Infrastructure management is undergoing a transformation. ITIL can help manage conflicting demands like – “low cost but high service quality”, “ubiquitous access but enhanced security”?

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January 30, 2008

Building a Service Centric CMDB

Traditionally, IT organizations have seen CMDB as a mechanism to gain better handle on where their individual technology components are, who maintains them and track basic information about their current state. What is that you are looking from CMDB?

CMDB can play a greater role in achieving service excellence. Until an IT organization understands what a service is and manages the service as such, rather than at an asset level, the benefits of a CMDB cannot be reaped. Are you defining your Service CIs before discovering what the actual services are?

Service catalog is the presentation layer of services. It contains the configuration “recipe” of a service with its associated cost and attributes. The core to service catalog is the description of resources “to-be-provided”. CMDB provides the resources “as-it-is”, where the actual service components or service assets get stored as CIs. CMDB also feedback information on performance, utilization and demand related data of the service CIs. Let us consider “Email account creation” as a service. The service catalog contains the name, description, timeliness for the service completion and cost information for this service. On fulfilling the email account creation service, a new service CI called email account (virtual in this case) will be created. This service CI needs to be mapped to a set of existing asset CIs like the Server, Storage group etc. As the service CI is linked to asset CIs and the CMDB keep track of the state of all asset CIs, usage statistics and performance related data for the service CI can be measured at any time based on the behavior of asset CIs.

Does your Service catalog and CMDB talk to each other?

As CMDB projects are more IT focused and encompasses the language of IT, there is always a challenge to convince the business with its benefits. Building up Service definition from CIs and technology assets will take the same IT centric approach which organizations are trying to get rid off.

Benefits of the service catalog are realized much earlier in the adoption cycle. By defining a service catalog upfront and focusing initially on high critical services, quick wins can be realized with less effort and time. There is a strong case that the CMDB data model should be drawn out from service catalog. Based on the services identified in the catalog, CIs involved in the actual delivery can be mapped. This will help organizations understand how CIs play a vital role in driving business functions, there by enabling business service management.

Once the Service is operational (cataloged), the CMDB shows the resources “as-they-are” or “resources being used and consumed”. Meanwhile the service catalog may take the role of managing the service agreement, providing operational data relevant for SLM (Service Level Management) and service costing. Does your CMDB feedback service CI performance data to other service management processes?

In short, the real benefit of CMDB is achieved by making it Service centric. Enabling a service centric CMDB by partnering with the Service catalog will accelerate CMDB implementation and improve the overall effectiveness and value delivered by CMDB. Are you running Service catalog and CMDB initiatives in isolation? It is time to re-think!

 

 

Posted by Renjith Sreekumar at 11:33 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

January 10, 2008

Service Governance - a vital step?

Here are 3 questions to kick off 2008 and your organizations' IT Service Management strategy

How old is your enterprise / IT governance model?

Is it relevant to Services and scalable to a wider audience?

What is its measure of performance?

With ITIL V3 being all the buzz and Service Strategy being a core element of this framework, a scalable, stable and performing Governance model to govern services cannot be too far.

You may wonder why one would ever need Governance and anyways what does this really mean?

Think IT Service Catalogs. Think how the services within the IT Service Catalog will be governed.
 
Think about how the Catalog itself will be managed. Service Governance is a key aspect to enable successful IT Service Catalog governance.

Most Fortune organizations have grown profitably over the last few years, however IT Services are pretty much in either a "project mode" or a "support- solve it" or "douse the fire" mode.

Is it time to take a step back and think about governance and its "connections" to the business?

Let’s look at an example. Earlier there was this article about Defining the Service Owner's role. Do you have this issue of the "invisible" Service Owner? With good Service Governance, comes a good understanding of key roles- the Service Owner's role being in that category.
 
So the next time you walk into a situation where there is no Service Owner defined, it is quite likely that you will find the absence of formal Service Governance mechanisms.
 
That is just the tip of the iceberg. Service Governance can enable a number of other functionalities
1) Facilitate inter service dialogue
2) Enable/ Create/ help design a cohesive Service Strategy
3) Drive new services /Phase out obsolete ones
4) Plan, monitor and track the overall IT Services strategy
 
It is about putting in a formal structure around your IT Services so that stakeholders can understand how Services are going to evolve and who has a stake in the setup.
 
A good governance model will take into account important stakeholders across IT infrastructure, applications and business.
 
Ultimately we have to address the critical people factor and Service Governance is that vital first step!

Posted by Ramshankar Ramdattan at 01:03 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 07, 2008

5 Reasons why you should go for ITIL v3?

If I were the CIO of any organization carrying the responsibility of putting  IT in order, would I take resort to the highly proclaimed best practice framework – ITIL version 3? I do not know. Having studied the ITIL version 3 books more than a couple of times, the one reason why I would think twice before taking the decision is – the practices within five ITIL version 3 books seem exhaustive and too voluminous to comprehend easily! However, a deeper reflection on ITIL version 3 principles, processes, concepts and techniques provide interesting insights in to its value addition.

Considering an IT setup of average maturity, with ambitions to adopt ITIL best practices, one would want to know the specific value addition that the ITIL v3 provides.

In my opinion, there are primary five reasons why an organization should go for ITIL v3: 

1.       Better Transition Planning & Support

Managing transition of application / infrastructure changes from development to support teams has always been a challenge for most organizations. The “Transition Planning & Support” process in the Service Transition lifecycle stage of ITIL v3 provides guidance to plan and manage this transition.

2.       Focus on Monitoring

Operations monitoring is a core area for IT infrastructure management. ITIL V2 or any other framework did not provide much guidance in this area. ITIL v3 has brought a good focus on this topic by providing best practices for –

a) Event Management, a separate process (it was earlier clubbed within Incident Management)      b) Four different functions in operations area – IT Operations Management, Technical Management, Network Management and Directory Services Management

3.       Concrete steps for Continual Improvement

Although Service Improvement was talked about in ITIL v2, there was no specific guidance on structured improvement. By having a whole lifecycle stage on Continual Service Improvement, organizations adopting ITIL V3 will find useful processes and step by step approach for continual improvement.

4.       Increased Service Orientation

The service lifecycle stages in ITIL V3 assist in providing a service oriented structure to manage IT Services. IT Service packages pass through stages of Strategy, Design, Transition and Operations to provide better quality and customer focused deliverables.  

5.       Practices enabling stronger coupling between IT and Business

While IT leadership understands the need for increased alignment between IT and Business, there is very less guidance on how to achieve this. New concepts and techniques introduced in ITIL v3 provide good practices enabling increased coupling between the two. Examples of such practices are – Patterns of Business Activity (PBA), Service Portfolio, 4 P’s of Service Strategy, Market Spaces, Core Service Packages, Service Level Packages and many more.

These are not the only benefits or reasons to turn to ITIL v3, but only indicative ones which I feel are important from a Business and IT management perspective.

The key to reducing apprehension for ITIL v3 among ITSM professionals is to learn to use the ITIL v3 books as “How-To” guides for your major pain points and target focused improvement in those areas that affect you most. ITIL v3 should be looked at as best practice guidelines for service improvement and implementation. Choice is left to users as to which practices to adopt and to what extent.

In my next blog, we will look at some tips and tricks for doing a quick ITIL v3 self assessment and some interesting insights from my experience with an ITIL v3 assessment.

Posted by Guest Author at 01:21 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)