White Papers

This article outlines the common challenges and objectives of ICT Service providers today, particularly around managing the controls and structures that enable and support ICT governance.

Read on to find out how an Integrated ICT Service Lifecycle Framework that adopts a centralised Lifecycle Management Office can ensure adherance and compliance to all policies and standards across the ICT Service Lifecycle.

It also explains the concept of  the Service Management Office (SMO) as part of a Lifecycle  Management Office (LMO)  and describes why  a SMO  is  key to driving the adoption of core ITIL principles.

Senior IT managers are increasingly being expected to be able to demonstrate the business value of IT Services and the alignment of their delivery to the business strategy. Effective Service Portfolio Management requires the value, as opposed to just the cost, of each IT service be understood.

Business benefit cannot be demonstrated just at senior levels of IT as there needs to be a business focus throughout the whole of the IT organisation. This means that what is often a technology-driven approach to the delivery of IT services needs to change to a business driven approach. Hence a transformation from a "Technology" Service Provider to a "Business" Service Provider is needed. This is best approached through a Transformation Journey (which is the subject of a separate whitepaper from ProActive Services).

Whilst there has been a lot of focus on how to identify and deliver business value for new IT services to ensure that the IT budget delivers tangible benefits, using the likes of Val-IT and P3O methodologies, that focus often stops at the point that the new IT service is handed-over to the operations staff. There is therefore not always the same focus on the alignment of BAU activities to business value. Decisions on the management of the IT Service Portfolio tend not to go past the development phase and often focus on the application rather than the end-to end IT service. This creates gaps in an IT organisation's ability to effectively deliver across the whole of the IT Service lifecycle. While the Opex budget is often larger than the Capex budget, the same emphasis on business value and governance is often missing, resulting in a lack of consistency in savings, efficiency and effectiveness in BAU.

Historically the failure of IT organisations to demonstrate business value, particularly in the delivery of IT services rather than in their development, has been a key reason for the rise of outsourcing as a complete or partial solution. The failure to demonstrate business value, results in the IT organisation being seen as a necessary evil and not a core part of the business. Hence cost and not value is the driver resulting in continued pressure on the IT budget and the search for what are perceived to be more cost-effective solutions.

The onset of Cloud computing will only add further pressure to the need for providers, whether internal and external, to demonstrate business value. The decision to adopt public or private cloud technology requires a good understanding of the value that can be achieved from existing services compared with cloud options including any risks involved such as the location of data hosting, a limited ability to tailor solutions to meet business requirements, etc. Implementing a public cloud solution requires a transformation of skills and capability from technology to the management of the delivery of IT services.

Whilst IT Service Management has long advocated that to be successful, there needs to be engagement with the business, there can be a hesitancy to engage with key business stakeholders regarding business value and how this will be measured to ensure that the predicted benefits are realised. This has proven the graveyard of many initiatives.

The challenge is to find a way to identify and demonstrate business value that can be used to drive the Transformation Journey such that the Business and IT benefit. However, "transformation" does not necessarily enjoy a reputation for being cost-effective and successful. Hence we need to use more a more "agile" approach.

It is fact that the number of NZ organisations being audited is on the increase. If you have not been audited yet, you are likely to be audited in the near future.

One of the major software manufacturers has a 3 year cycle which guides their auditing process. During year 1 Blue Chip Companies are typically audited. During year 2, government organisations are audited and during year 3, university & education institutions are audited. Then during year 4 they start with blue chip companies again and so forth.

The key message here is that they audit you, then wait for you to lose focus on your software management processes and then they audit you again!

Companies without suitable software management processes will typically initiate the implementation of these processes after they were audited, especially if there are penalties involved. However, if the focus on these processes is not maintained, they could be very vulnerable again after a 3 year period, and a perfect candidate for another audit.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has increased its focus on small businesses worldwide since 2006. This is being encouraged through the use of bounties in certain countries (e.g. in Australia bounties of up to $20k are possible).

This case study shows how a retail organisation improved the ability of service operations to receive and support solutions from projects. It sets out the issues that are common for many organisations, and identifies what was implemented to improve the ability of IT to successfully transition and support the services to the required quality.

Traditionally in IT there has often been a disjoint between the part of the IT organisation responsible for the management and delivery of IT projects and those responsible for day to day delivery of the IT services. Sometimes an organisation recognises that there is room for improvement but underestimates the positive impact that a good operational readiness process can have.

In addition, a balance needs to be struck between pricing solutions to win business and ensuring the costs of important service and operational requirements are included. The right amount of resources to deliver within agreed costs is always a challenge. Getting this balance wrong will often mean that the IT operational budget is left to resolve service operation quality issues.

IT Service Management (ITSM) maturity assessments have been around for over ten years and many organisations have used them over that time as part of an overall initiative to implement good practice. However, it is likely that in many cases, the full benefits of maturity assessment are not being realised. Sometimes there is a view that assessments are just part of the process of service improvement and are undertaken because 'good practice says that they should be' rather that with the objective of using the results of assessment to drive ongoing improvement to maximise benefit.

This paper looks at the purpose of IT process maturity assessment from the three viewpoints of ITIL, COBIT and international standard ISO/IEC 15504. It then provides a short history of maturity assessment from the mid 1980s up to the early 2000s and outlines the strengths and weaknesses of earlier models. The paper then goes on to describe the Process Maturity Framework, introduced in ITIL V2 and continued in V3, and explains how ProActive has used it since 2005 as a means of unlocking real value for our clients by driving ongoing business-focused service improvement.

The use of metrics is an essential component of IT Service Management. It provides a mechanism for ensuring that services and processes deliver the required outcomes and remain efficient and effective. Yet the use of metrics does not guarantee a successful outcome. Indeed, a poor choice of metric may adversely affect performance and hinder the achievement of the desired objective. This whitepaper examines why this can happen, provides some real-life examples and offers some guidelines for the selection of effective metrics.

There has been debate as to whether process improvement is fundamentally different to service improvement. The ITIL V3 publication Continual Service Improvement covers both aspects of quality improvement and metrics are a vital component of both. While much of this paper will look at metrics from a process perspective, many of the principles (or maxims) are equally relevant to the service perspective.

Conventional wisdom states that Service Catalogues are best designed from the top down, that is by starting with the business and asking them what services do they receive from the IT service provider. It is indeed important to have a business-focused view of IT services but it is often the case that the business does not have a common view of services. Some areas may have a very clear idea of what they get and how these service offerings support their business activity other areas may be much less clear and feel as though they are being put 'on the spot' when the question is asked.

With time and effort, IT and the business can together work out what should appear in the business view of the Service Catalogue. Does that mean that no work can be done behind the scenes to facilitate the process and allow the service provider to start to clarify its own view of the service hierarchy that supports business-facing services? On the contrary, this presentation describes a bottom-up approach to establishing such a hierarchy that supports the definition of those business-facing services.