What is ITIL ?
- Information Technology Infrastructure Library.
- Public framework that describes the Best practice in IT Service Management.
- Published by UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC).
- First publications in late 1980’s
- ITIL V2 was defined and published between 2000 and 2004.
- ITIL V3 superseded ITIL V2 in 2007 consisting of five core books.
ITIL Best Practice Solutions
- Starting point, not the finish line
- Guidelines versus rules or policies
- Not a standard
- Promotes internal synergy and direction
- Generic
- A basis for measurable professionalism
- Common vocabulary and language set
IT – A critical Component for Business Survival
IT Services are crucial, strategic, organisation assets. Issues faced by Business managers and IT managers are:
Strategic issues:
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- IT and Business strategic planning
- Integrating and alligning IT and Business Goals
- Demonstrating the business value of IT
- Developing business and IT partnerships and relationships
- Using IT to gain competitive advantage
Governance & Delivery issues:
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- Delivering the required, business justified IT services
- Managing constant business and IT change
- Demonstrating appropriate IT governance
- Regulatory compliance: Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA
Financial issues
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- Optimising cost and Total Cost of Ownership
- Achieving and demonstrating Return on Investment
Metrics & Measurement issues:
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- Implementing Continual improvement
- Measuring IT organisations effectiveness and efficiency
Other Issues
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- Improving project delivery success
- Outsourcing, Insourcing and smartsourcing
What is a Service?
A Service is a means of Delivering Value to the customers by Facilitating Outcomes customers want to achieve without the Ownership of specific costs & risks.
Customers purchase service only for the outcomes that they want.
Services must create value
How do you qualify value?
How do you create value?
What is Service Management?
Service Management is the set of organizational capabilities for providing value to the customers in the form of services.
OBJECTIVE:
To ensure that the IT services are aligned to the Business needs and actively support them.
IT Services
- Underpin the business processes.
- Acts as an agent for change to facilitate business transformation.
Service Mgmt. facilitates the service provider to fulfill the desired outcomes of the customer by managing the costs and risks associated with it.
Adopting good practice like ITIL can help service provider to create an effective service management system.
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
ITIL Service Life Cycle
1. Service Strategy
–Set policy and objectives for a set of services to meet business objectives
2. Service Design
–Design and Develop services and related processes
3. Service Transition
–Building, Testing and deploying new and changed services
–Retire obsolete services
4. Service Operation
–Manage and deliver services to business users and customers
5. Continual Service Improvement
–Measure, analyze and identify service improvements
Key Inputs/Outputs of ITIL Service Life Cycle
ITIL v3 Process Overview
ITIL V3 Certification Scheme
ITIL Bridging Certifications
IT Service Management Frameworks
- Control Objectives for IT – Cobit
- Capability Maturity Model Integration – CMMi
- Total Quality Management – TQM
- Six Sigma
- eSCM – eSourcing Capability Model
- Project Management Body of Knowledge – PMBOK
- Microsoft Operations Framework – MOF
- IBM Tivoli Unified Process – TUP
- ISO/IEC 27000, 17799 & others – Standards for Information Security Management
- ISO/IEC 19770 – Standard for managing software assets
- ISO/IEC 38500 – Standard for corporate governance of IT
ISO/IEC 20000
- International Standard for Service Management derived from prior British Standard
- Incorporates ITIL V2 Service Support and Delivery processes and some additional processes
- Subset of ITIL V3 service lifecycle
- Organizations can be assessed against the standard and Certified
- Ongoing audits to ensure continued compliance
ISO 20000 Process Model
Maturity and Management Challenge
ITIL Service Strategy
”People do not want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.”
– Professor Emeritus Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School
- Customers do not buy products but buy a satisfaction of particular needs.
- Understanding customer needs in terms of:
- Why,
- What and
- Customers of customer.
- Aligned to the Business culture.
- Based on the clear understanding of the existing competition.
ITIL Service Strategy – Key Concepts
Value creation through Service Strategy.
1. Resources & capabilities – Turned into products & services of value to the business.
- Resources – Direct inputs for the production.
