IT Service Management: Support for your ITSM Foundation exam
226
IT Service Management: Support for your ITSM Foundation exam
226eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781780173207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT |
| Publication date: | 04/08/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 226 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS SERVICE MANAGEMENT?
INTRODUCTION
In order to understand what service management is and why it is so important to enterprises, we need to understand what services are and how service management can help service providers to deliver and manage these services.
A service is defined as follows:
SERVICE
A service is essentially a means of delivering value to customers. This is done by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
The outcomes that customers want to achieve are the reason why they purchase or use a service. Typically this will be expressed as a specific business objective (e.g. to enable customers of a bank to perform all transactions and account management activities online or to deliver state services to citizens in a cost-effective manner). The value of the service to the customer is directly dependent on how well a service facilitates these outcomes.
Although the enterprise retains responsibility for managing the overall costs of the business, they often wish to devolve responsibility for owning and managing defined aspects to an internal or external entity that has acknowledged expertise in the area.
This is a generic concept that applies to the purchase of any service. Consider financial planning. As a customer, we recognise that we don't have the expertise, or the time, or the inclination to handle all the day-to-day decision-making and management of individual investments that are required. Therefore, we engage the services of a professional manager to provide us a service. As long as their performance delivers a value (increasing wealth) at a price that we believe is reasonable, we are happy to let them invest in all the necessary systems and processes that are needed for the wealth creation activities.
In the past, service providers often focused on the technical (supply side) view of what constituted a service, rather than on the consumption side. Hence it was not unusual for the service provider and the consumer to have different definitions and perceptions of what services were provided, or for the provider to know all about the cost of individual components, but not the total cost of a service that the consumer understood.
Service management is what enables a service provider to:
• understand the services that they are providing from both a consumer and provider perspective;
• ensure that the services really do facilitate the outcomes that their customers want to achieve;
• understand the value of those services to their customers and hence their relative importance;
• understand and manage all of the costs and risks associated with providing those services.
SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Service management is a set of specialised organisational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.
These 'specialised organisational capabilities' include the processes, activities, functions and roles that a service provider uses in delivering services to their customers, as well as the ability to establish suitable organisation structures, manage knowledge and understand how to facilitate outcomes that create value.
Although there is no single definition of a profession, it is widely accepted that the word profession applies where a group of people share common standards and disciplines based on a high level of knowledge and skills, which are gained from organised education schemes supported by training through experience and are measured and recognised through formal qualifications. Moreover, a profession seeks to use its influence through the development of good practice guidance and advice in order to improve the standard of performance in its given field.
Service management has a clear right to regard itself as a profession, and the exercise of service management disciplines as professional practice is performed and supported by a global community drawn from all market sectors. There is a rich body of knowledge and experience including formal schemes for the education of individuals.
'BEST PRACTICE' VERSUS 'GOOD PRACTICE'
Enterprises operating in dynamic environments need to improve their performance and maintain competitive advantage. Adopting practices in industry-wide use can help to improve capability.
The term 'best practice' generally refers to the 'best possible way of doing something'. As a concept, it was first raised as long ago as 1919, but it was popularised in the 1980s through Tom Peters' books on business management.
The idea behind best practice is that one creates a specification for what is accepted by a wide community as being the best approach for any given situation. Then, one can compare actual job performance against these best practices and determine whether the job performance was lacking in quality somehow. Alternatively, the specification for best practices may need updating to include lessons learned from the job performance being graded.
Enterprises should not be trying to 'implement' any specific best practice, but adapting and adopting it to suit their specific requirements. In doing this, they may also draw upon other sources of good practice, such as public standards and frameworks, or the proprietary knowledge of individuals and other enterprises. More recently, the ITIL framework has offered a supplementary list as illustrated in Figure 1.1.
These sources have different characteristics:
• Public frameworks and standards have been validated across diverse environments.
• Knowledge of them is widely distributed among industry professionals.
• Training and certification programmes are publicly available.
• The acquisition of knowledge through the labour market is more readily achievable.
The proprietary knowledge of enterprises and individuals is usually customised for the local context and specific business needs of an organisation. It may only be available to a wider market under commercial terms and may be poorly documented and hard to extract. If embedded within individuals it may not be documented at all.
