In This Chapter
Charting the service management journey
Discovering the four key elements that are part of the journey
Measuring, monitoring, and optimizing
We hope you understand that service management isn't just an operational issue; it's also a business issue. In Chapter 6, we discuss how a service management plan supports the actual service strategy. The types of services that your organization needs to manage are much more diverse than ever before. To get started with service management, you need to take a holistic approach. You need to understand that just about every asset under your control−be it physical or virtual −must be managed in a way that allows you to integrate all your capabilities and resources so that you can direct and control the costs, quality, and value of your services.
In Chapter 6, we also talk about some of the hard work involved in setting a new direction for service management, including education, strategy development, assessment, and design.
In this chapter, we give you some ideas of how to put your service management plan into action. First, however, here are two key things that you shouldn't do:
Don't think of service management as being just an IT operations problem. In other words, you shouldn't begin by sending the IT staff to get best-practices certifications and assume that certification alone will help you deliver a successful service management plan. Before you send anyone for training, make sure that everyone in the organization understands the business goals of service management, as well what service management is and why it's imperative to the company's long-term success. You need to start by recognizing that the strategy of the business needs to be continually reevaluated in harmony with the service strategy and the service management plan. Your service management strategy will involve a collaboration among the chief executive, operations, and information officers because it involves strategy, business operations, and IT.
Don't try to do everything at the same time. You need a vision for the future and an incremental road map that describes how you'll travel from where you are to where you want your services to be.
In this chapter, we offer some suggestions about how to optimize your business through service management. We talk about some key components of service management, including education, strategy development, needs assessment, and strategy design. We also talk about another key component of a service management plan: the need to measure, monitor, and optimize your approach to achieve the business outcomes that your business needs.
Note
The most important thing to keep in mind is that not every company is at the same place in its journey toward service management. Therefore, your company may have a different entry point from another company, based on how much your company has already done.
In the following sections, we discuss four key areas that you need to consider when you're actually implementing service management.
Education is crucial because one of the biggest limiters of service management is human understanding of service management. Educating the team is at the heart of getting started.
Tip
The best starting point for education is making sure that everyone understands the foundation of the business itself. Employees should understand the following aspects of the business and be able to answer the following questions:
The company's industry: Is your company in transportation, hospitality, or manufacturing, for example?
Customer expectations: Do you understand how to provide value to your customers? What is the customer experience of working with your company like?
Logical components: What are all the pieces that are necessary to make your business work well?
Most critical services: What business services and supporting IT services are most critical to your customers and stakeholders?
Biggest contributor to the cost, quality, and value of the business services: What are the most expensive aspects of your business services? Are they important to overall quality and value for your customers and partners?
This process may not sound like rocket science, and it isn't! Everyone in the company should have this knowledge, which takes on a new sense of urgency in the service management area because you're on the front line in terms of ensuring that your company understands its goals, objectives, and customer expectations.
Certification classes in industry best practices and standards can help operations get ready for a service management approach. In addition to the classes, you can find armloads of the books associated with the certification programs. Couple these programs with a focus on your service strategy, which is driven by the business strategy. Classes in best practices taken in isolation won't help you reach your business objectives. If these best practices are going to be meaningful, everyone in the business needs the same level of understanding of what these best practices will be applied to.
One of the most important requirements for service management is putting a strategy in place, which involves understanding what your business looks like today and how it may change in the future. The first thing to do is establish objectives. You need to ask yourself, "What do I really want to achieve?" Remember that your service management plan is based on the service strategy and needs to support changing business conditions and customer expectations.
Remember our example bank, ABC Financial, from earlier chapters? Although the bank is well established in its ability to provide automated teller machines (ATMs) to its customers, it needs to plan for a future that may be different from the present and the past. It needs to understand the expectations of its customers and anticipate how those expectations may change.
ABC Financial has a fundamental business goal of accepting deposits and providing cash to customers through its system of ATMs. Various key performance indicators (KPIs; see Chapter 5) are associated with this goal: Cash must be available for customers 24 hours a day; each ATM must be fully functioning 99 percent of the time; and at least one ATM must be functioning within a specific geographic radius. The operations team at ABC Financial initiates a cost-cutting initiative, expecting to save $800,000 in annual maintenance fees on the company's ATMs. This plan was put in place based on company goals for cost cutbacks. The operations and ATM-services divisions, however, didn't collaborate on plans for this new project. Each division had real goals to achieve but didn't evaluate the impact of the cost-cutting measures on customer expectations.
The new ATM maintenance plan didn't actually save money for the bank; the downtime was so great that it destroyed previously strong customer relationships. Customers moved to competitors, and the resulting losses to the bank were far greater than the dollars saved from the cost-cutting measures. Lesson learned: The overall goals for the business need to be evaluated in context with one another, and everyone in the company needs to understand what these goals are before any decisions about service management are made.
Tip
Companies that are prepared for the future have well-articulated corporate goals that are understood and followed throughout the enterprise. An understanding of corporate goals becomes part of the business fabric of the organization.
Note
Service management begins with the business. Good service management requires leadership so that employees understand their responsibilities within the context of the broader business goals and objectives of the enterprise. Inherent conflicts are likely to arise between divisions or departments that are trying to achieve specific KPIs. These conflicts need to be anticipated and planned for at the enterprise level to create a service management plan that produces consistent results.
When your company's service strategy is in place, it's time to do an assessment. This assessment includes a step-by-step approach to understanding the business you're in and developing a vision for the future. You need to specify what services your business offers and what the company needs to achieve your vision. When you know what your objectives are, you can assess your current service management capability around those particular goals. At this time, you can find the gaps in your service management capability and develop a plan to deal with those gaps. It's important to evaluate what you have if you expect to be able to locate and close the gaps and achieve your strategy.