- Management, organization, people and knowledge – used to transform resources.
- Capabilities – ability to coordinate, control and deploy resources.
- Capabilities without adequate resources cannot produce value.
2. Distinct capabilities are developed to retain customers with value propositions that are hard for competitors to duplicate.
What is the value for the customers ? Create Value
- Marketing Mindset – Help to understand the value of a service to the customer in terms of their:
- Perceptions,
- Preferences.
Questions to ask:
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What is our business ?
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Who is our customer ?
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What does the customer value?
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Who depends on our services?
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How do they use our services ?
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Why are they valuable to them ?
ITIL Service Strategy – Four P’s
- Perspective: The distinctive vision and direction.
- Position: The basis on which the provider will compete.
- Plan: How the provider will achieve their vision.
- Pattern: The fundamental way of doing things – distinctive patterns in decisions and actions over time.
ITIL Service Strategy – Service & Warranty
Service Utility
- Add activities, objects, or tasks that the customer wants.
- Relax or remove constraints on performance.
Service Warranty
- What the customer wants is available when needed and in sufficient capacity or magnitude.
- What the customer wants is delivered with security and continuity.
ITIL Service Strategy – Service Provider Types
- Type I – Internal Service Provider
- Business unit functions serving solely for one business unit.
- Eg: TIS having its own IT arm
- Type II – Shared Service Provider
- Serving multiple BU in same organization but are NOT at the company’s core competitive edge.
- Eg: WT IMG serving all business of WT
- Type III – External Service Provider
- Supporting multiple external customers
- Eg: TIS serving multiple external client
ITIL Service Strategy – Service Provisioning Models
- Managed Service: The business unit that requires the service fully funds for all its IT services.
- Shared Service: Provisioning of multiple services to multiple Business units through shared infrastructure and resources.
- Utility: Services are provided based on customer business needs.
ITIL Service Strategy – Service Portfolio
1. Service portfolio is the collection of all the services committed to the customers.
- Present contractual commitments
- New service development
- Ongoing service improvement programs
Note: It also includes third part service programs which are integral part of customer service offerings
2. Service Portfolio represents the ability and the readiness of the service provider to serve the customer in the market space.
3. Three Phases
- Service catalog – currently available
- Service pipeline – what is cooking
- Retired services – no longer available
ITIL Service Strategy – Service Catalog
- Subset of service portfolio which is visible to customers.
- Contains services that are currently being offered plus the services which are approved and ready to offer.
- The virtual projection of service providers current capabilities.
Two Kinds:
- Business Service catalog – Customer view of the service catalog.
- Technical Service catalog – underpins the Business service catalog not visible to customers.
ITIL Service Strategy – Purpose
- Sits at the core of ITIL V3 life cycle.
- Sets out guidance to service providers and customers to thrive in the long term by clear building of Service strategy.
ITIL Service Strategy – Key Processes
ITIL Strategy Generation
- Define the Market
Understand the customer and opportunities, classify and visualize the services how they create value and in what context
- Develop the offerings
Define the market space and define the services based on what is valuable to the customer
- Develop strategic assets
Increase the service and performance potential of the organization, treat IT service management as strategic asse
- Prepare for execution
Do a strategic assessment and understand what core differentiation already exists.
Financial Management
Function and process required for managing IT provider’s budgeting, accounting and charging.
Goal
- Provide cost-effective stewardship of the IT assets and resources used in providing IT services.
- Account fully for the spending on IT services and attribute these costs to the services delivered to the organization’s Customers.
- Assist management decisions on IT investment by providing detailed business cases for changes to IT services.
Financial Management – Key Terminologies
Budgeting: Budgeting is the Process of ensuring that:
- Predicting the money required to run IT services over a period of time.
- Reduce the chances of over-spending during the budget period.
- Ensure adequate revenues are available to cover spending.
- Ensure actual spending can be compared with predicted spending.
Accounting: Accounting enable organizations to:
- Account for money spent on providing IT services.
- Calculate the cost of providing IT services.
- Perform cost benefit to return on investment (ROI) analysis.
