The Purpose of Service Operation

The purpose of the service operation stage of the service lifecycle is to deliver the service at the level that was agreed to through the service level management process. This includes performing all the activities required to deliver the service as well as managing the technology used to deliver the service (such as applying updates, backing up data, and so on).

Service operation must deliver the service effectively, but also has to ensure that the cost of that delivery is within the operational costs that formed part of the original business case. Should a service be operated at a higher cost than was originally envisaged, the benefits that were planned, such as cost savings, may never be realized.

Service operation staff members must view the service as a whole and be given the tools they need to evaluate whether the delivery meets the standard required. It is a common error to have staff members concentrate on individual aspects of a service or to ignore those parts of the service provided by third parties, losing sight of the end-to-end service as it appears to the customer. Technology can be used to spot deviations from expected service or response levels very quickly, allowing remedial action to be put in place immediately.

The Objectives of Service Operation

The objectives of service operation follow on from its purpose. Service operation is what the customer sees and experiences. Their perception of the quality of the service provision is based on their experience, not on the design or implementation of the service, which may or may not have been done well. It is important to remember that service operation is far more than just managing the components that make up the service. It is in service operation that it all comes together . . . or all falls apart! So the first objective is to maintain business satisfaction and confidence in IT through effective and efficient delivery and support of the service as agreed in the service level agreement (SLA); this ensures that the business receives the level of service it expects. The second objective supports the first; it is to minimize the impact of service outages on day-to-day business activities—by finding, preventing, and resolving incidents and problems that could impact the business. Some service outages are inevitable; service operation will work to reduce both the number and impact of outages. The service operation process of problem management aims to reduce the recurrence of incidents that disrupt business activities, while incident management aims to resolve those incidents that do occur as quickly as possible.

Service operation is also responsible for controlling access to IT services. The final objective is to protect the services from unauthorized access. The access management process ensures that only authorized users can have access to the services provided.

The Scope of Service Operation

The scope of service operation, described in the ITIL framework, includes the “processes, functions, organization, and tools” that are used to deliver and support the agreed services. This lifecycle stage is responsible for performing the critical day-to-day activities and processes that ensure the service meets the business requirement and enables the business to achieve its objectives. It also collects the performance data that will be required by continual service improvement to identify and track improvement opportunities. The ITIL Service Operation publication provides guidance on the successful management of the following:

The Services Themselves This includes all the activities required to deliver the services consistently within the agreed service levels. These activities may be carried out by the service provider, an external supplier, or the user or customer of a particular service.

The Service Management Processes These include the service operation processes of event, incident, problem, access management, and request fulfilment. (We will be looking at the service operation processes in Chapter 34, “Service Operation Processes: Incident and Problem Management,” Chapter 35, “Service Operation Processes: Request Fulfilment,” Chapter 36, “Service Operation Processes: Event Management,” and Chapter 37, “Service Operation Processes: Access Management.”) In addition to these processes, service operation is responsible for carrying out activities associated with processes that originated in other lifecycle stages. Figure 32.1 shows these processes. Capacity management, for example, is a design process; however, the day-to-day monitoring and tuning of capacity takes place in service operation. Another example is service level management, which is a process that is undertaken as part of service design; once it’s operational, however, the monitoring and reporting of the service performance takes place during the operation phase. A process such as strategy management for IT services is outside of the scope of service operation because it is concerned with longer-term planning and improvement activities, but another service strategy process, financial management for IT Services, is included as the day-to-day management of budgets and takes place in operation. It is essential, therefore, that all of the processes that occur during the operation phase work effectively and efficiently. Continual service improvement (CSI) also depends on service operation producing the required information to allow improvement opportunities to be identified, baselines to be taken, and the success of any improvements measured.

Figure 32.1 shows how service operation is responsible for activities in processes from the other lifecycle stages.

The Technology Delivering IT services depends on the use of appropriate technology such as networks, desktops, servers, databases, and monitoring tools. Service operation is responsible for managing the technology that delivers the services.

The People Despite automation, service operation depends on the actions of the support staff members to ensure that the service runs as it should. Their management of the technology and processes is the key to successful service delivery.

Service Strategy

Service strategy is at the core of the service lifecycle. It is the role of strategy to understand the organizational objectives and customer needs. People, processes, and products should support the strategy. ITIL service strategy asks why something is to be done before thinking of how. It helps service providers to set objectives and to set expectations of performance for serving customers and markets. It also helps to identify, select, and prioritize opportunities. Service strategy ensures that providers understand and can handle the costs and risks associated with their service portfolios.

