Ch1- Service Management Flashcards
Best practices in the public domain
ITIL & Approach
ITIL is a source of best practices in service management.
ITIL is recognized worldwide as a best-practice approach for delivering IT services and IT service management. It focuses on the processes, functions, and capabilities required to support IT services in business.
Approaches must enable IT service providers to meet the needs of the customer, while remaining cost-effective and within the customer’s budget.
Why ITIL is successful
Origins in the 1980s.
Guidance principle behind the framework is to ensure that all efforts have a common goal: to deliver IT services that support the requirements of the business by delivering value to the organization.
Key factors:
- Vendor Neutrality: owned by U.K. government.
- Nonprescriptive: true benefit is in the adaptation to meet requirements for value creation. Guidance applicable/ adaptable to any situation.
- Best Practice.
Internal and external customers
Internal Customers: People who work for the same organization as the service provider.
External Customers: People who are not employed by the organization or are employed by a separate legal entity.
Internal and external services
Services
** Services: a means of delivering value to customers, by facilitating the outcomes customers want to achieve, without the ownership of specific costs and risks (i.e.. Email).**
Services facilitate the desired outcomes by enhancing the performance of the tasks and reducing the effect of the constraints– by doing this the desired outcome is more likely to be achieved.
You can apply the same strategic approach to the management of a wide variety of services and make only minor adjustments to meet specific requirements of each business.
Services can be grouped together to the value they provide for the customers:
- Core Services: Services that deliver the basic outcomes required. Provide value the customer wants. Provides the capability for the business-critical functions to take place. (i.e. Email).
- Enabling Services: Services needed to ensure that the core service can be delivered successfully. Without them, the core services may not be delivered. (i.e. infrastructure/ network).
- Enhancing Services: Additional services that enhance the core service, making it more attractive/ appealing to the customer. Not essential to the delivery of the core services. (i.e. ability to access email remotely).
Internal services are delivered between departments or business units within the same organization.
Internal and external services
Outcomes
** Outcome: result of carrying out an activity, following a process, or delivering an IT service, etc. Term used to refer to intended results, as well as actual results.**
Internal and external services
IT Service
** IT Service: service provided by an IT service provider. Combination of IT, people and processes. Customer-facing (internal/ external) IT service supports the business processes and service level targets should be defined. Other IT services (called supporting services) are not directly used by the business but required by the service provider to deliver.**
Stakeholders in service management
Stakeholders: Individuals/ groups potentially interested/ engaged in the activities, resources, targets, or deliverables from service management. i.e. functions, groups, teams.
External stakeholders:
- Customers: Individuals/ groups that buy goods/ services. Responsible for agreeing/ defining targets in service level agreements with IT service provider.
- Users: Individuals/ groups that use the service on a day-to-day basis. Have no overall authority over the service.
- Suppliers: Third parties who have responsibility for the supply of goods/ services required to deliver IT services.
The ITIL process model and the characteristics of processes
The management of the technology to deliver the service is crucial to the success of your organization’s required business outcomes. But the technology is not the sole element that makes up the services, which is why service management is more than technology management.
Service Management: Set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.
Service Provider: an organization supplying services to 1+ internal or external customers.
IT Service Management (ITSM): Implementation/ management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the business. Performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology.
IT Service Provider: Service provider that provides IT services to internal/ external customers.
ITIL recommends that this relationship and the service requirements of business need, cost, and performance are documented in an SLA.
IT Service Provider Types:
- Type I- Internal Service Provider: Internal service provider is located within the business unit it supports.
- Type II- Shared services Unit: Internal service provider that provides shared IT services to 1+ business unit.
- Type III- External Service Provider: Provider provides IT services to external customers.
Processes and Functions
** Process: Structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective. A process takes 2+ defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs.**
Within a process, we are able to define actions, dependencies, and sequence. A process that is well defined/ managed can improve productivity.
Process characteristics:
- Measurability: Important to ensure that all processes can be measured in a relevant manner. Different perspectives for the activities will require different measurement.
- Specific results: Processes exist to deliver a specific result. Must be individually accountable and identifiable.
- Customers/ Stakeholders: Should deliver its primary result for the benefit of a customer/ stakeholder.
- Responds to a Trigger.
Function: Team/ group of people and the other resources/ tools used to carry out a process or process activities.
Defined roles:
- Group: Number of people performing similar activities. Not formally viewed as formal structures but are used to ensure processes are carried out in the same way across a number of different areas.
- Team: Formal structure for those working together with a common objective.
- Departments: Formal organizational structures within an organization.
- Division: Departments that have been grouped together, often self-contained within an organization.
Service automation
Improving the automated capability of your service offers advantages in several areas: Capacity Management, Measurement, Optimization, Knowledge Capture.
There are a number of areas throughout service management where automation can provide significant benefits (i.e. design/ modeling, service catalog, pattern recognition/ analysis, etc.).
To ensure that automation fulfills the promises of benefit realization, it is necessary to do some preparation. i.e. no necessary steps/ info removed from process, clarify exact steps (inputs, dependencies, interactions).
The only tasks/ interactions that should be automated have a recognizable recurring pattern and clear inputs/ activities/ resources/ outputs.
Perform service analysis to see where enhancements can be achieved.
The structure of the service lifecycle
- SD-TOC:**
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
