http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/article/ en kirstiem@versosolutions.com Copyright 2008 2008-07-21T12:04:00+12:00 http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/the-service-catalogue-where-to-start/ http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/the-service-catalogue-where-to-start/#When:12:04:00Z I don’t think there is anyone in the IT Service Management world who would argue the importance of the Service Catalogue, but just where do you start? I liken the business Service Catalogue to a restaurant menu.  You have a choice of items you can select: Steak and Chips Fish of the Day Coffee For each of these choices there will then be some further decisions you need to make - how do you want your steak cooked? Do you want sauce with the chips? How is the Fish of the Day cooked? What sort of coffee do you want - latte, filter, flat white, capuccino? Underlying the customer facing menu are the recipes - the equivalent of the Technical Services Catalogue.  The customer, with a few exceptions, does not need to view the recipe just as, in the ITSM world, the customer does not need to know what underlying services make up the Service they are purchasing. Going down a further layer will bring us to the CMDB - in the case of the restaurant this will consist of the individual ingredients for the dishes, the pots and pans, the utensils - all the components that are needed to create your meal. Underpinning the restaurant menu we need to have a Service Level agreement.  In the case of a restaurant this may not be explicitly conveyed in the menu, but you can be assured that the customer will have certain expectations.  No matter how perfect the steak is that you serve to them, if they have had to wait 2 hours for it they will not be happy with the service provided. Moving back to the IT environment, let’s consider a customer purchasing an email service from their IT Service Provider.  It is not going to be enough to say they want email - where do they want it? Exclusively on their desktop PC? On their laptop in the office or connected to a home network? On a laptop with a roaming wireless connection? On a PDA or mobile phone?  Each of these options will have cost and technical considerations. Receiving email on a laptop with a roaming wireless connection is going to use more than one underlying technical service and multiple CIs - you will be looking at an Exchange Server, Spam filtering, proxy servers, file storage, back-up services, wireless connectivity, anti virus software, firewall.....the list is long, but the customer does not want, or need to know that.  What they want is spam and virus free email delivered to their laptop wherever they are in the world. My normal approach is to start looking at the Service Catalogue from a top down view. Define the customer facing services and then start to detail the underlying technical services that make up these services.  The KISS principle should certainly be applied to the creation of a Business Service Catalogue - Keep it simple, stupid, for example, don’t offer your customer virus protection as a Service, that should be an underlying technical service for the email and internet services. These layers, along with the Service Pipeline and your Retired Services make up the Service Portfolio. I will talk more about the creation of your Service Catalogue and Service Portfolio in upcoming posts.  In the meantime if you want to see a simple template for a Service Level catalogue, drop me a line at ITIL®, ITSM, Serio, Verso 2008-07-21T12:04:00+12:00 http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/reporting-where-to-draw-the-line/ http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/reporting-where-to-draw-the-line/#When:21:39:00Z Continual Service Improvement is a crucial part of the ITIL lifecycle. Success of CSI requires metrics, but some organisations just don’t seem to know where to stop when gathering data. The statement “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is true, but equally you need to consider the idea that “if you are not going to act, don’t bother measuring.” I see many businesses where a huge effort is put into gathering data, analysing it and then producing pretty graphical reports which are printed, emailed and otherwise distributed to various parties. Too often that is as far as it goes, these reports will often go straight into the round filing cabinet under the desk, or into the deleted items folder. If they are read, presented at meetings or distributed to management they may be examined, discussed...but is any action taken as a result of the information that contributes to improvements in your IT Service Management processes and performance? A huge amount of effort goes into the collection, formatting and distribution of these reports, too often these reports are either never used, or are used but not acted upon. Don’t get me wrong, measuring is absolutely crucial to a successfull Service Improvement initiative, but think carefully about just what you are going to be able to do with the information you are collecting. Is it going to provide you with anything that can be acted upon - and even more importantly, do you have the resources to make changes if they are required. Our current economic climate means that many IT Departments are running at full capacity with no ability to acquire new resources. I would suggest that you look at the current list of reports that you are providing and ask yourself what has been done as a result of the information contained in these reports - if the answer is “nothing” then you need to consider whether the effort involved in compiling and then examining these reports is warranted. SerioReports offers a wide range of reports that is adequate for most reporting requirements, we are also able to supply you with the tools needed to produce your own custom reports in your own reporting tools.  