Benefits of IT Service Management

Discuss about the Structured Approach To Integrating Audit To Create.

ExcelIT an Australian IT service Provider organization seeking ISO/IEC 20000 whose provides supports and infrastructure to other organizations. They have estimated four thousand employee and customers all over the world and most of them are from non-IT Company. They decided to consult with an external service provider rather than using their own infrastructure team to get certified ISO/IEC 20000. They decided to deal with an external multinational company, headquarters in India. The Indian company was responsible for fulfilling ExcelIT’s objectives. The first objective was to help them establish a central service management System. As ExcelIT have different customer from all over the world, they had individual team to deal with each customers. Some of the teams are already ISO certified and practicing different approches. They waned to make all the teams ISO 2000 certified and modicentralize them origanization specific hub practice. Second main requirement was to achieve better allignment among the custtomer, IT deliverying team, the support teams and suppliers. There is a global perspiction that support center is generally consider as cost centers not as profit canter. This perspection affect the support team members as they has misconception that they provides secondary value for the organization while IT delivery team is primary staff member. However  there is a huge link between this groups. The objective is to make them realize their importance in the team as well as include them in reward and recognition team. The requirement was to enhance customer confidence. The issue is that, althouh meeting all SLAs, customers had lake of sattisfication over the quality of deliverance. (BRelationshipM needs to practice).

Service management system can define as all-embracing and large scale management system that specifies desires for the service provider to implement, establish, operate, improve, monitor, maintain and services in an organization (Jäntti et al. 2013, p.126).  While ITSM, Information technology service management based on practices anticipated to support the distribution of information technology services with necessity of organizations highlighting profits to customers. ITSM also associate with pattern shift from managing IT as stacks of individual components to concentrating on the delivery of end-to-end services using best practice process models (Trusson, Doherty & Hislop 2014, pp.347-371). Service management system can enhance service level success. ISO/IEC 20000 is the international standard for IT service management technology.

The main goal of the ITSM is that it must assist organization to achieve the business objectives. ITSM allows the flow of managing stakeholders process and technology to make it reality.  It can assist ExcelIT to take along together the framework for improving the service management involvement. It allows for control, greater visibility and automation of work environment (Iden & Eikebrokk 2013, pp.512-523). By gaining better managing services and insights ExcelIT can better utilize their resources in an efficient and effective manner.

ExcelIT’s Journey to ISO/IEC 20000 Certification

ExcelIT’s customers are not fully satisfied with the quality of delivery. Utilizing ITSM allows perspective mythology combined with explanations that enables the automate key aspects. It allows to define the key performance indicator (Jäntti et al. 2015). By indulgent and tracking those KPI’s ExcelIT can realize how well they are meetings their objectives and also can take actions to ensure there is no missed SLA’s (service level agreement) by understanding trending and corresponding actions.

ITSM allows for sharing and integrated systems across the solution. It enables the flow of information integrated across all area on premise in the organization (Wan& Jones 2013, pp.490-522). ITSM pulls together information from disparate systems into a distinct view to deliver both consolidation of events and efficient visualization of event as to allow association of information.

By utilizing service management system, ExcelIT can identify the hazards before they effect end users and provide solution that can help to increase quality of service while reducing cost investment (Hoy & Foley 2015, pp.690-702 ). It can allows ExcelIT to take counteractive action to minimum the consequence of outrage.  Automation spans across on premise, hybrid and cloud environments to provided efficiency such as:

• Runbook Automation which consensuses for repeatable processes and deliver operations with well-defined solutions to rapidly tenacity problems.
• Workflow automation to streamline ITSM development such as Asset, Configuration, Incident, Change, and Problem Management (Steinberg 2013).
• Event analysis and root cause analysis helps to quickly separate problems and get them to the proper group for resolution.
• Automated finding of issues through instrumenting you applications for observing key modules of your business applications.