The complete list of service strategy processes includes strategy management for IT services, service portfolio management, financial management for IT services, demand management, and business relationship management. These processes impact service operation in the following ways:

• The success or otherwise of the services provided in service operation in meeting the business requirement would confirm whether the strategy management for IT services has been effective.
• Service portfolio management provides service operation with advance notice of future requirements through the pipeline, while the service catalog defines what is to be provided by service operation (in other words, it defines service operation’s scope).
• If demand management has been successful, service operation will be able to cope with the level of demand for the service, and any fluctuations in that demand, and will have techniques available to affect the levels of demand where required.
• Both financial management for IT services and business relationship management are strategic processes that take place during the service operation lifecycle stage; managing budgets and liaising with the business at a senior level are ongoing activities that touch all areas of the lifecycle.

Service Design

Service design turns strategic ideas into deliverables. The design must always consider the strategy, to ensure that services are designed with the business objectives in mind. Design considers the whole IT organization and how it will deliver and support the services, turning the service strategy into a plan for delivering the business objectives. Requirements from service operation processes, people, and tools must be taken into account to ensure that the design will work in the operational environment. Remember, design includes changes to existing services.

The complete list of service design processes includes design coordination, service catalog management, service level management, availability management, capacity management, IT service continuity management, information security management, and supplier management. Through these processes, design ensures that both the utility and the warranty of the new or changed service is considered in design, covering the continuity of the service, its achievement of service levels, and conformance to security standards and regulations.

• Design coordination is responsible for ensuring that the service operation requirements are included in the design and that an operations plan exists.
• The service catalog, as stated previously, defines the scope of service operation because it provides information about all operational services.
• Service operation provides the monitoring and metrics needed to manage the delivery of the availability and capacity targets and identify areas of concern.
• The reporting against service level targets and any actions required to deliver a service improvement plan take place as part of service operation.
• IT service continuity plans are tested regularly as part of operations, and any invocation of the plan would be to ensure that service operation is able to continue to deliver the required services to the business.
• Information security provides the policies that access management implements in operation
• Supplier management is dependent upon the metrics from live operational services to know whether the suppliers are providing the contracted services.

Service Transition

Service transition provides guidance for developing and improving capabilities for introducing new and changed services into supported environments. The value of a service is identified in strategy, and the service is designed to deliver that value. Service transition ensures that the value is realized; it does so by enabling the necessary changes to take place without unacceptable risks to existing services. It enables the implementation of new services, and the modification of existing services, to ensure that the services provided deliver the service strategy of achieving the business objectives and that the benefits of the service design are fully realized. Service transition also introduces the service knowledge management system, which ensures that knowledge is stored and made available to all stages of the service lifecycle and that lessons are learned and decisions are backed with factual data, leading to improved efficiency and effectiveness over time.

The complete list of service transition processes includes transition planning and support, change management, service asset and configuration management, release and deployment management, service validation and testing, change evaluation, and knowledge management. Each process has a role to play to ensure that beneficial changes can take place and, as a consequence, the service can be introduced and will work as transitioned.

• Service asset and configuration management provides service operation with detailed knowledge of how configuration items are combined to deliver the service, showing the relationships and dependencies between these items.
• Release and deployment management ensures that the changes are delivered into the live environment without disrupting the existing services.
• Service validation and testing provides quality assurance, establishing that the service design and release will deliver into service operation a new or changed service or service offering that is fit for purpose and fit for use.
• Change evaluation checks the actual performance and outcomes of the new or changed service in service operation against the predicted performance and outcomes. Successful completion of the change evaluation ensures that the service can be formally closed and handed over to the service operation functions and CSI.
• Knowledge management provides knowledge base articles that can be of great use to incident, problem, and request processes.

Service Operation

Service operation, the subject of this section, describes best practice for managing services in supported environments. It includes guidance on achieving effectiveness, efficiency, stability, and security in the delivery and support of services to ensure value for the customer, the users, and the service provider. Without this, the services would not deliver the value required, and the achievement of business objectives would become difficult or impossible.

The service operation stage is therefore critical to delivering the design and, in doing so, achieving the service strategy. Service operation provides detailed guidance for delivering the service within the agreed service levels by tackling issues both proactively through problem and event management and reactively through incident management. It provides those delivering the service with guidance on managing the availability of services, controlling demand, optimizing capacity utilization, scheduling operations, and avoiding or resolving service incidents and managing problems. It includes advice on shared services, utility computing, web services, and mobile commerce. By delivering the services to the agreed levels, service operation enables the business to use the services to achieve its business objectives.

The complete list of service operation processes includes event management, incident management, request fulfilment, problem management, and access management. We shall be considering each of these later. Each process has a role to play to ensure the delivery of services within the agreed service levels. Service operation also describes the four service operation functions: the service desk, technical management, IT operations management, and application management. Each function is responsible for managing its own area of delivery across all stages of the lifecycle.