Enterprises deploying solutions based on good and best practice should, in theory, have an optimal and unique solution. Their solution may include ideas that are gradually adopted by other enterprises and, having been widely accepted, eventually become recognised inputs to good and best practice.
THE ITIL FRAMEWORK
ITIL is not a standard in the formal sense but a framework which is a source of good practice in service management. The standard for IT service management (ITSM) is ISO/ IEC 20000, which is aligned with, but not dependent on, ITIL.
As a formal standard, ISO/IEC 20000 defines a set of requirements against which an organisation can be independently audited and, if they satisfy those requirements, can be certificated to that effect. The requirements focus on what must be achieved rather than how that is done. ITIL provides guidance about how different aspects of the solution can be developed.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Axelos, with the cooperation of the independent user group it SMF (the IT Service Management Forum), have publicly committed to keeping the standard and the framework as aligned as possible. However, it has to be accepted that they serve different purposes and have their own development lifecycles so it is unlikely that they will ever be completely synchronised.
The ITIL Library has the following components:
• ITIL Core: Publications describing generic best practice that is applicable to all types of organisation that provide services to a business.
• ITIL Complementary Guidance: A set of publications with guidance specific to industry sectors, organisation types, operating models and technology architectures.
• Web Support Services: Interactive web-based facilities that include a self-assessment process maturity model (co-built by one of this book's authors).
The objective of the ITIL service management framework is to provide guidance applicable to all types of organisations that provide IT services to businesses, irrespective of their size, complexity, or whether they are commercial service providers or internal divisions of a business. The framework shouldn't be bureaucratic or unwieldy provided it is used sensibly and in full recognition of the business needs of the specific enterprise.
ITIL-based solutions have been deployed successfully around the world for nearly 30 years. Over this time, the framework has evolved considerably. The original publications, of which there were over 40, tended to be single topic and function-based. The next iteration reduced the number of books considerably, taking a process-based view and concatenating topics to reinforce the integrated nature of service management solutions. The latest iteration, the 2011 Edition, now provides a broader, holistic service lifecycle approach.
The generic nature of ITIL is both a strength and a weakness. Since it is generic, it truly can be applied to any organisation of any size in any market sector and regardless of whether the service provider is internal to the business or a commercial enterprise. However, organisations have to adopt and adapt the guidance that it contains to their specific requirements, which in some cases requires considerable effort and commitment.
Unfortunately, much of the focus in learning programmes is on the specifics of terminology and process definitions included within the ITIL volumes, which means that individuals aren't always equipped to make the necessary decisions about how to implement key processes and functions. Organisations should not be seeking to 'implement ITIL', but to implement a service management solution based on ITIL that meets the needs of the organisation.
THE ITIL CORE
The service lifecycle is an approach to IT service management that emphasises the importance of coordination and control across the various functions, processes and systems necessary to manage the full lifecycle of IT services. The service management lifecycle approach considers the strategy, design, transition, operation and continual improvement of IT services. The service lifecycle is described in a set of five publications within the ITIL Core set. Each of these publications covers a stage of the service lifecycle (see Figure 1.2) from the initial definition and analysis of business requirements in service strategy (SS) and service design (SD), through migration into the live environment within service transition (ST), to live operation and improvement in service operation (SO) and continual service improvement (CSI). The term 'continual' is used in preference to 'continuous' to emphasise that this activity is not performed on a constant basis, but as a series of planned and controlled actions.
Service strategy is the hub around which everything revolves. Strategy drives all the decisions that are subsequently taken. Design, transition and operation are the more iterative cyclic activities. At all stages throughout the lifecycle, opportunities arise for improvement.
COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
Although the material in the core is likely to remain fairly constant, complementary material is likely to be more dynamic. Complementary material may take the form of books or web-based material and may be sourced from the wider industry.
Examples of such material are glossary of terms, process models, process templates, role descriptions, case studies, targeted overviews and study aids for passing examinations.
Other publications that focus on specific market sectors, techniques or technologies are more likely to be produced by organisations such as it SMF or by the vendor community.
RELATED MATERIAL
Apart from the ISO/IEC 20000 standard, ITIL is also complementary to many other standards, frameworks and approaches. No one of these items will provide everything that an enterprise will wish to use in developing and managing their business. The secret is to draw on them for their insight and guidance as appropriate. Among the many such complementary approaches are:
• Balanced scorecard: A management tool developed by Dr Robert Kaplan and Dr David Norton. A balanced scorecard enables a strategy to be broken down into key performance indicators (KPIs). Performance against the KPIs is used to demonstrate how well the strategy is being achieved. A balanced scorecard has four major areas, each of which are considered at different levels of detail throughout the organisation.