- Identify cost of changes.
Charging: Charging enable organizations to:
- Recover costs of the IT service from its customers.
- Operate as a business unit.
- Influence User & Customer behavior w.r.t. service being provided.
Service Portfolio Management (SPM)
- Proactive management of investment across service life cycle.
- Process responsible for managing the service portfolio.
- An ongoing process
SPM Includes
- Define : Inventory services, ensure business cases and validate service portfolio data.
- Analyze: Maximize portfolio value, align and prioritize, balance supply and demand.
- Approve: Finalize portfolio and authorize resources and services.
- Charter: Communicate decisions, allocate resources and charter services.
Demand Management
- Understand and influence customer demand and provision of capacity to meet these demands
- Excessive capacity generates costs with out adding any value
- Insufficient capacity hampers the service quality and growth
- Poorly managed demand is a risk for service providers
- Demand and capacity are tightly coupled in service systems
KEY TERMINOLOGIES
1. Pattern Of Business Activity (PBA)
PBA define the dynamics of a business and include interactions with customers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders.
2. Service Level Package (SLP)
SLP defines the needs of the business utility and warranty for a particular service and designed to meet the business activity.
Key Roles and Responsibilities
- Business Relationship Manager
- Product Manager
- Chief Sourcing Officer
ITIL Service Design
The role of ITIL Service Design can be defined as:
The design of :-
- Appropriate and
- Innovative IT services,
…including their
- Architectures,
- Processes,
- Policies and
- Documentation,
…to meet current and future agreed business requirements.
Service solution is generated based on:
- Documented business requirements, and
- Outcomes.
Service Design Package is created to hand over to the Service transition stage.
ITIL Service Design – Goals & Objectives
- Design services to meet the agreed business outcomes.
- Design processes to support the service life cycle.
- Identify and manage risks.
- Design secure, resilient, IT infrastructure environment, applications and data/information resource capability.
- Design measurement methods and practice.
- Produce and maintain plans, processes, standards, architecture, framework, and documents to support the design of quality IT solutions.
- Develop skill and capability with in IT.
- Contribute to the overall improvement IT service quality.
ITIL Service Design – Scope
5 Aspects of Service Design
- New or changed Services.
- Service Management tools & systems (especially service portfolio including service catalog).
- Technology architecture and management architecture.
- Processes required.
- Measurement systems, methods and metrics.
4 P’s Of ITIL Service Design
- People: the people, skills and competencies involved in the provision of IT Services.
- Products: the technology and management systems used in the delivery of IT services.
- Processes: the processes, roles and activities involved in the provision of IT services.
- Partners: the vendors, manufacturers and suppliers used to assist and support IT service provision.
Service Design Package (SDP):
- Defines all aspects of an IT service and its requirements through each stage of its lifecycle.
- An SDP is produced for each new IT service, major change, or IT service retirement.
ITIL Service Design – Activities
- Analyze business requirements
- Identify solution alternatives with a view of reusing existing components
- Design the solution
- Develop the service acceptance criteria
- Evaluate total costs, agree on expenditure
- Confirm that the solution is in balance with all the strategies, architectures, policies and plans.
- Ensure governance and security controls are included
- Complete IT Organizational readiness assessment
- Align the supplier and supporting agreements
- Assemble the Service Design Package (SDP)
ITIL Service Design -Key Concepts
Service Models
- Describes the structure and dynamics of a service which serves as a blue print to communicate and collaborate on value creation
- Describes how the customer assets interact with service assets to create value for the given portfolio of contracts
Service Design Package
Service Design Package (SDP) defines all the aspects of an IT service and its requirements through each stage of its lifecycle.
- It is produced :
- During the design stage of each new service
- Whenever a major change to the service to be done
- When a Service is removed
- When the SDP itself needs to be changed
- Passed from Service design to Service transition
- Contents: Requirements, Service design, organizational readiness assessment, service lifecycle plan.
