- Management Reference Guide
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Strategic Management
- Establishing Goals, Objectives, and Strategies
- Aligning IT Goals with Corporate Business Goals
- Utilizing Effective Planning Techniques
- Developing Worthwhile Mission Statements
- Developing Worthwhile Vision Statements
- Instituting Practical Corporate Values
- Budgeting Considerations in an IT Environment
- Introduction to Conducting an Effective SWOT Analysis
- IT Governance and Disaster Recovery, Part One
- IT Governance and Disaster Recovery, Part Two
- Customer Management
- Identifying Key External Customers
- Identifying Key Internal Customers
- Negotiating with Customers and Suppliers—Part 1: An Introduction
- Negotiating With Customers and Suppliers—Part 2: Reaching Agreement
- Negotiating and Managing Realistic Customer Expectations
- Service Management
- Identifying Key Services for Business Users
- Service-Level Agreements That Really Work
- How IT Evolved into a Service Organization
- FAQs About Systems Management (SM)
- FAQs About Availability (AV)
- FAQs About Performance and Tuning (PT)
- FAQs About Service Desk (SD)
- FAQs About Change Management (CM)
- FAQs About Configuration Management (CF)
- FAQs About Capacity Planning (CP)
- FAQs About Network Management
- FAQs About Storage Management (SM)
- FAQs About Production Acceptance (PA)
- FAQs About Release Management (RM)
- FAQs About Disaster Recovery (DR)
- FAQs About Business Continuity (BC)
- FAQs About Security (SE)
- FAQs About Service Level Management (SL)
- FAQs About Financial Management (FN)
- FAQs About Problem Management (PM)
- FAQs About Facilities Management (FM)
- Process Management
- Developing Robust Processes
- Establishing Mutually Beneficial Process Metrics
- Change Management—Part 1
- Change Management—Part 2
- Change Management—Part 3
- Audit Reconnaissance: Releasing Resources Through the IT Audit
- Problem Management
- Problem Management–Part 2: Process Design
- Problem Management–Part 3: Process Implementation
- Business Continuity Emergency Communications Plan
- Capacity Planning – Part One: Why It is Seldom Done Well
- Capacity Planning – Part Two: Developing a Capacity Planning Process
- Capacity Planning — Part Three: Benefits and Helpful Tips
- Capacity Planning – Part Four: Hidden Upgrade Costs and
- Improving Business Process Management, Part 1
- Improving Business Process Management, Part 2
- 20 Major Elements of Facilities Management
- Major Physical Exposures Common to a Data Center
- Evaluating the Physical Environment
- Nightmare Incidents with Disaster Recovery Plans
- Developing a Robust Configuration Management Process
- Developing a Robust Configuration Management Process – Part Two
- Automating a Robust Infrastructure Process
- Improving High Availability — Part One: Definitions and Terms
- Improving High Availability — Part Two: Definitions and Terms
- Improving High Availability — Part Three: The Seven R's of High Availability
- Improving High Availability — Part Four: Assessing an Availability Process
- Methods for Brainstorming and Prioritizing Requirements
- Introduction to Disk Storage Management — Part One
- Storage Management—Part Two: Performance
- Storage Management—Part Three: Reliability
- Storage Management—Part Four: Recoverability
- Twelve Traits of World-Class Infrastructures — Part One
- Twelve Traits of World-Class Infrastructures — Part Two
- Meeting Today's Cooling Challenges of Data Centers
- Strategic Security, Part One: Assessment
- Strategic Security, Part Two: Development
- Strategic Security, Part Three: Implementation
- Strategic Security, Part Four: ITIL Implications
- Production Acceptance Part One – Definition and Benefits
- Production Acceptance Part Two – Initial Steps
- Production Acceptance Part Three – Middle Steps
- Production Acceptance Part Four – Ongoing Steps
- Case Study: Planning a Service Desk Part One – Objectives
- Case Study: Planning a Service Desk Part Two – SWOT
- Case Study: Implementing an ITIL Service Desk – Part One
- Case Study: Implementing a Service Desk Part Two – Tool Selection
- Ethics, Scandals and Legislation
- Outsourcing in Response to Legislation
- Supplier Management
- Identifying Key External Suppliers