• COBIT: Control OBjectives for Information and related Technology provides guidance and best practice for the management of IT processes. COBIT is published by the IT Governance Institute.
• CMMI-SVC: Capability Maturity Model Integration is a process improvement approach that gives organisations the essential elements for effective process improvement. CMMI-SVC is a variant aimed at service establishment, management and delivery.
• EFQM: The European Foundation for Quality Management is a framework for organisational management systems.
• eSCM–SP: eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers is a framework to help IT service providers develop their IT service management capabilities from a service sourcing perspective.
• ISO 9000: A generic quality management standard, with which ISO/IEC 20000 is aligned.
• ISO/IEC 19770: Software Asset Management standard, which is aligned with ISO/IEC 20000.
• ISO/IEC 27001: ISO Specification for Information Security Management. The corresponding code of practice is ISO/IEC 17799.
• Lean: a production practice centred around creating more value with less work.
• PRINCE2: The standard UK government methodology for project management.
• SOX: the Sarbanes–Oxley framework for corporate governance.
• Six Sigma: a business management strategy, initially implemented by Motorola, which today enjoys widespread application in many sectors of industry.
Each of these contributes something different, as can be surmised from the brief descriptions, whether it be as legislation to comply with, as a standard to aspire to or as a method of measuring success. Enterprises globally have developed total corporate solutions embracing many permutations of these approaches.
THE ITIL SERVICE MANAGEMENT MODEL
Whether services are being provided by an internal unit of the organisation or contracted to an external agency, all services should be driven solely by business needs and judged by the value that they provide to the organisation. Decision-making therefore rests with the business. Within this context, services must also reflect the defined strategies and policies of the service provider organisation, which is particularly significant for external providers.
Figure 1.3 illustrates how the service lifecycle is initiated from a change in requirements at the business level. These new or changed requirements are identified and agreed at the service strategy stage and documented. Each of these 'packages' will have an associated defined set of business outcomes.
The package is passed to the service design stage where a service solution is produced, defining everything necessary to take this service through the remaining stages of the lifecycle. Solutions may be developed internally or consist of bought-in components that are integrated internally.
The design definition is passed to the service transition stage, where the service is built, evaluated, tested, validated and transitioned into the live environment, where it enters the live service operation stage. The transition phase is also responsible for supporting the service in its early life and the phasing out of any services that are no longer required.
Service operation focuses on providing effective and efficient operational services to deliver the required business outcomes and value to the customer. This is where any value is actually delivered and measured.
Continual service improvement identifies opportunities for improvement (which may arise anywhere within any of the lifecycle stages) based on measurement and reporting of the efficiency, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and compliance of the services themselves, the technology that is in use and the service management processes used to manage these components. Although the measurements are taken during the operational phase, improvements may be identified for any phase of the lifecycle.
KEY CONCEPTS
Value
From the earlier definition of a service, it is clear that the primary focus is on delivering value to the service consumer. Value is created through providing the right service under the right conditions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "IT Service Management"
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Copyright © 2016 BCS Learning & Development Ltd.
Excerpted by permission of BCS The Chartered Institute for IT.
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Table of Contents
SECTION 1: OVERVIEW
1 What is service management?
SECTION 2: THE SERVICE LIFECYCLE
2 Service strategy
3 Service design
4 Service transition
5 Service operation
6 Continual service improvement
SECTION 3: THE PROCESSES AND FUNCTIONS
7 IT financial management
8 Demand management
9 Service portfolio management
10 Service catalogue management
11 Service level management
12 Supplier management
13 Capacity management
14 Availability management
15 Service continuity management
16 Information security management and access management
17 Knowledge management
18 Service asset and configuration management
19 Change management
20 Release and deployment
21 The service desk
22 Request fulfilment
23 Incident management
24 Problem management
25 IT operations management
26 Event management
27 Application management
28 Technical management
29 The seven-step improvement process
SECTION 4: MEASUREMENT AND METRICS, AND THE DEMING CYCLE
30 Measurement and metrics
31 The Deming Cycle
APPENDIX