Welcome to Service Management For Dummies. We think a service-driven economy makes this topic increasingly important. Clearly, the way people manage business and IT services is changing dramatically. Companies get into trouble when they don't look at their physical and business assets as a unified measure of their ability to manage customers' expectations and experiences.
We think you should focus on the intersection of business strategy, IT strategy, planning, and operations. Companies that plan to create an integrated service management platform are in a great position to evolve as opportunities and threats emerge.
Service management isn't a quick fix: It's stages of maturity that make your company better able to compete in a changing world. We hope that this book inspires you to take a different look at this very complicated and important area.
Service management is a big topic covering lots of important issues that you must understand, whether you're managing a data center, virtualizing your computing environment, looking for best practices, or getting a handle on all the technologies you need. We tie our service management discussions directly to the issue that companies care about most: meeting the key performance indicators for their businesses. We think that understanding service management from a business perspective better prepares you to help your company succeed.
We recommend starting with Part I, because it puts into context the new way of thinking about managing the services that define your company. When you're ready, dive into the technical details in Parts III and IV. In Part V, you're rewarded with case studies that give you a taste of what real companies are doing to make their service management strategies work.
We think this book will be useful to many people, but we have to admit that we chose a segment of the world to focus on when writing Service Management For Dummies. Here's who we think you are:
You're thinking about technology from a business perspective. You care more about IT-enabled business services than about technical systems. Perhaps we're preaching to the choir. We think you understand that you're doomed to failure if your organization continues treating IT like an isolated fiefdom.
You're a businessperson who wants results from the IT you've invested in over the past decade. You want a business-driven service management strategy.
You're an educated IT person who's having trouble focusing on service management (versus server or systems management). You want to see how you can better leverage your existing capabilities and resources to satisfy customer expectations and improve value.
Whoever you are, we welcome you on this journey!
Part I: Introducing Service Management
In this section, we provide an overview of how to think about service management. We summarize the business drivers and the technical focus, and provide a perspective on the all-important customer.
Part II: Getting the Foundation in Place
Before you can get into the details of service management, you need some context for best practices and standards. Starting with a strategy is important, and strategy is an important focus of Part II.
Part III: Service Management Technical Foundation
Service management has a lot of important technical underpinnings. In this part, we put the foundation in context with governance principles.
Part IV: Nitty-Gritty Service Management
The data center and its many supporting services and infrastructure are the heart of this part. If you want to know how the data center is changing — with virtualization and cloud computing becoming important, for example — this is the part for you. We cover important enablers of service management, including security, business service management, and desktop management.
Part V: Real Life with Service Management
There's nothing like hearing from real people who've made a difference for their real organizations with service management. In this part, some of those people share their best practices.
Part VI: The Part of Tens
If you're new to the For Dummies treasure trove, you may be unfamiliar with the Part of Tens. Here, Wiley editors torture For Dummies authors into creating useful, accessible lists of ten (more or less) elucidating elements. We started these chapters kicking and screaming but ultimately were very glad that they're here. We think you'll be glad too.
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In this book, we give you an overview of service management and introduce all of its significant components. Each of the issues we discuss in this book could be the subject of a full-length book, however.
Service management is a big theme for us at Hurwitz & Associates. We invite you to visit our Web site at www.hurwitz.com and sign up for our newsletter.