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IT Service Management

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	IT Service Management			IT Infrastructure Library	IT Asset Management
Information Technology Service Management:
What are the core components of good IT Service Management - Enterprise IT service management (ITSM) has never been so time critical, so business-centric, and so financially focused.
Increasing Service Management Productivity - Service management is no longer just about reducing call volume. ITSM now answers to a higher standard - and demands higher productivity. Technicians must stay ahead of recurring incidents. Managers need real time process monitoring. Executives need business intelligence to implement business-aligned services.
Service Improvements that Affect Business Performance - Managing service levels requires visibility into a vast array of assets, configuration items, and service level standards. The components must not only work, but they must work together--perfectly, 24x7. Specific business functions no longer tolerate a single point of failure or system-wide outages.
Managing Risk Helps Reduces Cost - Unplanned outages are costly; the full effect can take days to recognise and longer to fix. That’s why preventing the unexpected should be at the core of any Service Desk solution. Problem and Change Management enable you to plan, track, and monitor system-wide activities. Being proactive pays big dividends in risk management: less cost, less worry, and satisfied technology customers.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership - Whether your service organisation operates as a central site, an outsourced concern, or a global ITSM operation, critical is ensuring a lower total cost of ownership of your ITSM solution.
An outline of the Key Modules of IT Service Management						Back to top
Configuration Management - Inventory and configuration management (ICM), a core component of CMDB, establishes a repository of assets that enable complex technical and business view configurations. ICM enables technicians working on any type of service request or issue to determine the business function affected by the configuration item. Service Management - Service Management tracks and documents all calls while including resolution and request activity. Single and multiple calls can be associated with an incident. Service management calls also can be closed by Incident Management, enabling the IT organisation to resolve multiple associated calls. Incident Management - Incident Management is important for documenting incidents from end users, service technicians, and Network Systems Management (NSM) applications. It provides powerful incident escalation, assignment, and integrated knowledge management so that incidents can be resolved quickly or assigned and managed based on business rules. Change Management - Change Management enables ITSM to quickly design change templates that automate change request and approval processes. This results in proactive service and a reduction in unplanned outages. Change Management can be invoked from the Problem Management application to provide best service practices for identifying and fixing the root cause of problems. Of course all types of 'changes' are able to be managed by this module. (Moves, Add, Changes, Deletions) Problem Management - Problem Management helps resolve incidents by root-cause analysis and creates a change request to correct the root cause. Tickets can be closed when a workaround is determined, at the same time creating problem requests to ensure that each incident and it’s cause are permanently resolved. Service Level Management - Service Level Management enables organisations to create service level agreements based on specific business requirements. It ensures that critical business functions are managed in prioritised order. It also manages service response time and service by third-party vendors. Additional modules; Request Management - Request Management has the ability to publish a catalogue of standard goods and services. Business users can easily request services such as new employee setups and terminations or simple requests for new assets. This helps the service organisation to enforce standards while promoting its portfolio of services. Asset Contract Management - Asset Contract Management helps the service delivery organisation to manage leases, maintenance agreements, warranties, and software licenses. It also ensures that software licenses are within compliance before deploying new users and reconciles the expected use of software licenses through tracking against actual deployment.
		So where from here?				Back to top
		ITSM solutions should be built on IT industry standards and best practices (such as ITIL), however key to implementation of an optimised and effective ITSM solution is starting with the right processes. Processes should be based on the key business drivers for Service Management within the organisation. Ultimately this will help technicians work smarter, managers plan better, and executives optimise the business value of IT. The result: reduced costs, less risk, and a dramatic improvement in services – all delivered with lower total cost of ownership.
Whether your service desk is newly established or if you’re already driving service level agreements (SLAs) and business alignment strategies, an optimised Service Management system will defitely help reduce the costs of running and managing IT.
Call us now to arrange for an independent 'RISK' assessment of your Service Management capability.

Process in IT Service Management - ITIL
		Developed in the 1980’s for the British government, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become a de facto standard for service management. ITIL is publicly available, and the framework may be used by any organisation seeking to standardise and improve IT processes. The ITIL framework provides practitioners with a set of guidelines for service management processes including goals, general activities, inputs and outputs. These guidelines recognise that the implementation of the framework will vary according to the needs of the organisation or ITSM user. According to the OGC book Best Practice for Service Support:
ITIL does not cast in stone every action you should do on a day-to-day basis because that is something which will differ from organisation to organisation. Instead ITIL focuses on best practice that can be utilised in different ways according to actual need.
Given that ITIL lays out a common approach to IT best practices, organisations that are making the decision to implement the framework must determine the approach and process details that are appropriate to their business. One of the greatest strengths of ITIL is in the relationships described between processes. ITIL provides process integration that can be used to break down operational silos and fosters cooperation between IT functions. The interdependencies of information and workflow for the Service Support processes are a significant component of ITIL.
These processes include:			The integration of these operational activities drives the business planning processes defined within the Service Delivery set:
Service Desk Incident Management Problem Management Configuration Management Change Management and Release Management			Capacity Management Financial Management for IT Services Availability Management Service Level Management IT Service Continuity Management and Customer Relationship Management
Although set out as two sets, the processes interact strongly, both across the areas, as well as within each set of processes. For example configuration management data supports availability, continuity, finance, and capacity; availability interfaces strongly with both incident and problem management. In summary, ITIL provides guidelines for IT process best practices that can be tailored to meet the unique needs of IT organisations (ITO) both large and small. IT practitioners tasked with improving organisational efficiency, cost controls, and communication will benefit from an understanding of ITIL and from implementing the framework in a manner that will meet their business requirements. For ITOs formalising their processes, ITIL helps relieve current business pains and creates a roadmap for future opportunities that will further improve operations. For large distributed organisations, ITIL provides a foundation for common terminology and metrics across multiple regions and operational centres. Lastly, ITIL is increasingly becoming the foundation for official standards, including the British Standards for Service Management (BS15000).
Business Benefits of ITIL - In addition to the process benefits associated with ITIL, the framework does establish the foundation for a business approach to service delivery, an increasingly important topic in the field and the focus of many IT initiatives such as “on demand” and “business service management.” IT organisations are facing increasing pressure to behave like outsource service providers. IT Organisations effectively have to “bid” for their client, providing services, costs and measurements similar to external service providers. By standardising service delivery processes across the organisation ITIL provides a framework within which to initiate a comparison and measurement process.

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