In This Chapter
Getting familiar with service management standards and best practices
Mining eSourcing and maturity models
Resources for chief information officers
Finding free resources from your favorite vendors
We've spoken with lots of people who have to manage the delivery of IT services at their companies, and we share some of their experiences with you in Part V. What's the number-one lesson? Don't reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of existing best practices by sending your team for certification programs and using others' experiences when planning.
This chapter lists resources that we hope you'll find useful as you plan and execute your service management strategy.
We here at Hurwitz & Associates, the authors of Service Management For Dummies and Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies, 2nd Edition (along with other books, research reports, and commentary), are happy to help you with your service management questions. We can give a talk, do specialized research, and help you find the right technology partners. We invite you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter and visit our Web site.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of books on best practices for IT service management. ITIL was created in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and has become one of the most comprehensive sets of best practices on service management. The five core books in ITIL Version 3 — introduced in 2007 — focus on service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, and continuous service improvement. ITIL emphasizes the importance of taking a life-cycle approach to service management. We have a lot more to say about implementing ITIL in Chapter 5.
Use the ITIL Central Web site to find helpful information about implementing ITIL best practices at your company and discover educational opportunities for yourself. The Web site offers an ITIL toolkit with materials to help you get started, including fact sheets on the major ITIL disciplines.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) brings together representatives from all over the world to agree on international business standards. Many thousands of standards are related to all matters of doing business. The most relevant standards for technology are developed by the industry along with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Several of these standards — such as ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 20000, and ISO/IEC 38500 — are specific to the requirements for an effective service management system. We provide a short summary of the ISO service management standards in Chapter 4.
www.isaca.org and www.isaca.org/cobit
The Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) is a membership organization for information governance, control, security, and employee auditing. The organization has set many standards for IT auditing and control, and it offers a certification program in IT governance.
ISACA and its affiliate, the IT Governance Institute, first released the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) in 1996. Many updates have been made since that time, including COBIT 4.1 in 2007.
COBIT is an IT governance framework and tool set designed to help businesses understand the relationship among technology, regulatory compliance, and controls, as well as the management of business risks. The COBIT publications are available free of charge on the Web site.
The eSourcing Capability Model (eSCM) is a framework developed at Carnegie Mellon University that is intended to provide a best-practices model for improving relationships between customers and suppliers. eSCM has two distinct models:
eSCM-SP: A best-practices model for service providers in IT-enabled sourcing. Use it as both an improvement road map and a certification standard.
eSCM-CL: A best-practices model for client organizations and companies that outsource IT services to external service providers. The eSCM helps client organizations improve the results they get from their service providers.
Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process-improvement best-practices model used to improve processes in a project or organization. It was developed by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in connection with representatives of industry and government.
www.tmforum.org/BusinessProcessFramework/1647/home.html
The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) Business Process Framework helps build a common vocabulary for both business and functional processes in the communications industry. The framework helps businesses prioritize operational areas based on those that will have the greatest impact on the business. The framework covers life-cycle, operational, and corporate management.
TechTarget.com is a comprehensive online resource for all sorts of IT-related information, providing links to IT communities that focus on different areas of interest. SearchCIO.com, for example, has lots of information about IT products and software vendors targeted to the needs of chief information officers and senior IT executives in large enterprises. Another site you may want to check out is SearchCompliance.com — which, as you may have guessed, focuses on information about creating a manageable compliance infrastructure.