201

TERM PAPER ON:-

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
SERVICE MANAGEMENT
THIS TERM PAPER INCLUDES THE BASIC OVERVIEW OF ITSM, ITS
IMPORTANCE AND VARIOUS COMPONENTS. A CASE STUDY HAS
BEEN PRESENTED IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE PRACTICAL
NATURE OF ITSM

Submitted To:-
Submitted By:-
MS TEENA BAGGA Pranav
Praveen-F-38

Eshan Bhateja-F-39

Ribhu Mahajan-C-44

10/20/2010
 Contents

Overview of ITSM
Various Elements Involved
ITSM Service Delivery:-
• Financial Management

• Service level Management

• Availability Management

• Capacity Management

• Continuity Management

Case study of successful implementation

Conclusion
Overview of ITSM

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a process-based practice intended to align the

delivery of information technology services with needs of the enterprise, emphasizing
benefits to customers. ITSM involves a paradigm shift from managing IT as stacks of
individual components to focusing on the delivery of end-to-end services
using process models. Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a globally
recognized collection of best practices for information technology (IT) service
management.

ITSM audits are based on analysis of four key performance indicators in specific
ways:

• Growth and value, which involves tracking revenue growth against investment
and utilization.
• Budget adherence, which involves optimizing the use of available funds and
avoiding unnecessary expenditures.
• Risk impact, which involves identifying and evaluating the consequences of
risks taken or avoided.
• Communication effectiveness, which involves examining customer feedback
and gauging customer satisfaction and awareness.

A thorough ITSM audit allows enterprise executives and management personnel to

determine the status of various processes and identify potential problem areas. In
order to function well, ITSM requires in-house expertise. One way to ensure this is to
have key individuals within the organization obtain ITIL Foundation certifications
regulated by the ITIL Certification Management Board (ICMB). Third-party auditing is
another option, although it carries some risk of product bias because outside
auditors may have vendor-specific knowledge or preferences.
ITSM is process-focused and in this sense has ties and common interests with
process improvement movement (e.g., TQM, Six Sigma, Business Process
Management, CMMI) frameworks and methodologies. The discipline is not
concerned with the details of how to use a particular vendor's product, or necessarily
with the technical details of the systems under management. Instead, it focuses
upon providing a framework to structure IT-related activities and the interactions of IT
technical personnel with business customers and users.

ITSM is generally concerned with the "back office" or operational concerns of

information technology management (sometimes known as operations architecture),
and not with technology development. For example, the process of writing computer
software for sale, or designing a microprocessor would not be the focus of the
discipline, but the computer systems used by marketing and business development
staff in software and hardware companies would be. Many non-technology
companies, such as those in the financial, retail, and travel industries, have
significant information technology systems which are not exposed to customers.

In this respect, ITSM can be seen as analogous to an enterprise resource

planning (ERP) discipline for IT - although its historical roots in IT operations may
limit its applicability across other major IT activities, such as IT portfolio
management and software engineering.
The following diagram provides an overview over the processes supported by ITSM.
Starting with incidents, change requests and project proposals, ITSM provides a continuous
process chain covering the planning, priorization, distribution, execution and rollout of
changes throughout the IT service organization