ITIL®, ITSM, Serio 2008-06-25T21:39:00+12:00 http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/is-it-time-to-lose-the-it-from-itsm/ http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/is-it-time-to-lose-the-it-from-itsm/#When:08:17:00Z This is something I have been thinking about for a while - having a husband working in Fleet maintenance and struggling with being able to provide an appropriate service to the end users has made me wonder why we keep the ITIL lifecycle tucked up in our little IT world.  I guess we could argue that fleet maintenance is today really an IT function as most modern fleets use computer diagnosis - my formerly computer illiterate-husband now happily plugs a laptop into massive pieces of machinery to pinpoint errors and when my car goes in for a service it is connected to the diagnostic computer before any work is done.  IT is everywhere now, in all apects of “Service” so has the IT in ITSM become redundant? I think it has. We limit the involvement of other parts of the business world by using the “IT” part of the title - “IT” conjures up visions of the stereotypical glasses-wearing “geek” inhabiting the basements of corporations around the world (check out “The IT Crowd” to see the vision the rest of the world has of “IT"). Therefore when someone sees “IT” as part of the title of an organisation or framework, they are likely to think - “That doesn’t interest me - I’m not one of those IT people.” Going back to the discussion I was having with my husband on Fleet maintenance, it was clear that they have problems - at the grass-roots level - in deciding what to do first.  There are the simple service requests for machinery which has done a certain number of hours and needs its regular maintenance; then there are minor faults such as blown bulbs, seats that won’t adjust, airconditioning that is not working properly (although in an underground mine that is a bit more than a minor inconvenience); and then there are the show-stoppers - major pieces of equipment which break down and stop production - often at a cost of 100s of 1000s of dollars each hour.  Prioritisation of these seems to be a bit haphazard, the fitters involved don’t have any SLA targets to work towards, the most important jobs are easy to work out, but beneath that there is little guidance.  This doesn’t apply just to the company he currently works for, he has had 30+ years in the industry and the situation has been the same pretty well everywhere he has worked.  If there is any priorisation applied it does not feed down to the people actually doing the work. I would love to hear your thoughts on the current relevence of “IT” in ITSM, is it a redundant acronym in today’s technology driven world, is there any part of the business where Service is not driven or at least enabled by IT? On another note - I have had an interesting few days attending the IPESC (International Publications Executive Sub-Committee) meeting in Paris. As a journalist in a previous life (pre-IT) publications is an area that is high on my list of priorities, we achieved some good work over the two day meeting, and Paris in summer is not a bad place to be. I even managed to spend a day at EuroDisney, an interesting experience with no children in tow. ITSM 2008-06-13T08:17:00+12:00 http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/welcome_to_our_new_look_website/ http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/welcome_to_our_new_look_website/#When:07:36:01Z We are very pleased to launch our new website today, versosolutions.com was well overdue for a facelift, so we hope you like the new look. In this blog we will aim to discuss topics of interest in the IT Service Management world, and we welcome your input into these discussions. We will also be using these pages to give you hints and tips to help Serio users to get the best value out of the toolset. With my own interest in publications you can expect quite a bit of discussion on this topic in this blog - I am currently the Endorsement Officer on IPESC (International Publications Executive Sub Committee), an ITSMF International sub committee charged with the job of ensuring that books carrying the ITSMF logo are up to the expected quality and provide valuable information to the ITSMF community. I hope that you will find this blog interesting, thought provoking and that you will contribute your own thoughts to the topics that spark your interest. Verso 2008-05-09T07:36:01+12:00 http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/itsmfnz_conference/ http://www.versosolutions.com/blog/itsmfnz_conference/#When:15:10:00Z The New Zealand IT Service Management Forum held its annual conference at the Wellington Convention Centre from May12-14.  Conference attendees were presented with a great range of high quality speakers, as usual the opportunity to network with others working in the ITSM field was invaluable.  Next year’s conference is also planned for Wellington in May 2009.  The next regional conference to look out for is the ITSMF Australia event being held in Melbourne in August of this year. ITSM, itSMF 2008-04-30T15:10:00+12:00