IT Service Management : WHAT IS SERVICE MANAGEMENT?

• WHAT IS 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.

• ‘BEST PRACTICE’ VERSUS ‘GOOD PRACTICE’

The term ‘best practice’ generally refers to the ‘best possible way of doing something’. 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 as illustrated in Figure 1.1.

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 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.

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 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.

• COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Complementary material may take the form of books or web-based material and may be sourced from the wider industry, rather than from The Cabinet Office/The Stationery Office (TSO). Examples of such material are glossary of terms, process models, process templates, role descriptions, case studies, targeted overviews and study aids for passing examinations. These will typically be officially commissioned and published by TSO.

• 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.

• THE ITIL SERVICE MANAGEMENT MODEL

The design definition is passed to the service transition stage, where the service is built, evaluated, tested and 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.

• 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.

Service assets

Service providers create value through using their assets in the form of resources and capabilities.

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.

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.

Process characteristics

A process transforms a prescribed set of data, information and knowledge into a desired outcome, using feedback as a learning mechanism for process improvement.

Role

A set of responsibilities, activities and authorities granted to a person or team.

Daftar Pustaka : IT_Service_Management_2nd_Edition.pdf