Before they impact end users. IT Service Management solutions produce a significant amount of data. This ranges from Service Desk artifacts, logs to alerts, messages and metrics. IT Analytics in ITSM solutions permit clients to correlate this data and consolidate analyze and use it to foresee emerging trends and potential problem areas before they effect delivery of business services (Renault, Cortina & Barafort 2015, pp. 188-200). When problems arise, information is quickly evaluated to support determine fundamental concerns and permit clients to rapidly recognize root cause and resolution the issue.

There are mainly two standard issues to follow for getting ISO certified as waterfall model and Iterative model (Mesquida & Mas 2015, pp.80-91). Waterfall fall approach starts by planning and then getting certified to hand over. While in iterative approach multiple iteration can be taken throughout the journey in incremental maturity ways. The advantage of using iterative journey is that the whole process can be break down to multiple pieces and complete them piece by piece (Disterer 2013, pp. 92). For ExcelIT, It was suitable to follow iterative approach to get ISO certified for some certain reason. The approach starts with planning with supervision of three external consultant. The entire journey was planned with the requirements and scoping to solving them with time management. Based on the plan, gap analysis of their current service management system has been done, though ExcelIT does not had a proper service management system some trace of practice been analyzed for two weeks. Gap analysis was also divided by two sub parts. First one was test of design where they tested the current design and documentation such as process document, policy document and definition of their roles and responsibility and so on to understand the situation properly. Second part was test of effectiveness which is nothing but analyzing their practices for that some stakeholders are interviewed and transfer the inputs to the service management language to identify their confidence level. After analyzing gap analysis certain issues were identified such as design gaps and practice gaps and needs to redesign the 4 p’s (people, process, product and partner) in the part central system design (Cots & Casadesús2015, pp.515-533). Products as such tools and technology, people roles and responsibility, and processes are redesigned including partner aspects internal and external as well. All this design has to be generic so they could be implemented into entire organization. Then the report was shared with client and propose them to make modification to a certain label after distributing to the teams. The roles of Process manger, central point of contact, internal audits were to be distributed.  To decide this roles the capability, expertise and experience must considered able to appreciate the role. Also need to ensure one person does not involves with conflicting roles. After distributing roles the role based training was given to able them run their areas such as availability.  Then they went live to capture new metrics and planning iteration while monitored. Each iteration run 12 weeks and two months of monitoring to check weekly goal report. After summarize all the parts overall internal audit starts for six weeks. Internal audit activities were closing the gaps identified by previous processes. After 2 weeks Excel IT got ISO/IEC certified and hand over activities was done successfully.

Lack of management commitment	Organizational change concerns.
·         Reduction in management commitment due to changing priorities. ·         Structural changes to the organizational halfway through the engagement.	·         The initiative was a top management agenda, with very little involvement from the mid and junior management staff. ·         Support teams had very low understanding of the journey and thus minimal participation.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

   There are two type benefits can be constructed as Effective benefits and efficiency benefits from ISO 20000. Effective benefits are associates with better achievement of the intended goals such as value delivery, risk management and so on. Typical standard framework for this type of benefits are ISO 20000, ISO 27001 (Huang, Wu & Ching 2013, pp.1219-1240 ). Though ISO 20000 is primarily fit for enhancement of system effectiveness, however it naturally results into some secondary efficiency benefits too (Moreno et al. 2015, pp. 1-12). Efficiency benefits are associate with optimization of resource used to achieve the intended goals such as financial resource, human resource and time resource. Among multiple benefits achieved this journey resulted into a few following major benefits:

• Strong alignment between support and service delivery teams of ExcelIT through identification of generic and service team specific dependencies, defining OLA’s accordingly and mobilizing report and review mechanism of the same.

• Culture service ownership was also better defined
• Support team got higher level of clarity on their contribution and its impact on better customer satisfication thus changing their approach to value adding.
• Proactive planning, reporting and review agreements across ExcelIT base.

