SaaS – Best Practice perspective

A good perspective by John Rowell, OpSource on steps required to build Software As A Service Offerings. The steps that he has recommended are :

Discovery of business requirements, objectives and guidelines

Designate the Operations Team

Conceive and Design Scalable Infrastructure and Services

Determining Bandwidth requirements and selecting hosting facility

Procuring Infrastructure components

Deploying SAAS delivery infrastructure

Implementing DR and BCP

Integrate monitoring solution

Establish NOC, Client Call Center and Ticketing system

Design and manage SLAs

Document and manage the solution

Read the detailed white-paper here.

Prince2 and ITIL working together – Case Study from BMP

Click here for a detailed case study  by Noel Scott, discussing co-existence of Prince2 and ITIL Frameworks to achieve business requirements

CMDB or CMS

Glenn O’Donell writes in his blog on ComputerWorldUK. Please click here to read more…

Official list of ITIL Processes in ITIL V3

Taken from Pink Elephant’s blog…

Service Strategy – 4 processes

1. Strategy Generation
2. Financial management
3. Demand management
4. Service Portfolio management

Service Design – 7 processes

1. Service Catalog Management
2. Service Level Management
3. Availability Management
4. Capacity Management
5. It service Continuity Management
6. Information Security Management
7. Supplier Management

Service Transition – 7 processes

1. Transition Planning and Support
2. Change Management
3. Service Asset and Configuration Management
4. Release and Deployment Management
5. Service Validation and Testing
6. Evaluation
7. Knowledge Management

Service Operation – 5 processes

1. Event Management
2. Incident Management
3. Request Fulfillment
4. Problem Management
5. Access Management

Continual service improvement – 3 processes

1. The 7 improvement process
2. Service Measurement
3. Service Reporting

IT Service Management Starts with?

According to Mark Schouls, the three processes that IT Service Management starts with are Change Management, Configuration Management and Release Management.

Release Management – Proper release management, which defines the process of building and releasing software, results in a greater success rate in the provisioning of software and hardware to the business, and perhaps more importantly, results in a perceived improvement in the quality of service. Bringing consistency and documented processes to software and hardware releases minimizes downtime, reduces support costs, improves resource utilization and increases confidence across all levels of management.

Configuration Management – Enacting configuration management processes gives organizations a single view of all corporate assets, including their dependencies and interrelationships. Having one federated repository as a point of reference ensures accuracy and eliminates time-consuming duplication of efforts.

Change Management – Codifying change management practices helps organizations better align IT services to business requirements. With rigid processes in place, they eliminate rogue changes, thereby reducing risk and improving user productivity. To undertake change management initiatives, businesses must first accurately assess risk, understand the impact due to any change, analyze resource requirements and make adjustments to align resources as required. At that point they can enact a formal method for approving changes.

Read more of this article on ITSMwatch here.

I would also put Incident Management in this list. IT has to exist in the organization in some form or the other right from the start. Incident Management is one of the key bridges between the IT and its users. It gives a first hand information about the issues which are being faced by the users and would be a key driver for a lot of changes that would be done to restore services.

SaaS and ITSM

Two beautifully written articles on Saas and ITSM

1. SaaS and ITSM – a Marriage Made in Acronym Heaven? by Stephen Mann

This article does not dive down into the complexity of SaaS-variants such as SaaS 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, or the single-tenancy versus multi-tenancy debate, or terminology such as Hybrid SaaS. It does, however, assume a perspective that views enterprise interest in SaaS-delivered ITSM solutions in the context of replacing already deployed on-premise ITSM applications – a viewpoint that is also used by many vendors to calculate the Return On Investment. Moving from on-premise Product A to SaaS Product B rather than determining the underlying benefits an organisation would realise from utilising their technology to support ITSM processes and procedures.

2. SaaS 3.0 And ITSM, Match Made In Heaven!! by Chris Dancy

The second article is a wonderful overview of Saas, its evolution, maturity levels related to SaaS and its associated with ITSM.

Must read articles both of them!

Relationship between ITIL Processes – 1

Basic! yes! very! But don’t be surprised if there are people who have been managing these processes and still do not completely understand these relationships.

This diagram however cannot be termed complete and there is a lot that can be added to it. Will write about the process relationships in detail in the next few posts!

BMC Survey : Top Priorities through 2010

What will be most important to IT organizations over the next 12 months? It’s probably no surprise that cost control or reduction in spending is the key priority. Based on a recent survey of more than 400 enterprise-level IT management personnel and their teams in Europe and the United States, reducing IT costs is the number-one priority out of 15 objectives. The second most critical priority is addressing regulatory compliance issues. Improving the availability and performance of business services is the third most critical priority on the IT “must-do” list.

Download the whitepaper here.

The answer is in “HOW”, not “WHAT”

In my experience, its not the “what” framework you are using that helps an organization, its “how” you are using the framework that makes a difference.

This has been validated by organizations that have stayed with ITIL V2, and focussed on improving the maturity and compliance of existing processes, instead of jumping on to ITIL V3 bangwagon after it was introduced. There is another set of organizations that have started to adopt the V3 lifecycle approach and bringing in flavors of process definition and structure  from ITIL V3, however that still needs to translate to being able to execute what gets documented. And no results can be guarenteed unless there is adoption and compliance to the new set of processes.

The thought was triggered by the latest article on ITPReport by Alim Ozcan where he summarises the versions of ITIL and recommends  when to use them. I feel that he is correct, however I also feel that before an organization decides between one of the few available versions and best practice frameworks, a quick analysis of what we want to do, and how we are doing it currently is very important!

A quick checklist could look like this

1. Do we measure current process performance and adoption?

2. If no, start doing that before we decide on a new framework. If Yes, what is our level of execution? are we doing good?

3. If we are doing well on the current set of processes, what do we add to the process  to take it to a different level? Integration? Governance? Services flavor? It is important to benchmark the processes against best practices and a maturity assessment once in a couple of years would help answer the question # 3.

You can’t improve IT, if you are not measuring IT

 

The 7-Step process in CSI phase of ITIL has identification of what needs to be measured as one of the steps.

There is no way of improving a service or a process, if we are not measuring. Measurments allow us to do two things

1. Know where we are

2. Help determine where we want to go

Often in my experience, we take the standard set of metrics and put all of them on a dashboard for various stakeholders to review, irrespective of the relevance of these beautiful looking graphs. I would in this post and in future try to put together some  tools which help in identifying what needs to be measured. One of such tools is GQM – Goal Question Metric Approach. In some of the next posts, I would write about illustration of the GQM related to ITSM Processes.

Read more about the GQM here and here.