Service Management (ITSM) as the descriptive framework that would enable IT to

begin the transformation into an internal service provider.
A recent Gartner report examined long-term trends in IT. It concluded that over the
next five years IT would transform itself into a business focused, process-oriented
organization delivering the agility and innovation enterprises need to maintain
their competitive advantage in the marketplace. In effect, IT would be delivering
Business Technology solutions that would exploit technology in support of business
objectives.
When examined in detail, the Gartner report predicts that IT as we know it will evolve
into a Business Technology organization (BTO), integrating itself into the
enterprise or mission value chain. The enterprise’s focus will shift from Return-On-
Investment (ROI) on technology projects to total business value delivered to the
enterprise or mission. In turn, IT will shift its focus from the internal delivery of
technology to the brokering of services in a multi-source environment. To support
this transformation, Gartner is also predicting that the IT profession itself will split into
four domains; technology, information, process and relationships.
Whether IT evolves into a BTO or into an “internal outsourcer” is more a matter of
semantics than a critical differentiator. The fact of the matter is that the convergence
of several external forces are creating an environment that is forcing IT to change
the way it does business with its clients and the value it needs to deliver to the
enterprise going forward.
Charles Darwin astounded the world when he theorized, in his book “The Origins of
Species,” that species evolved over time in response to their environment through
the process of natural selection. Only those organisms that successfully adapt to the
environment survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. One could argue
the point that natural selection is at work in the business and information technology
worlds. History is littered with the bones of successful businesses that failed to adapt
to changing marketplaces. IT organizations have shared a similar fate. If IT is going
to survive and
pass on its genes,” it needs to adapt to this new ecological niche before the one it
currently occupies closes up.
Shaping the Future – The Business Technology Ecosystem
Before IT can adapt and transform itself to support this new business technology
ecosystem it must rationalize the predictions Gartner is forecasting with something
that is actionable.
In order to operate as a service provider, organizations must demonstrate three main
characteristics; an unambiguous understanding of their customer’s need, repeatable
processes to ensure consistency of execution, and the ability to innovate in a
structured manner. In effect this becomes the model for the delivery of business
aligned-processes and technology.
In order to achieve an unambiguous understanding of the customer’s needs, the
service provider must, in a structured repeatable manner, define and categorize the
enterprise process, technology and capability requirements. The next step is to
compare these requirements to the existing environment to understand what it will
take to achieve and manage the required capability. The provider must do this in the
context of governance based on enterprise goals and achievement measured
against expected outcomes.
Repeatable processes are required to ensure consistency of execution. This is
critical because day-to-day business processes rely so much on embedded
technology that failure to execute consistently directly impacts the enterprise’s ability
to deliver its product or service.
Finally, the service provider must develop a utility grade delivery platform and
process management model that is capable of supporting emerging hardware and
software architectures such as Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) and Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA). A service provider provides the portal through which the
enterprise receives its enabling business technology. The service provider brokers
those services
irrespective of their source, internal or external. Therefore, the provider can deliver
utility grade, enterprise-aligned services as needed, and manage technology
investments and innovation in a structured manner.
Underpinning all of this is the need for a model that helps identify what services need
to be sourced internally and what services can be sourced externally. This model will
provide the guidance the enterprise needs to classify the services and processes
that are critical to quality service delivery and differentiation in the marketplace (See
Figure 1). The internally sourced services are prime candidates for investment, as
they are critical to the success of the business. The business may source other
activities according to the capability of the enterprise using established sourcing
policies and guidelines (using Carnegie-Mellon’s eSCM – capability model).
Figure 1
 ITSM SERVICE DELIVERY

SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT:-

• Provides a way to align the IT services with the business requirements.

• Customers and IT personnel can discuss and asses how well a service is
being delivered.

• Primary Objective:

• Provide a way for setting clear expectations with both customers and user
groups

• The primary management of IT services

• Service Level Management is dependent upon all the other areas of service
delivery

• Business processes associated with SLM:

Reviewing existing services

Negotiating with the customers

Implementation of Service Improvement policies and processes

Planning for service growth

Involvement in accounting to asses costs of services

Financial Management:-

• Financial Management includes budgeting, accounting, and charging for IT

services being delivered to the customers.

• Budgeting and accounting involves understanding the costs of providing

various services

• Financial Management ensures that any IT service proposed is justified from

a budget point of view.

• Allows IT departments to function as a business unit.

• The discipline of ensuring the IT infrastructure is obtained at the most

effective price
• Not necessarily the cheapest!

• Calculating the costs of providing the service so the organization can justify
the costs of its IT services

• Costs can then be recovered from the customer of the service

• IT Costs can be divided into different units:

• Equipment

• Software

• Organization (staff, overtime, etc.)

• Transfer (costs of 3rd party service providers)

• Costs can also be divided into direct and indirect costs, and can be capital
costs or ongoing cost

Availability Management
• Main goal is to ensure the IT services are available to users when they need
them.

• Availability is usually calculated and reported as a percentage of the agreed

service hours for which the service was available

• Measuring availability:

• Agreement statistics – what is included within the agreed service

• Availability – agreed service times, response times

• Help Desk Calls – number of incidents raised, response times,

resolution times

• Capacity – performance timings for online transactions, report

production, numbers of users, etc.

Costing Details – charges for the service, and any penalties should service
levels not be me

• Calculating availability:
 – Serviceability – when a service is provided by a 3rd party, this is the
expected availability of those components

– Reliability – how long a component can be expected to perform under

certain conditions without failing

– Recoverability – how long it should take to restore a component back

to its normal state after a failure

– Maintainability – how easy a component can be maintained, which can

be both corrective or preventative

– Resilience – the ability to withstand failure

– Security – the ability of components to withstand breaches of security

CAPACITY MANAGEMENT

• Includes planning, sizing, and controlling service solution capacity to satisfy

user demands.