- Identifying Key Internal Suppliers
- Integrating the Four Key Elements of Good Customer Service
- Enhancing the Customer/Supplier Matrix
- Voice Over IP, Part One — What VoIP Is, and Is Not
- Voice Over IP, Part Two — Benefits, Cost Savings and Features of VoIP
- Application Management
- Production Acceptance
- Distinguishing New Applications from New Versions of Existing Applications
- Assessing a Production Acceptance Process
- Effective Use of a Software Development Life Cycle
- The Role of Project Management in SDLC— Part 2
- Communication in Project Management – Part One: Barriers to Effective Communication
- Communication in Project Management – Part Two: Examples of Effective Communication
- Safeguarding Personal Information in the Workplace: A Case Study
- Combating the Year-end Budget Blitz—Part 1: Building a Manageable Schedule
- Combating the Year-end Budget Blitz—Part 2: Tracking and Reporting Availability
- References
- Developing an ITIL Feasibility Analysis
- Organization and Personnel Management
- Optimizing IT Organizational Structures
- Factors That Influence Restructuring Decisions
- Alternative Locations for the Help Desk
- Alternative Locations for Database Administration
- Alternative Locations for Network Operations
- Alternative Locations for Web Design
- Alternative Locations for Risk Management
- Alternative Locations for Systems Management
- Practical Tips To Retaining Key Personnel
- Benefits and Drawbacks of Using IT Consultants and Contractors
- Deciding Between the Use of Contractors versus Consultants
- Managing Employee Skill Sets and Skill Levels
- Assessing Skill Levels of Current Onboard Staff
- Recruiting Infrastructure Staff from the Outside
- Selecting the Most Qualified Candidate
- 7 Tips for Managing the Use of Mobile Devices
- Useful Websites for IT Managers
- References
- Automating Robust Processes
- Evaluating Process Documentation — Part One: Quality and Value
- Evaluating Process Documentation — Part Two: Benefits and Use of a Quality-Value Matrix
- When Should You Integrate or Segregate Service Desks?
- Five Instructive Ideas for Interviewing
- Eight Surefire Tips to Use When Being Interviewed
- 12 Helpful Hints To Make Meetings More Productive
- Eight Uncommon Tips To Improve Your Writing
- Ten Helpful Tips To Improve Fire Drills
- Sorting Out Today’s Various Training Options
- Business Ethics and Corporate Scandals – Part 1
- Business Ethics and Corporate Scandals – Part 2
- 12 Tips for More Effective Emails
- Management Communication: Back to the Basics, Part One
- Management Communication: Back to the Basics, Part Two
- Management Communication: Back to the Basics, Part Three
- Asset Management
- Managing Hardware Inventories
- Introduction to Hardware Inventories
- Processes To Manage Hardware Inventories
- Use of a Hardware Inventory Database
- References
- Managing Software Inventories
- Business Continuity Management
- Ten Lessons Learned from Real-Life Disasters
- Ten Lessons Learned From Real-Life Disasters, Part 2
- Differences Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity , Part 1
- Differences Between Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity , Part 2
- 15 Common Terms and Definitions of Business Continuity
- The Federal Government’s Role in Disaster Recovery
- The 12 Common Mistakes That Cause BIAs To Fail—Part 1
- The 12 Common Mistakes That Cause BIAs To Fail—Part 2
- The 12 Common Mistakes That Cause BIAs To Fail—Part 3
- The 12 Common Mistakes That Cause BIAs To Fail—Part 4
- Conducting an Effective Table Top Exercise (TTE) — Part 1
- Conducting an Effective Table Top Exercise (TTE) — Part 2
- Conducting an Effective Table Top Exercise (TTE) — Part 3
- Conducting an Effective Table Top Exercise (TTE) — Part 4
- The 13 Cardinal Steps for Implementing a Business Continuity Program — Part One
- The 13 Cardinal Steps for Implementing a Business Continuity Program — Part Two
- The 13 Cardinal Steps for Implementing a Business Continuity Program — Part Three
- The 13 Cardinal Steps for Implementing a Business Continuity Program — Part Four
- The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
- The Origins of ITIL
- The Foundation of ITIL: Service Management
- Five Reasons for Revising ITIL