Sourcing Models
- In sourcing, outsourcing, co-sourcing
- Partnership
- Multi-sourcing
- Business process Outsourcing
- Application Service Provision
- Knowledge process Outsourcing
ITIL Service Design – Key Processes
Service Level Management
- SLM is the process responsible for negotiating, agreeing and documenting the IT service targets and ensure its adherence
- Ensures that the ITSM processes, Operational Level agreement, Underpinning contracts are appropriate to meet the Service level committed
- Monitors and generates reports on the Service Levels to ensure that it meets the SLA.
- Holds regular customer reviews and plans on Service Improvement plan.
- Creates Service Quality Plan to ensure quality Service Delivery
Availability Management
- Process is responsible for defining, analyzing, planning, measuring and improving all the aspects of service availability
- It ensures that all the IT infrastructure, processes, tools, roles etc are appropriate for the agreed service level targets for availability
- Goal: To ensure that the level of service availability delivered in all services is matched to or exceeds the current and future agreed needs of the business cost-effectively
- Purpose: To provide a point of focus and management for all availability related issues, relating to both services and resources, ensuring that availability targets in all areas are measured and achieved.
Capacity Management
Three types
- Business
- Service
- Component
Goal: Ensure that cost justifiable IT capacity is available for the current and future needs of the Business in a timely manner
Purpose: Provide point of focus and management for all capacity issues relating to services and resources
Capacity Management information systems is the heart of Capacity Management where al the information and managements reports are stored and analyzed for issues
IT Service Continuity Management
- Support business continuity management functions by ensuring that IT services can be recovered in the event of a major business disruption within required timescales.
- Ensures that the IT service provider can always provide minimum agreed service levels, by reducing the risk to an acceptable level and planning for the recovery of IT services
Information Security Management
- Process that ensures the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of an organization’s assets, information, data and IT services.
- Goal: Align IT Security wil business security and ensure that information is effectively managed in all service and service management activities
- Purpose: Provide a focus for all aspects if IT security and manage all IT security activities
- Objective: Protect the interests of those relying on information and the systems and communications that deliver the information, from harm resulting from failures of availability, confidentiality and integrity.
Service Catalog Management
- Process responsible for producing and maintaining Service catalog that is part of IT Service Portfolio
- Purpose: is to provide a single source of consistent information on all the agreed services or being prepared for transition in to live environment, and ensure that it is widely available to those who are approved to access it.
- Service Catalog –
- details all the operational services being provided or being prepared for transition into live environment
- Summary of their characteristics
- Details of customers and maintainers of each
- Business Service Catalog & Technical Service catalog
Supplier Management
Process Objective: To ensure that all contracts with suppliers support the needs of the business, and that all suppliers meet their contractual commitments.
- Goal: To Manage suppliers and the services they supply, to provide seamless quality of IT service to the business ensuring value for money is obtained.
- Supplier and Contracts database (SCD) provides vital source of information for managing the suppliers and the contracts
ITIL Service Design – Key Roles and Responsibilities
- IT Designer/Architect – responsible for designing the IT infrastructure that are required to provide the service
- Availability Manager – responsible for defining, analyzing, planning, measuring and improving all aspects of the IT services availability
- IT Service Continuity Manager –responsible for managing risks that could seriously impact the IT services incase of disaster
- Capacity Manager – responsible for ensuring the IT services and the infrastructure has the right capacity to support the agreed levels of Business transactions
- Security Manager – responsible for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of IT assets and IT services
- Service Catalog Manager – responsible to maintain Service Catalogue up-to-date ensuring all information within the Catalogue is accurate
- Service Level Manager – responsible for negotiating SLA and ensuring that they are met
- Service Design Manager – responsible for producing quality, secure and resilient designs for the new or improved services
- Supplier Manager – responsible to manage suppliers so as to obtain the value of money
ITIL Service Design – Summary
- Service Design brings together the infrastructure, applications, systems and processes needed to create a successful service offering
- New processes introduced in Service Design are:
- Information Security Management
- Service Catalog Management
- Supplier Management
- Key new topics in Service Design are:
- Service Portfolio
- Service Models
- Service Design Package (SDP)
- Service Sourcing Approaches and Options
ITIL Service Transition
Service Transition processes helps to develop and improve capabilities for transitioning new and changed services into operations
- Ensure requirements of the Service Strategy encoded in the Service Design are effectively realized in Service Operation while controlling risks of failure / disruption
- Manage complexity of changes to services and service management processes, preventing undesired consequences while allowing innovation
ITIL Service Transition – Goals
- Set Customer expectations on how the service can be used to enable the business change
- Enable the business or customer to integrate the release in their business processes and services
- Decrease variations in the predicted and actual performance of the transitioned services
- Reduce know errors and minimize risks from transitioning new or changed service into production
- Ensure service can be used as per requirements and constraints specified within the service requirements
ITIL Service Transition – Objectives
- Plan and Manage the resources to move services into production with in predicted cost, quality and time estimates
- Ensure minimal unpredicted impact on the production services, operations and support organization
- Raise satisfaction with the service transition practice
- Including deployment, communications, release documentation training, knowledge transfer
- Increase proper use of the services and underlying applications and technology solutions
- Help customer and business change projects to align their activities with the service transition plans
ITIL Service Transition – Key Processes
ITIL Change Management Process
Process responsible to control the lifecycle of all the changes
Goal: To ensure standard methods and procedures are used for all changes and minimize the impact of change related incidents
Objectives:
- Enable beneficial changes to be implemented with minimal changes
- Ensure that changes are recorded, evaluated, prioritized, authorized, planned, tested, scheduled, implemented, reviewed, documented in a controlled manner
Service Asset and Configuration Management
- SACM is responsible for both Configuration management and asset management, and it aims to provide a logical model of IT infrastructure that correlates to IT services and the IT components
- Configuration management: maintaining information on the configuration items including their relationships that are required to deliver the IT service
- Asset Management : Tracking and reporting the value of IT assets and their ownership through out the lifecycle
ITIL Service Operation
The purpose of Service Operation stage is:
- To deliver agreed levels of service to users and customers, and
- To manage the applications, technology and infrastructure that support delivery of the services.
- Carry out the day-to-day operations required to deliver and manage the services at agreed service levels to the business users and customers.
- During this stage Services actually deliver value to the business.
- Service Operation staff is responsible to ensure that this value is delivered.
ITIL Service Operation – Balancing Conflicting Goals
ITIL Service Operation – Scope
- Manage the day-to-day Service Management Processes.
- Incident Management, Problem Management, Request Fulfillment and Access Management.
- Manage the day-to-day functions or people within Service Operations.
- Service Desk, Technical Management, IT Operations Management and Application Management.
- Manage the Technology that supports Service Management Processes and Functions
ITIL Service Operation – Activities
- Monitoring & control.
- Console management/operations bridge.
- Management of the infrastructure.
- Operational aspect of the processes from other lifecycle stages.
ITIL Service Operation – Key Processes
Event Management
- Key Terminologies
- Event: It is a change of state that has significance for the management of a CI or IT Service. It also means an alert or notification created by any IT service, CI or monitoring tool.
- Event Management: The Process responsible for managing Events throughout their lifecycles.
- Event Management is the process responsible for:
- Monitoring all events that occurs anywhere in the infrastructure.
- Detecting & escalating exception conditions.
- Determining the appropriate control action.
- Event Management provides value by:
- Early detection of incident.
- Real-time and automatic exception reporting.
- Proactive Recovery Actions.
- Integrated to Service Management.
Incident Management
- Key Terminologies
- Incident: An incident is an unplanned interruption to an IT service, or a reduction in the quality of an IT service. Failure of a configuration item that has not yet impacted service is also an incident.
- Incident Management: The Process responsible for managing incidents throughout their lifecycles.
- Incident Management is the process responsible for:
- Managing any event which disrupts or which could disrupt a service. These includes:
- Events that are communicated directly by the user.
- Events that are communicated through the interface with Event Management.
Goal:
- The goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.
Incident Management provides value by:
- Reducing downtime.
- Aligns IT activity with real-time business priorities.