This requires a collection of information about usage scenarios and patterns

as well as stated performance requirements

• Inputs:

– Performance monitoring

– Workload monitoring

– Application sizing

– Resource forecasting

– Demand forecasting

– Modeling

IT SERVICE CONTINUITY MANAGEMENT

• Also known as contingency management

– Focuses on minimizing the disruptions to businesses caused by failure

of “mission-critical” systems

– Deals with planning to cope with and recover from an IT disaster

 – Provides guidance on safeguarding existing systems

– Also considers what activities need to be taken in the event certain

services are not available

• Basic steps:

– Prioritizing the businesses to be recovered by conducting a Business

Impact Analysis (BIA)

– Performing a Risk Assessment (Risk Analysis) for each of the IT

Services to identify the assets, threats, vulnerabilities and
countermeasures for each service.

– Evaluating the options for recovery

– Producing the Contingency/Recovery Plan

– Testing, reviewing, and revising the plan on a regular basis

• Continuity management and disaster recovery are important, yet often

overlooked, part of IT security and risk analysis

• Inadequate contingency planning is looked at as a risk to the business, and is

often overlooked until it is too late.

– When a security or other breach results in the loss of supporting IT

systems or valuable information
 A Case Study on a Successful ITSM
Intervention

This case study will showcase how an ‘ITSM’ intervention that Senthil Kumar carried
out for a leading multi-national company resulted in an average

Objective:
During Senthil’s international tenure as an ITSM Consultant with a Global Fortune
500 organization, a reputed international client requested for consultation to improve
its Service Desk quality.

Client Background:
This client is a mining and building construction materials group. The annual revenue
of this company is about $10 billion
.
Challenges Faced:
The client claimed that despite all their efforts, an average of 46% of the total internal
customer calls in a month was getting dropped or unattended to. Before consultation
with Senthil, the procedure for Service Desk enquiry was such that when an internal
customer called the front line helpdesk, the front line employees would take the call
and try to resolve the query and close the case, provided the query was within their
scope. On the other hand, for complicated queries, front line employees from the
Service Desk would note customer details and then log the call to the concerned
technician who was in-charge of that particular IT PLATFORM. This takes
considerable amount of time and slows down the front line employees’ ability to
handle the call volume.

Due to this procedure, all calling customers calling at a time when a technician was
handling a complicated query would be made to wait in queue. This led to a lot of
disgruntlement and dissatisfaction amongst customers. Hence call quality and
service delivery levels were well below optimal levels.
They had also outlined that the employees needed to have a professional approach
to customer service, problem solving and call handling as part of the IT Helpdesk
operations. This included a change in the mindset toward a ‘culture of customer
service’, and also taking ownership.

Solution:

After consultation with the various managers and employees, Senthil and his team of
consultants suggested that the client should perform a procedural change with
respect to call handling in order to reduce waiting time.

It was suggested that when the internal customers get on line with IT Service Desk
for sorting out a query, they would have to choose from a range of options that cater
to their IT platform. When this number is pressed on their handset that corresponds
to a particular IT platform, the call would directly get routed to the technician in-
charge of the same. In this way, the waiting time was reduced. If more than one
customer calls at the same time requiring support for a particular IT platform
resulting in the technician being busy, the call would get routed to the front line
Service Desk employees. They would then try to solve the customer’s query. If the
query was beyond their scope of work, they would log the call to the concerned
technician.

Results:

In this way, calls were being effectively routed; this resulted in increasing the
response rate of customer calls by over 90%. This, in turn, increased the call quality
and effectiveness of IT support rendered. It also reduced the burden of call logging.
Senthil’s consultation with this organization also helped to enhance the customer
service mindsets in the employees bring about a change in employee mindsets
towards developing a sense of teamwork and a ‘Culture of Customer Service’. They
also understood the need to take ownership for all queries that came their way.
Conclusion:
The client organization was delighted with the results.
Senthil has handled many more cases from diverse organizations during his 9 year
spell with leading multi national companies. Through his experience, he has the
knowledge and competency that is aiding him to successfully spearhead training of
IT Service Management at MMM Training Solutions.

In the End:-

Although managing the technology itself is a necessary component of

most ITSM solutions, it is not a primary focus. Instead ITSM addresses the
need to align the delivery of IT services closely with the needs of the
business. This transformation of a traditional "business - IT paradigm" can
be depicted by some of the following attributes:

Traditional I/T becomes ITSM Process

Technology focus  Process focus
"Fire-fighting"  Preventative
Reactive  Proactive
Users  Customers
Centralized, done in-house  Distributed, sourced
Isolated, silos  Integrated, enterprise-wide
"One off", adhoc  Repeatable, accountable
Informal processes  Formal best practices
IT internal perspective  Business perspective
Operational specific  Service orientation
The ITSM module combines and integrates all important processes
necessary to run IT operations