- The Relationship of Service Delivery and Service Support to All of ITIL
- Ten Common Myths About Implementing ITIL, Part One
- Ten Common Myths About Implementing ITIL, Part Two
- Characteristics of ITIL Version 3
- Ten Benefits of itSMF and its IIL Pocket Guide
- Translating the Goals of the ITIL Service Delivery Processes
- Translating the Goals of the ITIL Service Support Processes
- Elements of ITIL Least Understood, Part One: Service Delivery Processes
- Case Study: Recovery Reactions to a Renegade Rodent
- Elements of ITIL Least Understood, Part Two: Service Support
- Case Studies
- Case Study — Preparing for Hurricane Charley
- Case Study — The Linux Decision
- Case Study — Production Acceptance at an Aerospace Firm
- Case Study — Production Acceptance at a Defense Contractor
- Case Study — Evaluating Mainframe Processes
- Case Study — Evaluating Recovery Sites, Part One: Quantitative Comparisons/Natural Disasters
- Case Study — Evaluating Recovery Sites, Part Two: Quantitative Comparisons/Man-made Disasters
- Case Study — Evaluating Recovery Sites, Part Three: Qualitative Comparisons
- Case Study — Evaluating Recovery Sites, Part Four: Take-Aways
- Disaster Recovery Test Case Study Part One: Planning
- Disaster Recovery Test Case Study Part Two: Planning and Walk-Through
- Disaster Recovery Test Case Study Part Three: Execution
- Disaster Recovery Test Case Study Part Four: Follow-Up
- Assessing the Robustness of a Vendor’s Data Center, Part One: Qualitative Measures
- Assessing the Robustness of a Vendor’s Data Center, Part Two: Quantitative Measures
- Case Study: Lessons Learned from a World-Wide Disaster Recovery Exercise, Part One: What Did the Team Do Well
- (d) Case Study: Lessons Learned from a World-Wide Disaster Recovery Exercise, Part Two
When the 39 industry experts from business, government and academia began developing the first version of ITIL in Great Britain during the mid 1980s, they quickly realized that IT service management was the common link on which the numerous best practices of IT infrastructure management was based. Service management in general focuses the quality of products and services on the reasonable expectations of customers. When applied to an IT environment, service management focuses the quality of its IT services on the reasonable business expectations of its customers and end-users. In ITIL terminology, end-users are defined as the day-to-day users of IT services while customers are defined as the managers of these end users.
IT Service Management (ITSM) bridges the gap between the business goals of a company and the technology used to accomplish those goals. It sets up formalized and regular communications channels to allow requirements, requests and difficulties to be expressed and dealt with. This serves the very important function of ensuring IT aims are correctly aligned to the business.
This notion of IT service management was not always prevalent within IT. In fact, as the IT industry passed through its infancy and adolescent stages, there was little or no emphasis on service management. How, then, did IT environments evolve from being totally technical entities into world-class service-oriented organizations? The next section answers that question.
How IT Evolved into Service-Oriented Organizations
Most IT organizations began as offshoots of their company's accounting departments. As companies grew and their accounting systems became more complex, their dependency on the technology of computers also grew. The emphasis of IT in the 1970s was mostly on continually providing machines and systems that were bigger, faster, and cheaper. During this era, technological advances in IT flourished. Two factors led to very little emphasis on customer service.
First, in the 1970s the IT industry was still in its infancy. Organizations were struggling just to stay abreast of all the rapidly changing technologies, let alone focus on good customer service. Second, within most companies the IT department was the only game in town, so to speak. Departments that were becoming more and more dependent on computers—finance, engineering, and administration, for example— were pretty much at the mercy of their internal IT suppliers, regardless of how much or how little customer service was provided.
