL framework
* transforming IT from Provider-of-Technology to Provider-of-Services
* identifying and reducing wasteful activities in IT
* building a self-healing IT organisation
* making better use of existing resources and capabilities
* extracting maximum value from service providers
* implementing an IT Governance framework (aligned to KING III)

My consulting approach may seem counter-intuitive and unconventional, however it is built on a sound foundation of systems theory by authors:
* Eliyahu Goldratt,
* W. Edwards Deming,
* John Seddon and
* Peter Drucker.

Whether you need to improve customer satisfaction, reduce service disruptions, innovate, increase value or control risk - shifting the culture, habits and behaviours in your team is essential. That's where I come in.

History

Member for
10 years 4 weeks