Chapter 6: Implementing a Service Management Strategy |
65 |
you expect,” and “You can’t manage what you don’t know” still hold true. For every management process and every service, the provider needs management information. Key performance indicators (KPIs) track the agreed-to activities. Key goal indicators measure the progress made toward business objectives. Key cost and quality indicators also have to be measured; otherwise, the service provider is flying blind. Without some automation, managers would be up very late at night trying to figure out how everything is working!
Automating Service
Effective automation is critical for managing service cost and quality, as well as for providing the information that you need for effective direction, control, and execution of services and service management. In most organizations, service management automation is poor; consequently, the management information just isn’t available.
Figure 6-2 illustrates the service automation path that an operational department needs to traverse. It begins with automation, consisting of a set of fragmented services. Many IT departments find themselves in this situation. The next step from there is standardizing the foundations of service automation so that all service automation systems can talk to one another in a comprehensible way. That standardization establishes a basis for the integration of all services that contribute to the next step: overall service automation. The final step is optimizing across all those services.
Figure 6-2: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The evolu- |
|
Fragmented |
|
|
Standardized |
|
|
Integrated |
|
|
Optimized |
tion of |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
service |
|
services |
|
|
services |
|
|
services |
|
|
services |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
automation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
That process seems to be simple: Assuming that you start with fragmented services, you simply follow a nice three-step process. If you’re dealing with a tax collection service, you might make sure that it works effectively and does the right thing. So far, so simple. Don’t forget, however, that this process becomes part of a service management plan, which complicates the matter.
66 |
Part II: Getting the Foundation in Place |
Luckily, this situation translates into a pretty picture. Figure 6-3 illustrates the simple fact that the service management plan and service automation need to work together. The graph shows 12 areas of automation mapped against overall strategy. An organization can sit in any of those 12 areas. It may have highly developed service automation to the point of delivering an optimized service, yet any one operational team (such as facilities, plant operations, or network operations) may have limited vision in terms of its role in service management. The IT department may do nothing more than systems management, for example. Similarly, the company could have fragmented service automation but be fully focused on business performance management.
Business performance management
Service management
Figure 6-3:
Service System
management
management planning and service automation.
Service Management Strategy
Service Management Automation
Fragmented |
Standardized |
Integrated |
Optimized |
services |
services |
services |
services |
The usefulness of Figure 6-3 is that it helps with service management planning. It helps you define what management capability your organization needs to work on next.
When we refer to service automation, we’re referring directly to software. By contrast, service management also includes skilled staff members and standardized management processes. Both services and service management benefit from automation. Automation reduces human effort and labor costs. Reducing human effort also reduces human error that can hamper quality. Automation helps reduce cost and improve quality of service.
Chapter 6: Implementing a Service Management Strategy |
67 |
A service strategy needs to include a service management plan. The service strategy sets the business context for the service management plan, including the three interwoven strands: people, standardized processes, and tools that deliver automation.
Planning Service Strategy
and Service Management
When you’re planning for implementation, here are five sets of questions that you should be able to answer about your road map:
With the changes happening in my industry, how agile is my approach to managing my physical and virtual assets? Can my company change quickly enough while protecting the integrity of oversight, if it needs to?
Can I manage my world if and when change comes? Does the organization see sufficient collaboration across groups and divisions? How is this collaboration exhibited in terms of people, processes, and automation?
Can I direct and control changes in my services if the inputs and outcomes are different? Do I have the right level of visibility and control?
Do I understand my management processes today? Can I adapt those processes to new business demands? Can I integrate those processes across the organization so that I get a complete view across my value chain? (A value chain is the sequence of business activities that links all important contributors to the company’s success, such as suppliers and customers.)
Do I have a standards-based approach to service management to enable greater collaboration, not only across my own management domains, but also with my suppliers and customers? Do I have sufficient clarity and transparency in decision rights and accountability chains that I can change and innovate? Can I direct and control service management?
Finding Out How Your Organization
Measures Up
The vision of service management laid out in the service strategy can be daunting for many organizations. You have to worry not only about keeping
68 |
Part II: Getting the Foundation in Place |
the lights on and the processes operating efficiently, but also about keeping customers happy and preventing competitors from gaining an advantage. How ready are you to change, innovate, grow, and compete? This question isn’t easy to answer, because it requires a certain level of assessment to determine the readiness of your organization. We lay out the framework for this assessment in Figure 6-3, earlier in this chapter, but the framework also includes the assessment of skills and standardized processes. As part of this assessment, you should ask the following sets of questions:
Where is the business value within my organization? Which assets (sets of capabilities and resources) produce my company’s unique differentiation: my information, for example, or my distribution network? Can I measure these assets in terms of how they’re designed to service customer needs?
