44 |
Part II: Getting the Foundation in Place |
eTOM
The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is designed to provide a business-process model or framework for the telecommunications industry. eTOM describes enterprise processes required by a service provider. You can analyze them based on their significance to the business. For suppliers, eTOM outlines potential boundaries of software components to align with the customers’ needs, and it highlights the required functions, inputs, and outputs that products must support. Like ITIL and COBIT, eTOM contains many concepts that benefit all service providers.
One interesting aspect of eTOM is its view of services as products. This view is aligned with the ISO 9001 perspective on common requirements in quality management system products and services. eTOM provides prescriptive guidance for applying the ISO 9001 concept of a quality management system to a telecommunications service provider.
eTOM, like COBIT and ITIL, is going through continuous improvement. Currently, the TM Forum (the organization that publishes eTOM) is evaluating some of ITIL V3’s best practices for inclusion.
Getting Certified
Certification is an important part of any discussion of service management because certification implies a certain level of expertise. Here are a few basic things that you need to know about certification:
Types of certification: You can choose among three types of certification, according to your needs:
•Personal certifications validate a candidate’s understanding of specific terms and concepts.
•Professional certifications indicate that a person can prove both knowledge and experience in a topic.
•Organizational certifications validate an organization’s methods, proving that it does something in a reliable way.
Certification versus standard: You should understand the difference between the certification and the body of knowledge or standard with which it is associated. ISO/IEC 20000, for example, is a documented standard for service management. Some certification schemes are designed
Chapter 4: Service Management Standards and Best Practices |
45 |
to validate whether ISO/IEC 20000 principles have been implemented in practice in a service provider.
Value of certification: The value of a certification is tied directly to the value that the market associates with it. The standard or best practice may be very beneficial, whereas a certification may or may not have market value.
Education is one of the most important aspects of getting on the right path to implementing standards and best practices. Many of the standards and best-practices bodies have extensive education and personal certification programs that allow you to become proficient in your understanding of their standards.
ITIL has a very extensive personal certification program. The V2 series of certificates includes the Foundation Certificate, the Practitioner’s Certificate, the Clustered Practitioner’s Certificate, and the Manager’s Certificate. The V3 certification program includes a Foundation Certificate, a choice of five Lifecycle Stage Certificates or five Capability Certificates, and an ITIL Expert Certificate. The certification courses teach you about ITIL’s language and terms. The programs provide information about the philosophy of ITIL service management.
The V3 course’s target audience includes employees of IT companies who are involved in supporting and delivering IT services, as well as just about anyone else who needs to understand ITIL and service management best practices.
If you’re suffering from certification burnout, it’s okay to learn the knowledge and just do your job. Also, the IT industry is increasingly expressing interest in professional qualifications that recognize that skills and qualifications are acquired outside the classroom as well. Certifications are good, but certification plus experience is even better.
Getting an ITIL certification isn’t a surefire recipe for success. In fact, taking any class on any subject isn’t a surefire recipe for success. Many other factors are required for a company to implement standards and best practices for service management successfully. We delve deeper into this topic in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.
46 |
Part II: Getting the Foundation in Place |
Chapter 5
Implementing ITIL
In This Chapter
Using ITIL V3 as a blueprint for enterprise service management
Considering practical matters in implementing ITIL
Understanding how ITIL integrates with other best-practices frameworks
So far in this book, we’ve defined a service, discussed the importance of managing a service, and enumerated the value of best practices in service management. We’ve also given you a brief overview of some of the
important public standards and best practices — namely, best-practices models such as Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), as well as standards from the International Standards Organization (ISO). (Refer to Chapter 4 for more information on these models and organizations.)
In this chapter, we explore in detail one of the most comprehensive sets of best practices for service management: Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). We chose ITIL for this discussion in part
because many of its best practices are now being adopted even beyond IT (such as in service provider operations) to help adherents align existing services with business objectives; to identify new service opportunities to support the business; and to successfully address the closed-loop planning, execution, and continuous improvement of these services.
Although ITIL is a set of published guidance books that you can simply download to your computer or view on the Internet (at www.itilsurvival.com/ ITILBooksintheUS.html), implementing ITIL service management best practices in your organization isn’t so simple, so we also talk about some practical considerations in implementing ITIL. Specifically, we discuss how ITIL integrates into other frameworks.