- Identifies potential improvements to Services.
- Identifies training requirements and needs.
Problem Management
Key Terminologies
- Problem: A cause of one or more Incidents.
- Problem Management: The Process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems.
- Error: It is a design flaw or malfunction that causes a Failure of one or more Configuration Items or IT Services.
- Known Error: It is a problem that has a documented root cause and a workaround.
- Known Error Database (KEDB): It is the storage of previous knowledge of incidents and problems – and how they were overcome.
Goal:
The goal of Problem Management is to minimize the adverse impact of Incidents and Problems on the business that are caused by errors within the IT Infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of Incidents related to these errors.
Types:
- Reactive Problem Management: Finding Root Cause of Problems that have resulted in incidents.
- Proactive Problem Management: Preventing incidents from occurring.
Problem Management provides value by:
- Higher Availability of IT Services.
- Higher Productivity of business and IT Staff.
- Reduced expenditure on workarounds or fixes that do not work.
- Reduction in cost of effort in fire-fighting or resolving repeat incidents.
Request Fulfillment
Key Terminologies
- Service Request: It is a request from a user for information or advice, or for a standard change, or for access to an IT service.
- Request Fulfillment: The Process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all Service Requests.
Request Fulfillment is the process responsible for:
- Providing assistance with any call to the Service Desk that is NOT an incident.
- Providing quick and effective access to standard services.
- Providing a channel for users to request and receive standard services.
- Providing information to users and customers.
- Assisting with general information, complaints, or comments.
Goal: The goal of Request Fulfillment is to enable users to request and receive standard services; to source and deliver these services; to provide information to users and customers about services and procedures for obtaining them; and to assist with general information, complaints and comments.
Access Management
Key Terminologies
- Access Management:
- The Process responsible for allowing users to make use of IT Services, data, or other assets.
- Helps to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of assets by ensuring that only authorized users are able to access or modify the assets.
- Is sometimes referred to as Rights Management or Identity Management.
- Identity: Unique information about a users status within an organization.
- Rights: The privileges and rights that a user has to access services and information such as document read/write privileges.
- Services: Typically certain “role” within a company has access and rights to a certain portfolio of services and tools.
- Directory Services: Specific tool that manages access and rights for users.
Access Management is the process responsible for:
- Requesting Access.
- Verification.
- Providing Rights.
- Monitoring Identity Status.
- Logging and Tracking Access.
- Removing or Restricting Rights.
Goal: The goal of the Access Management process is to provide the rights for users to be able to access a service or group of services, while preventing access to non-authorized users.
Purpose: To execute the policies and actions defined in Security and Availability Management.
Service Desk
Key Terminologies
- Service Desk: Single point of contact between Service Provider & users.
Goal: The goal of Service Desk is to restore the “normal service” to the users as quickly as possible.
Responsibilities:
- Logging all incidents and requests, categorizing and prioritizing them.
- First-line investigation and diagnosis.
- Managing the lifecycle of incidents and requests, escalating as appropriate and closing them when the user is satisfied.
- Keeping users informed of the status of services, incidents and requests.
Service Desk Structures:
- Local: Physically close to the user community it serves.
- Centralized: Service Desk personnel are co-located with each other.
- Virtual: Though in many locations yet appear to the users to be centralized.
- Follow The Sun: Service Desks in different time zones give 24-hour coverage by passing calls to a location where staff are working.
Technical Management
Definition: It is the function responsible for providing technical skills in support of IT Services & mgmt of the IT Infrastructure. It defines Roles of Support Groups, as well as the tools, Processes & Procedures required.
Goal: The goal is to provides technical expertise and overall management of the IT Infrastructure Technical Management to IT groups/departments/teams.
Activities:
- Identifying knowledge and expertise requirements.
- Defining architecture standards.
- Involvement in the design & build of new services and operational practices.
- Contributing to service design, service transition or CSI projects.
- Assistance with Service Mgmt processes, helping to define standards and tools, and undertaking activities such as the evaluation of change requests.
- Assistance with the management of contracts and vendors.