Do I have a service management capability that enables my organization to change services quickly when the market demands innovation?
How well does my service management capability prepare me to control costs and quality while providing customers what they need? Do I have the technology in place to measure the customer’s view of the value I’m offering and provide the detailed management information I need?
Do I understand both my service and service management gaps — areas where I lack the systems that can address problems but can’t provide that capability? When I know where the business needs to be, can I direct and control the capabilities and resources required to get there?
This type of assessment is critical to your organization’s ability to move forward. No organization should move to the adoption phase without a good, honest assessment of the current state of service management. The quickest route to ruin is acting without forethought.
Seeing What Service Management Will
Look Like in Your Organization
Service management isn’t a project or a product. You might say, “I really just want to go out and buy something and be done with it. I’m ready to manage change and become an agile company.” If only life were that simple! Service management is a journey.
As we’ve discussed so far in this chapter, service management is a combination of vision, scope, and assessment. When you figure out where you are, you can begin to plan for where you want to be.
Chapter 6: Implementing a Service Management Strategy |
69 |
Putting the focus on business performance
Unlike systems management, service management is about looking at business performance rather than just server or data center management. In a typical systems management scenario, you may look at an incident. You log the incident, work to figure out what caused that problem, and come up with either a work-around or a patch to repair the problem. You’re done!
If you look at this same issue from a service management perspective, however, you’re looking at the incident differently. You have to ask what the incident was all about: what type of incident it was, whether it was isolated to a particular piece of hardware, whether a critical service wasn’t working properly, or whether the incident involved a network router or a potential disruption of a service.
Organizations need to think differently about how they deal with service disruptions. They need a combination of good tooling, skills, and information to manage services in context with the business problems that they’re addressing.
To continue the Netflix example, suppose that the company is unable to stream a popular movie to its customers’ computers or game boxes. The company needs to ask itself a variety of questions, such as what impact the incident will have on customer expectations; which services were affected (or potentially affected); and whether the organization has the process, skills, and tools required to manage this situation and others like it.
When planning a change, management needs to understand which services are potentially affected and what the business outcome will be, as well as whether the company has the service configuration information required to assess the effect of the change. All of a sudden, the challenge is very tangible and fundamental: How should these services be managed? In other words, the organization needs to look at manageability from many perspectives with the right business context. It needs well-constructed strategies for managing customer expectations in context with costs, competitive conditions, and operational effectiveness. All these issues require skills and good judgment.
Understanding service oriented architecture
To really understand service management, you also should understand service oriented architecture (SOA). We strongly recommend that you take a look at another book, Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies, 2nd Edition
70 |
Part II: Getting the Foundation in Place |
(Wiley Publishing, Inc.). (Yes, our team wrote that book too.) Why are we complicating things by bringing up SOA? We’re not. We’re trying to clarify the situation. We define service oriented architecture as a software architecture for building applications that implement business processes or services by using a set of loosely coupled, black-box components orchestrated to deliver a well-defined level of service.
Admittedly, this definition doesn’t flow trippingly from the tongue, but from it springs a sustainable, reusable, extensible approach to business and technology that is already providing huge competitive advantages to organizations around the globe. Here are some of the principal characteristics of SOA that are important for service management:
SOA is a black-box component architecture. SOA deliberately hides complexity wherever possible, and the idea of the black box is integral to SOA. The black box enables the reuse of existing business applications by adding a fairly simple adapter to them, no matter how they were built.
SOA components are loosely coupled. One component passes data to another component and makes a request; the second component carries out the request and, if necessary, passes data back to the first. The emphasis is on simplicity and autonomy. Each component offers a small range of simple services to other components.
A set of loosely coupled components does the same work that tightly structured applications used to do, but you can combine and recombine the components in myriad ways to make the overall service infrastructure much more flexible.
SOA components are orchestrated to link through business processes to deliver a well-defined level of service. SOA creates a simple arrangement of components that collectively can deliver a very complex business service. Simultaneously, SOA must provide acceptable service levels. To that end, the architecture embodies components that ensure a dependable service level. Service level is tied directly to the best practices of conducting business, commonly referred to as business process management.
Because so many of the business applications that you have to manage are now built in this loosely coupled, modular fashion, service management needs to walk hand in hand with SOA. SOA becomes part of the architectural approach required to make the pieces of business services, processes, and operations work in coordination.