An organization can't thrive in a competitive market unless everyone on the technical and business sides knows the company's objectives, which includes understanding the definitions of the business and the customer and knowing how the company plans to meet its objectives. A member of the IT staff who's responsible for keeping company servers up and running, for example, must understand his responsibilities in the context of the IT-enabled business services that the individual servers are part of. Just understanding the technical requirements for managing the servers isn't sufficient; the staff member also needs to have a realistic understanding of the business implications of downtime and the relative significance to the business of the different applications running on those servers.
Assessing where you are today is really about evaluating your technical and organizational readiness for implementing your service management plan. You may already have many of the technical components required for a well-integrated infrastructure, but you may maintain them in a siloed manner (see Chapter 6). By evaluating your infrastructure from the perspective of an integrated enterprise, you may find that you don't need much in the way of additional technology. You may determine, however, that you do need a center of excellence (refer to the "Creating centers of excellence" sidebar, earlier in this chapter) that empowers business and IT to leverage the technology at hand to reach new levels of integration and success.
Here are some questions you may want to ask during the assessment process:
Do you have a consistent way to manage assets across your organization?
Do you have a process for change and configuration that ensures that all members of the organization have reliable access to the service configuration information they need to perform their responsibilities?
Can you ensure that business services created and maintained by one division are made available in a consistent manner across other areas of your organization?
Will these business services help you reach your goals when they're adapted to the various divisions of the company?
Do you have a process for assessing whether your technical and business divisions are performing at the right levels to keep customers satisfied?
Have you developed a process to identify business services and encourage sharing across the enterprise where appropriate?
Can you monitor and measure the effect of your strategy on demands for security, storage, and hardware?
Are organizational structures in place that support creative knowledge sharing across business and IT teams?
Have you identified roadblocks −such as outdated or inflexible business processes or people who place personal power ahead of delivering value to customers and business stakeholders −that may hamper your success in a collaborative business/IT world?
Does your corporate culture support processes that help balance the management of individual components against the broader needs of managing customer experience?
When you understand the gaps, you can start to design your service management plan. Because you've done (or will do) an assessment, this design isn't a matter of everyone just grabbing a hammer to build a house; the design needs to be well thought out. You need to understand and plan for service-level commitments when you're designing solutions and services. If you wait until services are delivered to figure out service levels and other management issues, you've waited too long. How will you make sure that you have the capacity, security, and financing available?
We mention reusable components in Chapter 6, and you certainly should consider this concept to be part of the design process. The discovery of services shouldn't be confined to one department or even confined to your company; you also need to look at your broader ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers. You aren't discovering just pieces of code, for example; you're also discovering what business processes exist in your company and what resources they need to access or integrate with. Look for overlapping or contradictory business processes, and fix them before they cause serious business problems.
Note
An essential ingredient of a successful approach to service management is a well-defined, rationalized, and integrated approach to infrastructure. It's particularly important to ensure that you have a well-integrated architecture to support the intersecting physical, virtual, and IT worlds. This area is where service oriented architecture (SOA) may be very helpful. (See Chapter 6 for some basic definitions of SOA.) If your service strategy centers on the development of a stand-alone data center, your infrastructure requirements may not require a SOA approach. Your top priority, however, should be to create a road map that lays out where you are today and defines your steps to the future. A road map helps by ensuring that you take a measured, step-by-step approach to developing and defining your infrastructure. You shouldn't plan to do everything at the same time.
One reason why moving too quickly can be a problem is that you may be tempted to skip some of the details. Throughout the process, details matter. You must pay attention to details such as fine-tuning your configuration, looking at the dependencies among services, and considering how the pieces fit together in context with customer expectations and change.
You've educated your team, assessed your readiness for service management, and designed your service management plan. Do you sit back in a comfy chair and wait for the profits to roll in? No! Your business and operational strategies are never static. You always have more work to do because the business environment changes constantly. (Refer to the Netflix example in Chapter 6. That company was able to challenge traditional video stores by changing to a technology-driven business model.) Technological and business change happens so quickly that you can never assume that your strategy is complete.
Tip
The processes you create to measure, monitor, and optimize your results are critical components of any service management plan. Thinking about the measurements you need as you begin developing your service management plan is important. These measurements should be designed to help you meet your objectives. Your business doesn't operate in a static environment; therefore, your capabilities for monitoring and measuring must always be active. You need to monitor and measure against your service objectives on an ongoing basis to ensure that you understand how your business is performing on a day-to-day basis and optimize your future outcomes.
To continue the ABC Financial example, suppose that one division of the company decided on several business objectives to help measure and monitor results related to ATM services. Unfortunately, ABC Financial's monitoring process was based on a series of KPIs that were inconsistent across the company. The company didn't have its eye on the ball during a crucial economic period. Customers expected high (99.9 percent) availability at ATMs and wouldn't be satisfied with anything less. ABC Financial let cost-cutting measures interfere with its ability to meet its KPI for ATM availability. The company suffered because it didn't measure and monitor the right outcomes.
The monitoring-and-measuring process must be designed to make allowances for evaluating changes in quality relative to cost. As ABC Financial adjusts its service strategy, for example, it has many trade-offs to consider. In its desire to improve customer satisfaction, it may decide to include several high-quality new products that customers want but that are very expensive to maintain. As it turns out, the value of these products is high for only a small segment of the customer base, and the cost of producing and maintaining these products is high. It's unwise to optimize a subsystem (such as new ATM services) at the expense of a service management system. The result can be an unmanageable cost structure.