Operational Support and Analysis (OSA)

This blog was written in 2015. The OSA class was sunsetted along with all of ITILv3. For a more recent perspective, visit our latest article on the importance of modern operational practices and the ITIL Practice Manager path on How to Align ITSM with Organizational Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide

What if we did not build an operational support system to meet current business requirements?

That might sound a bit outrageous and contradictory to everything we have learned. If you are a service provider, then you are aware that what we consider premium service support today could be accepted as the norm and sometimes can be outdated before it becomes a reality. The key to sustaining underpinning operations for any industry is in the constructs of the system. If we build a system to provide what the customer and business outcomes require now, then that is what we will have. The likelihood is that we will have a system that provides for a service that will render itself less than optimized in a shorter time than we would like to think.

What is required is an operational support system that can deliver fast, but also one that is able to shift, bend, and weave with the ever-changing environment and outcomes that it supports. We need a growing living moving system that can adapt to changing business and customer requirements. A dynamic, not static support system.

At the core, this system will need to have the capability to monitor, analyze, predict, and most importantly, to act. All of this must be done at an exponential rate in order to meet the dynamic needs of our customers and strategic business requirements. But wait… isn’t that what we have always done?

In order to build a system that is not static to today’s requirements, but rather one that can adapt to changing requirements, the core principles of best practice still apply. For example, what if we exploit Event, Incident and Problem Management systems to monitor and analyze patterns of business activity and forecast what would be required to meet future changes? What if we could automate the feedback loops and adjust our service assets to provision and optimize business assets ahead of time? It is difficult to exploit and build upon an operational system if our baseline is reactive or chaotic.

It all starts with knowing the important role of Operational Support and Analysis in service provision and understanding how processes interact with other Service Lifecycle processes.

Long gone are the days when the data center was in the basement, and the help desk was a necessary evil. Today, businesses are irreversibly dependent upon technology, and real dollars are lost when IT services are not available.

To continue developing skills in modern operational support and service management, explore the ITIL 4 Create, Deliver & Support (CDS) module or the Monitor, Support & Fulfil (MSF) Practice Manager bundle. These reflect today's capabilities for adaptive, experience-driven operations.

Four Service Characteristics

Recently I came across several articles by researchers and experts that laid out definitions and characteristics of services. ITIL provides us with a definition that can help drive the creation of value-laden services: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. An area that ITIL is not so clear is in terms of service characteristics. Several researchers and experts put forth that services have four basic characteristics (IHIP): Intangibility—Services are the results of actions not things. They have no physical presence and represent a logical set of elements. One way to think of service is “work done for others.” Heterogeneity—Also known as “variability”; services are unique items because of the mechanisms used to deliver services, which is people. Because the people element adds variability, the service is variable. This holds true, especially for the value proposition—not eve...

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

This article was originally published in 2015. With the Introduction of ITIL 4, some of the concepts have changed in ways that are described below. ITIL 4 has also introduced new roles, as explained in our blog ITIL 4 and the Evolving Role of Roles . Before we dive into the difference between these roles, let’s first look at a key update in ITIL 4 – the shift from processes to practices. ITIL 4 has evolved to focus on holistic practices vs. isolated processes. By definition, a practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. For example, the purpose of the incident management practice is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible. All organizations recognize the need to allocate resources to the management of incidents and mature their capabilities in that area. In ITIL 4, each practice includes resources based on the four ...

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL 4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group. As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions 1. Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. ...

Search