Continual Service Improvement

The final stage of the lifecycle is continual service improvement (CSI). CSI ensures that the service provider continues to provide value to customers by ensuring that the strategy, design, transition, and operation of the services is under constant review. Feedback from any stage of the service lifecycle can be used to identify improvement opportunities for any other stage of the lifecycle. This ensures that opportunities for improvement are recognized, evaluated, and implemented when justified. These may include improvements in the quality of the service or the capabilities of the service provider. It may be developing ways of doing things better, or doing them at the same level but more efficiently. Improvements may be major or small and incremental. CSI enables every new operation to incorporate lessons from previous operations.

CSI ensures that feedback from every lifecycle stage is captured, analyzed, and acted upon. Service operation is the source of information regarding the performance of services, and so the service operation lifecycle stage is an important source of information for CSI. Many of the improvement initiatives driven by CSI will directly affect service operation processes, products, and people; improvements to other lifecycle stages may lead indirectly to improved operational performance.

The CSI approach to improvement is based on establishing a baseline and checking to see whether the improvement actions have been effective. It uses the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, together with service measurement, demonstrating value with metrics, and conducting maturity assessments. The seven-step improvement process provides a framework for these approaches.

Functions and Processes in Service Operation

Now let’s look at the functions and processes in service operation—you should remember this from your Foundation course.

Process A process is defined as “a set of coordinated activities combining resources and capabilities to produce an outcome that creates value for the customer.”

Function A function is “a unit of an organization specialized to perform certain types of work and responsible for specific outcomes.”

A process for dealing with incidents comprises the coordinated activities of logging the call, prioritizing it, diagnosing it, and so on. The outcome that creates value is the user (hopefully) being able to work again. The service desk that carries out this process is a function. It is a specialized group that is responsible for carrying out activities within a process—for example, providing a fix to an incident. Make sure you understand the difference!

We will now examine the processes in service operation briefly. We shall be looking at these in more detail in later chapters.

Event Management This process is concerned with having useful notifications about the status of the IT infrastructure and services. Event management sets up rules to ensure that events are generated so that they can be monitored, captured, and acted upon if necessary.

Incident Management The purpose of incident management is to return normal IT service to users as quickly as possible. This may prompt the question, How do we define normal service? The answer is that it is the level of service specified, and agreed to, in the SLA. The goal is to minimize the adverse impact of incidents on the business, and thus on service quality and business productivity. The objective of incident management is to ensure that the best possible levels of business-aligned service quality are maintained.

Problem Management The responsibility of problem management is to manage the lifecycle of problems, which includes monitoring and reviewing the process in addition to managing problems to their conclusion. Problem management is about the prevention and reduction of incidents, solving and removing their root cause. At the very least, if an incident cannot be prevented, then the impact to the business should be reduced through the provision of work-arounds provided through the known error database.

Request Fulfilment The objectives of the request fulfilment process is to log and fulfil standard requests for users in a simple, efficient way. For a request to qualify, a predefined approval and qualification process must exist. Request fulfilment also provides information to users about the availability of services and how to obtain them. Users can request and receive the service or the software/hardware they require to use the service. Request fulfilment is also the channel for general information, complaints, and comments.

Access Management Access management is responsible for putting the policies of availability and information security management into day-to-day practice. It is essential to control access to protect an organization’s data and intellectual property while at the same time enabling authorized users to have the access they need. Access management is not responsible for ensuring that this access is available at all agreed times—this is provided by availability management.

Now we will look briefly at the service operation functions. Again, we will be examining these in more detail later, in Chapter 39, “Organizing for Service Operation.”

The Service Desk The service desk not only provides incident resolution and request fulfilment directly, it is also the single point of contact for the rest of IT. It provides a straightforward interface and ensures that more complex incidents and requests are allocated to the appropriately skilled people.

Technical Management This refers to the various groups, departments, or teams that provide technical expertise and overall management of the IT infrastructure for an organization. Technical management provides detailed technical skills and the resources needed to support the ongoing operation of the IT infrastructure and plays an important role in the design, testing, release, and improvement of IT services.

Operations Management Operations management’s role is to execute the ongoing activities and procedures required to manage and maintain the IT infrastructure, thus delivering and supporting IT services at the agreed levels. It has two subfunctions. The first is IT operations control, which is usually staffed by shifts of operators who carry out routine operational tasks and centralized monitoring and control activities, usually using an operations bridge or network operations center. The other subfunction is facilities management. It refers to the management of the physical IT environment, usually data centers or computer rooms. In many organizations, technical and application management are colocated with IT operations in large data centers.

Application Management The final function is application management, which is responsible for managing applications throughout their lifecycle. The application management function may be performed by any department, group, or team involved in managing and supporting operational applications. Application management should also play a significant role in the design, testing, and improvement of applications that form part of IT services. It makes recommendations about whether it is best to source applications from third parties or to develop them internally. Finally, it focuses on the ongoing management and maintenance of applications that takes place once applications have been deployed.