IT Service Management

Support for your ITSM Foundation exam

John Sansbury, Ernest Brewster, Aidan Lawes, Richard Griffiths

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780173207
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: System Administration
• Index: Computer Science

Whether you're preparing for your service management foundation exam, or simply want to understand service management better, this new edition of our popular book covers the latest thinking and provides a comprehensive, practical introduction to IT service management.Building on their collective service management experience, the authors walk you through essential concepts including processes, functions and roles and illustrate these with real-life examples.

SECTION 1:
OVERVIEW

1 WHAT IS SERVICE MANAGEMENT?

INTRODUCTION

In order to understand what service management is and why it is so important to enterprises, we need to understand what services are and how service management can help service providers to deliver and manage these services.

A service is defined as follows:

SERVICE

A service is essentially a means of delivering value to customers. This is done by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

The outcomes that customers want to achieve are the reason why they purchase or use a service. Typically this will be expressed as a specific business objective (e.g. to enable customers of a bank to perform all transactions and account management activities online or to deliver state services to citizens in a cost-effective manner). The value of the service to the customer is directly dependent on how well a service facilitates these outcomes.

Although the enterprise retains responsibility for managing the overall costs of the business, they often wish to devolve responsibility for owning and managing defined aspects to an internal or external entity that has acknowledged expertise in the area.

This is a generic concept that applies to the purchase of any service. Consider financial planning. As a customer, we recognise that we don’t have the expertise, or the time, or the inclination to handle all the day-to-day decision-making and management of individual investments that are required. Therefore, we engage the services of a professional manager to provide us a service. As long as their performance delivers a value (increasing wealth) at a price that we believe is reasonable, we are happy to let them invest in all the necessary systems and processes that are needed for the wealth creation activities.

In the past, service providers often focused on the technical (supply side) view of what constituted a service, rather than on the consumption side. Hence it was not unusual for the service provider and the consumer to have different definitions and perceptions of what services were provided, or for the provider to know all about the cost of individual components, but not the total cost of a service that the consumer understood.

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.

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.

Although there is no single definition of a profession, it is widely accepted that the word profession applies where a group of people share common standards and disciplines based on a high level of knowledge and skills, which are gained from organised education schemes supported by training through experience and are measured and recognised through formal qualifications. Moreover, a profession seeks to use its influence through the development of good practice guidance and advice in order to improve the standard of performance in its given field.

Service management has a clear right to regard itself as a profession, and the exercise of service management disciplines as professional practice is performed and supported by a global community drawn from all market sectors. There is a rich body of knowledge and experience including formal schemes for the education of individuals.

‘BEST PRACTICE’ VERSUS ‘GOOD PRACTICE’

Enterprises operating in dynamic environments need to improve their performance and maintain competitive advantage. Adopting practices in industry-wide use can help to improve capability.

The term ‘best practice’ generally refers to the ‘best possible way of doing something’. As a concept, it was first raised as long ago as 1919, but it was popularised in the 1980s through Tom Peters’ books on business management.

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. More recently, the ITIL framework has offered a supplementary list as illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Sources of good practice

These sources have different characteristics:

• Public frameworks and standards have been validated across diverse environments.
• Knowledge of them is widely distributed among industry professionals.
• Training and certification programmes are publicly available.
• The acquisition of knowledge through the labour market is more readily achievable.

The proprietary knowledge of enterprises and individuals is usually customised for the local context and specific business needs of an organisation. It may only be available to a wider market under commercial terms and may be poorly documented and hard to extract. If embedded within individuals it may not be documented at all.

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 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Axelos, 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.
• Web Support Services: Interactive web-based facilities that include a self-assessment process maturity model (co-built by one of this book’s authors).

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 framework shouldn’t be bureaucratic or unwieldy provided it is used sensibly and in full recognition of the business needs of the specific enterprise.

ITIL-based solutions have been deployed successfully around the world for nearly 3...