By the 1980s, the role of IT and customer service began changing. IT was becoming a strategic competitive advantage for many corporations. A few industries such as banking and airlines had long before discovered how the quality of IT services could affect revenue, profits, and public image. As online applications started replacing many of the manual legacy systems, more and more workers became exposed to the power and the frustration of computers. Demand for high availability, quick response, and clear and simple answers to operational questions gave rise to user groups, help desks, service level agreements, and eventually customer service representatives, all within the confines of a corporate structure.
Good customer service was now becoming an integral part of any well-managed IT department. By the time the decade of the 1990s rolled around, most users were reasonably computer literate; PCs and the Internet were common fixtures in the office and at home; the concept of customer service transitioned from being hoped for to being expected. Demands for excellent customer service grew to such a degree in the 1990s that the lack of it often led to demotions, terminations, and outsourcing.
Whether IT professionals were prepared for it or not, IT had evolved from a purely accounting and technical environment into a totally service-oriented one. Companies hiring IT professionals now often use traits such as empathy, helpfulness, patience, resourcefulness, and being team-oriented as requirements for the job. The extent to which these traits are in evidence frequently determines an individual's, or an organization's, success in IT today.
Other Factors Driving IT Service Management
Several other factors help drive the IT industry to become more service-oriented, and the truly successful organizations understand and respond to these factors.
Competition: We see IT everywhere these days and it affects all our lives. If your IT service delivery lets you down, you will lose customers. In high volume, real-time industries such as online travel or banking, you may lose them immediately. Providing a framework for successful Customer retention is one of the prime deliverables of ITSM.
Increased dependency on IT: Most organizations could not function as a business without acceptable levels of IT service availability and reliability.
Higher visibility of service failures: If things do go wrong, the impact on the business is more likely to be noticed quickly.
More exacting customer demands: A general increase in computer literacy, particularly amongst customers, has led to a higher expectation of what is required from IT services, and a reduction in their level of tolerance of faults and failures in the IT services.
Increased complexity of the IT infrastructure: IT services are delivered by a complex mix of hardware, software, networks and people. It is essential that all these components are managed effectively and efficiently as poor performance of any one component can seriously affect the quality of the overall IT service.
Services and Service Management
ITIL is a service management framework, so let's talk about what services are. A service is what is perceived by the customer as a service. The important point here is that if you have defined your services without including your customers in the process you have no assurance you are providing what is really needed. It is important that the services are defined in conjunction with customers.
Service management is a total organizational approach that makes quality of service, as perceived by the customer, the number one driving force of the operation of the business. In the context of IT, service management is ensuring the provision of the highest quality of IT services required by the customer to accomplish business goals.
IT service management is driven by the following three objectives:
- To ensure that the organization's business needs are underpinned by high quality, cost effective, value-adding IT Services
- To improve the quality of IT service provision
- To reduce the long term cost of service provision
IT operations exist to develop, deliver, support and maintain services which support one or more business operations. They are not 'in business' for IT reasons alone. Wherever applicable these services should enhance as well as underpin business operations. Service management is also a philosophy or mindset that encompasses: enacting a service culture, recasting individuals, teams, and organizations as IT service providers, and enacting processes that underpin the creation and delivery of services that meet changing business needs and expectations, conceptualizing and running IT as a business, as opposed to an overhead function.
Service management is about managing the client service experience and infrastructure, where a service is set of related functions IT provides that are seen by the Customer as a coherent, self-contained entity, and infrastructure is everything that underpins service delivery, including people, processes, and technology. This means Service management requires a focus on the relationships with customers that include sometimes difficult conversations about what is needed to consistently deliver on service commitments
Summary
Service management is 'service-centric' as opposed to 'client-centric' or 'technology centric'. Being service-centric means systematically managing both client expectations and perceptions, and the technology infrastructure required to consistently deliver on those expectations. As the ITIL framework started taking shape, the overriding emphasis on service management became very evident. As we explore the different ITIL processes in upcoming sections, we will see how being 'service centric' manifests itself, and why it is so valuable.