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ITIL v3 : Service Startegy (Part 2)

Four main activities in the service strategy process:

• Define the Market
• Services and strategy
• Understand the customer
• Understand the opportunities
• Classify and visualize
• Develop the Offerings
• Understand market space
• Outcome base definition of services
• Service Portfolio
• Develop Strategic assets
• Service management as closed-loop control system.
• Service management as a strategic asset.
• Prepare for execution
• Strategic assessment.
• Setting Objectives (MBO)
• Defining critical success factors
• Expansion and growth

Process & Roles

Service Portfolio Management

• A dynamic method for governing investments in service management across the enterprise & managing them for value
• Role: Product Manager

Demand Management

• To understand and influence customer demand for services & Provide capacity to meet these demands
• Role: Demand Manager

Financial Management

• Financial Management provides operational visibility, insight and superior decision making capabilities ( Quantification: Financial terms, value of service, of assets)
• Explains Return on Investment to both Customer and Service Provider
• Role: Financial Manager

Service Portfolio

It is part of the Service Management Knowledge System (SMKS) and it is considered as a Configuration Item (CI).
Here's what the ITIL V3 glossary says:
"The complete set of Services that are managed by a Service Provider. The Service Portfolio is used to manage the entire Lifecycle of all Services, and includes three Categories: Service Pipeline (proposed or in Development); Service Catalogue (Live or available for Deployment); and Retired Services."


In order to accomplish this goal, the following activities are periodically executed:

1. Define - inventory services, ensure business cases and validate portfolio data.
2. Analyse - maximize portfolio value, align and prioritize and balance supply and demand.
3. Approve - finalize proposed portfolio, authorize services and resources.
4. Charter - communicate decisions, allocate resources and charter services.

Click here to know more about Service Portfolio Management .

Develop Strategic assets
The closed loop created through strategic Service Management is that mutual reinforcement between capabilities and resources enables an organization to accept bigger challenges and to overcome them through better service delivery.

To succeed in creating a closed-loop value control system, strategic Service Management must fulfill the following functions:

• Develop and maintain service assets.
• Map service assets to customer assets through services.
• Design ,develop,and operate suitable service assets.
• Extract Service potential from service assets.
• Convert service potential into performance potential.
• Reduce risk for the customer.
• Control the cost of providing services.

ITIL v3 : Service Startegy (Part 1)

Basic guidelines to add value to the customer :

• Look from the customer's perspective.
• Recognize the value that can be added at different level of process or service.
• Business outcomes the service can provide to the customer

To understand customer's perspective we need to ask ourselves following questions :

• What is our business?
• Who are our customer ?
• What is that the customer value?
• Who depends on our services?
• How do customer use our services?
• How are our services valuable to customer?

One way the service provider can add value to goods and services is through the use of assets. There are two main types of assets :

1. Resource
2. Capabilities

Resource
The direct form of input to the system or process.
Example -Information, Infrastructure, Applications, Financial capital

Capabilities
Capabilities are the component that make up an organization's ability to use and transform resource in a way that adds value to services or product .
They are often

• Experience-driven
• Knowledge-intensive
• Information-based that lie within the organisation's people, processes and technologies

Both of assets bring capacity for creativity, analysis, perception, learning, judgement, leadership, communication, empathy and trust to an organisation.

Service Automation can have direct impact on the performance of service assets.It can improve the quality of delivered services, reduce risk, and resolve production trade-offs.Examples of areas in which service management can benefit from service automation :

• Pattern recognition and analysis.
• Detection and monitoring
• Optimization

Advantages of service automation :

• Adjusting capacity to demand.
• Enabling complex processes.
• Provides an means to capture knowledge required for monitoring, analyzing, and improving a service process.
• Enabling handling capacity with fewer time restriction.

Basic guidelines to ensure the service automation:

• Simplify service processes before automation.
• Clarify the needed flow of activities.
• Minimize users' contact with underlying processes.
• Exercise caution when automating complex task or interactions.

ITIL v3 : Objectives & Values

Objective of the Service Strategy phase :

1. Turning service management into strategic assets to help organization achieve their goals.
2. Determine the nature and type of service offered. Determining how it differ from competing services .
3. Creating value for customer and stakeholders.
4. Define service quality. Determining how to deliver and improve it .
5. Determining where and when to make strategic investments.

