Chapter 2: Getting Inside Service Management |
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In most services of any size, the staff members who deliver the service have specific roles that involve them in specific activities. In many instances, they need to be trained in specific skills, and they were hired because they have the requisite intelligence and judgment.
In many circumstances, although a standardized process is in place, it’s almost wholly enshrined in the knowledge of the person who’s carrying out the task. In fact, many services have two information systems: the computer system and the skilled staff members who deliver the service.
Seeing the Importance of Oversight
We think of the oversight system (or service management system) as recording all the information about the service or any aspect of the service that can be useful in any way. Thus, the oversight system may refer to the standardized process model to gather measurements about the speed of any given activity or the speed of flow from one activity to another. It may take readings from sensors embedded in machinery or from programs that monitor the activity of computer systems, and it may take information directly from the skilled participants who carry out the service.
This book is about service management, but our model of a service currently includes nothing that relates to managing the service. We address that problem in Figure 2-4 by adding the element of oversight.
Oversight & optimizing the outcome
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Part I: Introducing Service Management |
As far as oversight is concerned, you shouldn’t think simply in terms of computer systems gathering and analyzing information. You also need to include physical systems, such as the fire-alarm system that’s deployed throughout the working space, the central heating system, or even a nuclear power plant.
The point is that for most services, many individual oversight systems operate within the overall service management system, contributing to the proper performance of the service, but you should have most interest in the oversight systems that provide feedback to those who carry out the service. Oversight systems that provide feedback on how efficiently the service is running are especially useful to the people or computers that carry out the service. Their primary role is to ensure that the service is delivered at a level that is acceptable to the service user.
Balancing the Physical
World and IT Systems
Take a moment to review Figure 2-1, earlier in this chapter. In this section, we discuss that figure from the service management point of view.
The first thing to note is that service management doesn’t concern itself only with what we think of traditionally as computer and communications systems. Information technology is now embedded inside most assets that in the past may not have been thought of as IT assets. In fact, an increasingly blurry line divides enterprise physical assets (such as buildings, furniture, landline phones, and security systems) and IT assets (servers, laptops, and mobile devices) as all assets become increasingly smart, interconnected, and instrumented by design.
Physical and IT systems
Although many of us think about managing computers and communications systems, this example is only the tip of the iceberg. Service management really looks to manage physical environments (plants, facilities, trucks, and so on) as well as IT systems, and it defines processes, functions, and roles for people. In our ATM example, we aren’t talking just about IT technology. The ATM service also relies on trucks, the people who replenish the cash, and the paper on which receipts are printed.
Chapter 2: Getting Inside Service Management |
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When you examine the mission-critical activities of your organization, you usually discover that computer systems play a central role. As far as this discovery is concerned, we have good news and bad news:
The good news is that IT service management involves similar activities, no matter what the various technology and systems are doing.
The bad news is that service management is, in many ways, a complex and highly skilled activity.
Luckily, businesses have been using IT (including computers, applications, networks, storage devices, and security firewalls) for decades, and in doing so, they’ve accumulated a mass of experience and a wealth of assets. The experience that businesses have accumulated spans all these areas; more important, more physical assets are transforming into IT assets with the inclusion of smart chips and sensors that allow them to be managed as IT assets. An explosion of computerization or smartening of dumb assets is occurring, allowing service management to control the broad set of assets more easily and adding complexity to what were once simple applications, systems, and networks.
Service best practices
The service management experience is embodied to a great extent in the hundreds of thousands of computer professionals who run the systems. The assets include a wide range of software that’s purpose-built to assist in service management. Much of this software has evolved over many years. In addition, we have standardized process models and best practices for service management, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), and Control
Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT). (For more information, see Chapter 4.) Any organization that needs to consider implementing or changing the way that it manages the services it delivers can leverage these resources to augment its service management planning.
Service delivery and oversight
In this chapter, we consider only the internal operation of a service. A service has inputs and outcomes, involves the use of tools and assets in a specific environment, and is carried out by skilled participants who implement a standardized process model, and the whole environment is subject to the oversight of the service management system.
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Part I: Introducing Service Management |
What we haven’t done is discuss the nature of that oversight and what it involves in detail, but you’ve probably deduced that it involves service management. The notions of both service and service management are critical. The staff members who deliver a service take pride in their activities and also seek to improve their efficiency so as to make the service better over time. In addition to the delivery of the service, many activities are required to manage the service. You need to consider the following questions:
How will you plan and manage changes to the service?
How will you monitor service levels and service costs?
How will you manage incidents that may occur?
How will you manage the availability and continuity of the service in the event of a major unplanned disruption?
How will you manage the security of information within the service?
How will you direct, evaluate, and monitor compliance with required regulations or polices?
How will you manage exceptions?
Service management needs to be effective to answer these questions, but in the end, the execution of the service itself must be done in such a way that the customer finds the outcomes to be valuable, convenient, and correctly priced.
Chapter 3
The Customer Is King
In This Chapter
Figuring out what the target and customer want
Viewing a service from the outside
Delving into service management
Using services as components of other services
We look at a service from the inside in Chapter 2, so it seems logical that in this chapter, we take a look at a service from the outside. In
Chapter 2, we focus on the first part of the definition of a service (a service is a purposeful activity); in this chapter, we focus on the second part (carried out for the benefit of a known target).
We could say for the benefit of the customer, but we don’t. In most circumstances, satisfying the customer isn’t the only driver that shapes a service. If the service is delivered by a public company, for example, you also need to satisfy the shareholders. You can quite easily make the customers happy and still go out of business, and the shareholders are unlikely to approve such a business strategy. So in addition to executing the activities of a well-defined service in a high-quality manner, service management needs to include both a customer satisfaction process and a stakeholder-requirements management process to ensure that the needs of all stakeholders are known and managed.
So when we say for the benefit of a known target, we may be talking about a need to satisfy multiple targets, each of which has a specific expectation of the service. The shareholders care about profitability, whereas the customers care about the quality of service.