IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT
A Guide for ITIL®
Foundation Exam Candidates Second Edition
1 WHAT IS SERVICE MANAGEMENT?
A service is a means of
delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to
achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. A service is a means
of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want
to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
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.
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 The Cabinet Office, with the
cooperation of the independent user group itSMF (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.
Service model A service model describes how a service
provider creates value for a given portfolio of customer contracts by
connecting the demand for service from the assets of its customers with the
service provider’s service assets. It describes both the structure and the
dynamics of the service:
• Structure: The
particular service assets needed to deliver the service and the patterns in
which they are configured.
• Dynamics: The activities, flow of resources, coordination,
and interactions between customer and service provider assets (e.g. interaction
between service users and service agents). Service dynamics include patterns of
business activity (PBAs), demand patterns, exceptions and variations.
Functions, processes
and roles The terms function, process and role are often confused. This is
not surprising since they are so intertwined. In addition, the way the words
are used in ITIL is precise, and may be confused with the way these words are
used in a more general context.
2 SERVICE STRATEGY
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. The international
standard for IT governance, ISO/IEC 38500:2008, ‘provides a framework for
effective governance of IT to assist those at the highest level of
organisations to understand and fulfil their legal, regulatory and ethical
obligations in respect of their organisations’ use of IT’.
3 SERVICE DESIGN
Once an organisation has determined the IT strategy it
wishes to pursue, it uses the service design phase of the lifecycle to create
new services which service transition then introduces into the live
environment. In so doing, service design aims to take the necessary steps to
ensure that the new service will perform as planned and deliver the
functionality and benefits intended by the business. This principle is at the
heart of the ITIL approach and is why the majority of the service design processes
are focused on operational control:
• Service catalogue
management;
• Service level
management;
• Capacity management;
• Design coordination; • Availability management; • IT
service continuity management; • Information security management; • Supplier
management.
4 SERVICE TRANSITION
There has frequently been a disconnection between the
development and operations departments within IT, which has consequently led to
many failed implementations of new or changed services. Service transition is concerned
with bridging that gap smoothly, ensuring that operational requirements are
fully considered and catered for before anything is moved into the live
environment, including documentation and training for users and support staff.
Service transition is also responsible for the decommissioning and removal of
services that are no longer required.
The purpose of service transition is to:
• set customer expectations on how the new or changed
service will enable business change;
• enable the customer
to integrate a release seamlessly into their business processes and services;
36 SERVICE TRANSITION
• reduce variations in the predicted and actual performance
of the services once they are introduced;
• reduce known errors
and minimise the risks from change;
• ensure that the
service can be used in the manner in which it is required.
5 SERVICE OPERATION
Service operation is the phase of the IT service management
lifecycle that is responsible for ‘business as usual’ activities. If services
are not utilised or are not delivered efficiently and effectively, they will
not deliver their full value, irrespective of how well designed they may be. It
is service operation that is responsible for utilising the processes to deliver
services to users and customers. Service operation is where the value that has
been modelled in service strategy and confirmed through service design and
service transition is actually delivered. Without service operation running the
services as designed and utilising the processes as designed, there would be no
control and management of the services. Production of meaningful metrics by
service operation will form the basis and starting point for service
improvement activity.
The processes performed by service operations are:
• Event management: This is the process responsible for the
monitoring of all events throughout the IT infrastructure and applications to
ensure normal operation. Event management is there to detect, escalate and
react to exceptions.
• Incident
management: This is the process for dealing with all incidents. These may be
incidents where service is being disrupted or where service has not yet been
disrupted.
• Request fulfilment: This is the process that carries out
service requests from users. Request fulfilment covers standard change
requests, requests for information and complaints. From a service desk
perspective, the process of SERVICE OPERATION request fulfilment tends to cover
all the calls that are neither incidents nor relate to problems.
6 CONTINUAL SERVICE IMPROVEMENT
CSI has the following objectives:
• To review, analyse
and make recommendations on where improvements could be made at any point
throughout the lifecycle.
• To review and
analyse service level achievements against targets.
• To identify and
implement individual activities to improve service quality and the efficiency
and effectiveness of service management processes.
• To improve the
cost-effectiveness of delivering IT services without impacting customer
satisfaction.
• To apply quality management methods to support continual
improvement activities.
SECTION 3: THE PROCESSES AND
FUNCTIONS
7 BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
(SS 4.5)
In its broadest sense the relationship between customer and
IT service provider encompasses the full spectrum of business interactions
between them, from operational matters concerned with service delivery and
operational performance, through tactical issues, such as developing
requirements or perhaps a business case for new or changed services, to the
development of longer term strategy. Chapter 13 of this book describes how service
level management (SLM) provides a platform for managing the relationship
relative to operational and lower level tactical issues. This chapter describes
how business relationship management (BRM) is used to align the activities of
the service provider with the needs of its customer by developing,
strengthening and maintaining the relationship for strategic and higher level
tactical issues, and how BRM relates to other ITIL processes.
8 FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT FOR IT
SERVICES (SS 4.3)
The purpose of financial management is to ensure that: •
money is managed and spent wisely; • the financial resources available align
fully with the organisation’s plans and requirements for IT service delivery; •
investment decisions are sound and relevant to the organisation’s objectives; •
financial risks are identified and managed effectively; • governance
arrangements are in place to ensure the effective stewardship of financial
resources and to define clear accountabilities; • the organisation complies
with all relevant financial regulatory obligations and the overall financial
policy and strategy of the business.
9 DEMAND MANAGEMENT (SS 4.4)
The process of demand management is necessary for two main
reasons: • The arrival rate of work, such as transactions sent to a server,
print jobs sent to a printer or calls to a service desk, is not steady. In
other words, there are peaks and troughs over the hour and day, as well as
seasonal increases or decreases in demand. There is rarely sufficient
flexibility in IT resources to provide just enough capacity to meet the demand
at each and every point in time. • Fluctuations in demand and the challenge of
providing just the right amount of capacity are sources of risk that the
service provider should minimise. The decision on how much risk is acceptable
is taken by the business, which may accept a level of spare capacity (and
therefore extra cost) to reduce the risk.
