SECTION
2: THE SERVICE LIFECYCLE
SERVICE
STRATEGY
The objective of service strategy is to offer better
services than the competition. You need to beat the opposition to survive.
GOVERNANCE
The concept of
governance is central to the sound operation and management of all healthy
organisations. It covers the various policies, processes and structures
established by senior management to ensure the smooth running and effective
control of the organisation. The guidance provided through the ITIL disciplines
offers a sound foundation for the development of effective governance, which is
as important to the IT provider as to any other organisation
RISK
Risk is defined as a possible event that could cause harm or
loss, or affect the ability to achieve objectives. Risk can also be defined as
the uncertainty of outcome.
KEY PROCESSES The key processes in service strategy
are:
• business relationship management
• Financial
management for IT services
• service portfolio management
IT SERVICE PROVIDER TYPES
• Type I – Internal service provider: This is the in-house
IT unit typically positioned within the business units they serve, although it
is common for these smaller scale IT units to be consolidated into a corporate
IT department that has to balance the interests, demands and priorities of the
corporate organisation against those of individual business units.
• Type II – Shared services unit: This is where a range of
functions, regarded as non-core to the business, are grouped together into a
corporate shared service unit. The functions involved are typically IT, Finance
and HR, sometimes with legal service, logistics and facilities management.
• Type III – External
service provider: This is a separate commercial entity from the businesses it
services, and operates as a competitive business in the marketplace.
THE FOUR Ps OF STRATEGY Having considered the IT
service provider’s strategic approach to the marketplace, the next part of the
strategic equation is the IT service provider’s approach to service strategy.
This may be analysed in terms of the four Ps:
• Strategy as a Perspective: This relates to vision,
direction and the IT service provider’s philosophy for doing business with its
customers.
• Strategy as a Position: This describes strategy in terms
of the IT service provider’s general approach to its service offerings (e.g.
high value or low cost, emphasis on utility or warranty).
• Strategy as a Plan: This describes strategy as a plan
showing how the IT service provider will move from where it is today to where
it wants to be.
• Strategy as a Pattern: This describes strategy as a
consistent way of making decisions.
STRATEGIC ASSET Strategic assets are assets that
provide the basis for core competence, distinctive performance, durable
advantage, and qualifications to participate in business opportunities. IT
organisations can use the guidance provided by ITIL to transform their service
management capabilities into strategic assets.
DEVELOPING STRATEGY FOR SPECIFIC SERVICES In terms of
the development of a strategy for a specific service offering, the key elements
are concerned with a series of activities that involve:
• understanding the customer and the ways IT can deliver
value to them;
• understanding the outcomes the customer wants from the
service and how the service will deliver benefit; • defining critical success
factors for the service;
• developing a specification based on the outcomes required
by the customer, including the utility and warranty required;
• developing through demand management an understanding of
the customer’s priorities in relation to patterns of business activity (PBAs).
SERVICE PACKAGE A service package is two or more
services that have been combined to offer a solution to a specific type of
customer need or to underpin specific business outcomes. A service package can
consist of a combination of core services, enabling services and enhancing
services. A service package provides a specific level of utility and warranty.
SERVICE OPTION A service option is a choice of
utility and warranty offered to customers by a core service or service package.
Service options are sometimes referred to as service level packages.
AUTOMATING SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES
Automating business processes delivers higher utility and
warranty thereby generating better performance and value from service and
customer assets.
• Monitoring and measuring to an extent not possible by
other means, handling high levels of complexity and volume irrespective of time
or location.
• Generating automated alerts helps us respond more rapidly
to events, helping us maintain service availability.
• Discovery tools enable us to maintain an up-to-date
configuration management system and identify and deal with a range of control
related problems.
• Sophisticated modelling and simulation helps us design
infrastructure and applications, and model complex options for service
delivery.
• Artificial
intelligence is able to offer a range of capabilities from root cause analysis,
through sophisticated alarm and control systems, to complex scheduling and
resource management.
• Workflow management systems improve customer service and
efficiency across a range of processes.
SERVICE
DESIGN
THE FIVE MAJOR ASPECTS OF SERVICE DESIGN ITIL
formally recognises five separate aspects of service design that together
describe the scope of this part of the service lifecycle:
• The introduction of new or changed services through the
accurate identification of business requirements and the agreed definition of
service requirements.