Value :

1. It is effectively and efficiently used to develop strategies objective.
2. It help IT organisation to develop and maintain the advantage of being reliable and valuable service provider.

Objective of the Service Design phase :

1. Design process that ensure efficiency and effectiveness.
2. Design stable infrastructure that can be built further or developed without compromising time or cost constraint.
3. Recognizing and controlling risk.
4. Design measurement methods to evaluate the success of the design process.

Value :

1. Reduced Total Cost of Ownership(TCO).
2. Improved in quality and consistency of service.
3. Improved IT governance.

Objective of the Service Transition phase :

1. Selecting resource and capacity
2. Controlling visible errors an anticipating risk.
3. Meeting service requirements and constraints.
4. Meeting customer expectations.

Value :

1. Ability to predict the service levels for the service,and to reduce variation.
2. Ability to meet business and governance compliance requirements
3. Skills to prevent service outages,disruptions, or reworks.

Objective of the Service Operation phase :

1. Continually maintaining the technology that accompanies the service
2. Ensuring everyday operation are properly conducted and controlled
3. Continually monitoring the performance, conducting assessments, and gathering information.

Service operation provides value to the Customer. It validates all the previous phases where the service was planed, designed and improvement are realized. Theses all are monitored in the service operation phase.

Objective of the Continuous Service Improvement phase :

1. Improve overall IT service quality
2. Ensuring customer satisfactions while maintaining cost effectiveness.
3. Ensuring quality of the management method used.

Value :

1. Improvement
2. Benefits
3. Return on Investment(ROI)
4. Value on Investment(VOI)

ITIL v3 : Service Lifecycle

In ITIL v3, the service lifecycle has been categorised into five core books. Thoses are :

1. Service Strategy
2. Service Design
3. Service Transition
4. Service Operation
5. Continual Service Improvement

MAPPING : ITILv2 to ITILv3

The 12 processes of the original ITILv2 are all categorised in the five new core ITIL books of the ITIL Lifecyle Publication Suite. The picture below maps those processes to the new books and identifies where the topic is dealt with primarily to the process.

Optimization

Due to the current economic downturn, IT industry has been affected in a number of ways with not much new projects in the pipeline. Companies are struggling hard to retain their existing clients. This leads to a new phase in IT industry, where we are talking about cost cutting,value adds,Optimization,automation and the most talked about is Innovation.

Current scenario has forced companies to think in two directions:

1. To look beyond the existing architecture into a more dynamic architecture which needed to be more explored in terms of demand of services and their related cost.Here we are talking about SOA(Service Oriented Architecture),cloud computing and other upcoming architecture.
2. The other one is optimizing the current existing architecture that includes process,infrastructure,applications and skills of the peoples.

I came across an article which says about Reshaping the Application portfolio.This means taking fresh look at the legacy systems which are key component of the existing infrastructure.

The article then describe an approach to help determine right focus for optimization : cost or system performance.It describe how a performance warehouse can be used to paved the path for better resource allocation.

A performance warehouse can be created through systematic data gathering about the cost and performance of the system. Hence provide a statistical foundation for system optimization.

ITIL v3 : Introduction

The IT Infrastructure Libary(ITIL) is a set of guidelines and best pratices outlining how IT Service Management(ITSM) can be Implemented.
ITIL intended to help organizations to optimize and manage their IT services and practices by focusing on the people,processes, and resources involved in delivering their services.
ITIL is one of the leading framework for ITSM globally because

1. It is nonproprietry.
2. It is nonprescriptive.
3. It provides best pratices.
4. It provides good pratices.

ITIL was developed and is managed by the Office of Government Commerce(OGC),an independent Office of the British Treasury.

The framework has evolved during late 1980's ITIL v1 that focused on "IT Infrastructure Management", which moved to the next level v2 where it talked about "IT Service Management".And now ITIL v3 published in May 2007 has specific focus on"Service Management".

Service Components

Basics of Service

Utility and Warranty, describe the value of service provided by a service provider

1. The utility effect of a service result in increased performance of customer assets and greater protability of achieving the customer's goals.
2. The warrenty effect represent a decrease in possible losses for the customer from variation in performance.

The combined utility effect and warrenty effect can help assure customer for services are fullfilled consistently.