• Improved customer satisfiaction response rate improved by approximately 6% result by 9%
• Renewal of a high risk account as ExcelIT taken many positive steps towards betterment of good relationship with their non-IT clients.
• The initiative was a top management agenda, with very little involvement from the mid and junior management staff.
• Support teams had very low understanding of the journey and thus minimal participation.

Evaluate the current practices

Document and evaluate the differences

Train teams in ISO 20000

Define and implement the management system

Implement ISO 20000 process

Perform internal Audit

Perform external pre-audit

Perform external final audit

Get the ISO 20000 certified

Conclusion

The general objectives of the research is reached through the elaboration of a detailed certification process, with all the implementation items detailed and accomplished. The lessons learned are the information collected and documented during the project which may be used for the benefits of current project, future project or any project under execution by the ExcelIT. During any project, knowledge should be integrated, transferred created and explored in order to create new organizational value. Analyze the requirements for implementing the ISO 20000 evidencing the common grounds and how to simplify the parallel maintenance of such certifications complying with all of their requirements. Ii is suggested, that the subject be researched upon after implementation so to open a quite vast range of possibilities which shall serve as initial idea to numerous further researcher.

References

Cots, S, & Casadesús, M 2015, ‘Exploring the service management standard ISO 20000’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol. 26, no. 5-6, pp.515-533.

Disterer, G 2013, ‘ISO/IEC 27000, 27001 and 27002 for information security management’, Journal of Information Security, vol.4 no. 2, pp.92.

Mesquida, AL, & Mas, A 2015, ‘Integrating IT service management requirements into the organizational management system’, Computer standards & interfaces, vol.-37, pp.80-91.

Renault, A, Cortina, S & Barafort, B  2015, June, Towards a maturity model for ISO/IEC 20000-1 based on the TIPA for ITIL process capability assessment model, In International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, Springer, Cham.

Hoy, Z & Foley, A 2015, ‘A structured approach to integrating audits to create organisational efficiencies: ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 audits’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol.-26, no.-5, pp.690-702.

Huang, SJ, Wu, MS & Chen, LW 2013, ‘Critical success factors in aligning IT and business objectives: A Delphi study’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol.-24, no.-9, pp.1219-1240.

Moreno-Campos, E, Sanchez-Gordón, ML, Colomo-Palacios, R & de Amescua Seco, A 2014, June, Towards measuring the impact of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard: a systematic review, In European Conference on Software Process Improvement, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Ionita, I & Gordas, V 2013, ‘Impact of ISO/IEC 20000 series standards on development of an IT service management system’, Calitatea, vol.-134, pp.75.

Steinberg, RA 2013, ‘Measuring ITSM: Measuring, Reporting, and Modeling the IT Service Management Metrics that Matter Most to IT Senior Executives’, Trafford Publishing.

Wan, J & Jones, JD 2013, ‘Managing IT service management implementation complexity: from the perspective of the Warfield version of systems science’, Enterprise Information Systems, vol.-7, no.-4, pp.490-522.

Trusson, CR, Doherty, NF & Hislop, D 2014, ‘Knowledge sharing using IT service management tools: conflicting discourses and incompatible practices’, Information Systems Journal, vol.-24, no.-4, pp.347-371.

Marrone, M, Gacenga, F, Cater-Steel, A & Kolbe, L 2014, ‘IT service management: A cross-national study of ITIL adoption’, Communications of the association for information systems, vol-34.

Melendez, K, Dávila, A & Pessoa, M 2016, ‘Information technology service management models applied to medium and small organizations: A systematic literature review’, Computer Standards & Interfaces, vol.-47, pp.120-127.

Iden, J & Eikebrokk, TR 2013, ‘Implementing IT Service Management: A systematic literature review, International Journal of Information Management’, vol.-33, no.-3), pp.512-523.

Jäntti, M, Rout, T, Wen, L, Heikkinen, S & Cater-Steel, A 2013, June, Exploring the impact of IT service management process improvement initiatives: a case study approach, In International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.