• The service management systems and tools such as the
service portfolio, ensuring mutual consistency with other services and
appropriate tools support.
• The capability of technology architectures and management
systems to operate and maintain new services. 33 IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT
• The capability of all processes, not just those in service
design, to operate and maintain new and changed services.
• Designing in the appropriate measurement methods and
metrics necessary for performance analysis of services, improved
decision-making and continual improvement.
SERVICE DESIGN PACKAGE (Service design) document(s)
defining all aspects of an IT service and their requirements through each stage
of its lifecycle. A service design package is produced for each new IT service,
major change or IT service retirement. 34 SERVICE DESIGN The key contents of
the service design package include:
• the service definition, agreed business requirements and
how and where the service will be used;
• the service design including the architectural design,
functional requirements, SLRs/ SLAs (if available), service and operational
management requirements including metrics and key performance indicators,
supporting services and agreements;
• a service model showing the overall structure and dynamics
of the service, showing how customer and service assets, service management
functions and processes come together to deliver value;
• an assessment of organisational readiness and its
implications; • a plan covering all stages of the service lifecycle;
• plans for service transition (covering build and assembly,
test, release and deployment) and for operational service acceptance;
• acceptance criteria and the strategy and plan for user
acceptance testing
SERVICE
TRANSITION
The objectives are to:
• plan and manage the resources to introduce and activate a
new or changed service to the live environment within the predicted cost,
quality and time estimates;
• minimise any unpredicted impact on the production
services, operations and support organisation;
• increase customer, user and service management staff
satisfaction with the deployment of new or changed services, including
communications, release documentation, training and knowledge transfer;
• increase correct use of the services and any underlying
applications and technology solutions;
• provide clear and comprehensive plans that enable
alignment between the business and service transition.
PROCESS OBJECTIVES AND VALUE Section 3 contains
details on five of the processes in this phase. The remaining two processes and
the activity ‘managing organisational and stakeholder change’ are described
briefly below. Service validation and testing The objective of service
validation and testing is to ensure that a new or changed service and its
associated release process will meet the needs of the business at the agreed
cost.
Change evaluation Evaluation is a generic process that
considers whether the performance of something is acceptable, value for money,
fit for purpose and whether implementation can proceed based on defined and
agreed criteria. The objectives of change evaluation are:
• to evaluate the intended effects of a change and as much
of the unintended effects as reasonably practical given capacity, resource and
organisational constraints;
• to provide good quality outputs from the evaluation
process so that change management can expedite an effective decision about
whether a change is to be approved or not;
• to set stakeholder expectations correctly.
SERVICE
OPERATION
The functions of service operation are:
• The service desk: This conducts a number of processes, in
particular incident management and request fulfilment. The service desk is made
up of a group of staff trained to deal with service events. Service desk staff
will have access to the necessary tools to manage these events. The service
desk ought to be the single point of contact for IT users within an
organisation.
• Technical management: This is the function that provides
the resources and ensures that knowledge of relevant technologies is kept up to
date. Technical management covers all the teams or areas that support the
delivery of technical knowledge and expertise. This includes teams such as
networks, mainframe, middleware, desktop, server and database.
• Application management: This will manage applications
through the totality of their lifecycle. This starts with the first business
‘idea’ and completes when the application is taken out of service. Application
management is involved in the design, testing and continual improvement of
applications and the services that the applications support.
• IT operations management: This is responsible for
operating the organisation’s IT infrastructure and applications on a day-to-day
basis.
CONTINUAL
SERVICE IMPROVEMENT
Value to business CSI recognises that the value IT provides
to the business can be realised and measured in different ways:
• Improvements:
Outcomes that are better when compared with the previous state.
• Benefits: The gains achieved through the implemented
improvements.
• Return on investment (ROI): The difference between the
realised benefit and the cost of achieving it.
• Value on investment (VOI): The extra value created by the
improvement including non-monetary benefits and outcomes.
Implementing CSI means committing to continued investment in
order to create and maintain service improvement plans (SIPs). The expected
value from an investment is a critical component of any business case, and CSI
stresses the need for periodic re-evaluation following the implementation of
improvements by:
• checking that benefits/ROI/VOI are realised by specific
improvements;
• identifying the best investments by estimating benefits
from different initiatives;
• assessing the impact or current benefit of any proposed
change of organisation structure or business strategy, or of regulatory or
legislative change.