Responsibility:
- It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing the IT Infrastructure.
- It provides the actual resources to support the ITSM Lifecycle.
Application Management
Definition: It is the function responsible for managing the applications throughout their lifecycle.
Goal: The goal is to manage applications throughout their lifecycle.
Objectives: To support organization’s business processes by:
- Helping to identify functional & manageability requirements for application software.
- Assist in design & deployment of the applications.
- Ongoing support.
- Improvement of applications.
Responsibility:
- It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing applications.
- It provides the actual resources to support the IT Service Management Lifecycle.
IT Operations Management
Definition: It is the function within an IT Service Provider that performs the daily Activities needed to manage IT Services and supporting the IT Infrastructure.
Goal: The goal is to provides technical skills in support of IT Services and management of the IT Infrastructure
Responsibility: To Perform organization’s day-to-day operational activities.
Sub-Functions:
- IT Operations Control: It oversees the execution and monitoring of the operational activities and events in the IT Infrastructure.
Eg.: Console mgmt, Job scheduling, backup & restore, print & o/p mgmt…
- Facilities Management: It involves management of the physical IT environment (like data centre, recovery sites, power, cooling, etc.)
ITIL Continual Service Improvement
The purpose of Continual Service Improvement (CSI) stage is:
- To identify & implement ways to improve effectiveness, efficiency and economical value of a process.
- Continually align and realign the IT services to the changing business needs.
Thus, CSI is concerned with:
- Maintaining value for customers through the continual evaluation,
- Improvement of the quality of services
- Improvement of the overall maturity of the ITSM service lifecycle and underlying processes.
CSI Model
CSI – Key Processes
- 7-Step improvement process.
- Service measurement.
- Service reporting.
7 – Step Improvement Process
Covers steps to:
- Collect meaningful data.
- Analyze this data to identify trends and issues.
- Present information to management their prioritization and agreement.
- Implement improvements.
Each step is driven by :
- Strategic goals.
- Tactical goals.
- Operational goals.
…defined during Service Strategy & Service Design phases.
Step 1: Define what you should measure
- Define a measurement set that fully supports org. goals.
- Focus on identifying what is required to satisfy the goal.
Step 2: Define what you can measure
- Identify the limitations/gaps for measurements.
- Gaps can be identified by conducting a gap analysis of what is or can be measured today and what is actually required.
Step 3: Gather the data
- Collect the data needed for defined measurements
- Monitoring (Quality is the key objective of monitoring).
Step 4: Process the data
- Process raw data into the required format.
- Processed data provides an end-to-end perspective on the performance of services and/or processes.
Step 5: Analyze the data
- Analysis transforms the information into knowledge of the events that are affecting the organization.
- Analysis of results helps in answering the following questions:
Are we meeting targets?
Are there any clear trends?
Are corrective actions required? What is the cost?
Step 6: Present & use the information
- Present the knowledge gained in a format that can be easily understood and used to make strategic, tactical and operational decisions.
Step 7: Implement corrective action
- Implement corrective actions to optimize, improve and correct services, process and all other supporting activities and technologies.
- Communicate
Service Measurement
Baseline
- A reference or starting point for later comparison
- used as initial data point for service improvements.
Why do we Measure or Monitor?
- To validate
- To direct
- To justify
- To intervene
Monitoring & Measurement
Underpins CSI & 7 Step Improvement Process
Essential part for:
- Service Management
- Process Management
- Reporting value to Business.
Service Measurement – Metrics
Types of Metrics
- Technology Metrics
- Process Metrics
- Service Metrics
Defining Metrics & KPIs
- Customer perspective
- Internal processes perspective
- Financial perspective
- Learning & growth perspective
Technique
Technique that may be useful is SWOT Analysis.
Service Measurement – Service Reporting
Why?
- Only a small subset of collected data is of interest & importance.
- Business likes historical representation of past performance.
Helps In
- Providing data that is of interest & importance to management.
- Mitigating against threats (historical events that continue to be a threat going forward.
- Working towards improving service delivery.
Example – Not logging a call
