ITSM Best Practice will align five main process with the
lifecycle of “Service Operation”.
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Event Management
- Request Fulfillment
- Access Management
It was not too long
ago that the idea of some of these processes were new to service providers. Most
will find them to be common in today’s market place. An organization may not literally follow the
best practices for the service operation processes but most likely have some
close facsimile when executing Incident, Problem, Request Fulfilment, and Event
management processes for provisioning IT services and support. In order to ensure identity management and
authorization for access, some form of “Access Management” will also be needed
to support an overall security policy in Service Operation. I would like to focus on some thoughts for
“Event Management” and early engagement of operational staff in the service
lifecycle.
As organizations mature they begin to realize the value of
taking these process activities and expanding the scope of their capabilities
to address problems early in the lifecycle.
Finding defects (events) early in the development can ensure a more
stable environment and also save an organization a lot of time, money and
resources. We used to think that if we
instrumented our monitoring tools for components in the infrastructure that we
were actually being proactive. That is
to say, the service provider could identify the incident in advance of the
customer or end user and take action before there was a great business impact. Hmm… is that really proactive? We also used to think that getting an
insurance quote in 15 minutes was great and today commercials make fun of that
notion.
Benefits from “Event Management” and proactive monitoring in
the production environment still ring true.
But, what if we applied that same mentality and method for monitoring to
our development lifecycle. What if we
could proactively alert on events that could result in defects before products
moved into the delivery lifecycle. What
if we could monitor manage, measure and report upon process activities to
discover “problems” and “root cause” prior to a service being deployed. The answer is that we could begin to design anti
fragile software and more stable environments.
Even more important is that the service provider will gain a huge cost
savings for the resource and effort that it takes when we are reactive and
consistently in firefighting mode.
Caution! It is
critical that a service provider does not see a “Proactive” state of maturity
in their organization as the end goal.
The idea is that once we become more proactive we can finally position
our technical staff in design process activities such as Capacity,
Availability, Security and others early on in the development and design
lifecycle stage. That is right!
According to best practice for IT Service Management Capacity and Availability
are actually processes in the “Service Design” lifecycle. When asked, many IT practitioners position
them as processes for “Service Operation”. Including process activities for Capacity,
Availability and Security early in the Lifecycle an organization allows us to
design for availability, design for security, and also allows the provider to
focus on a design that allows for tremendous cost savings while enabling the
staff for success.
There will always be a reactive side to these processes in
support of problem and incident management but focusing on them early in
Service Design will allow your organization to excel in “Service
Operation”. Once stable the true
activities for monitoring, reporting and sustaining performance in Service
Operation can be truly optimized. Where
are you? Are your Incident and Problem
management processes separate? Can you
optimize “Request Fulfillment” in a timely fashion to meet the need of your
customers? How are you applying “Event Management”
to bring real business value?
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