Two strategies in ITIL

ITIL Service Strategy provides access to prove best practice based on the skill and knowledge of experienced industry practitioners in adopting a standardized and controlled approach to service management. Although this publication can be used and applied in isolation, it is recommended that it is used in conjunction with the other core ITIL publications. All the core publications need to be read to appreciate and understand the overall life-cycle of services and IT Service Management. Selecting and adopting the best practice as recommended in this publication will assist organizations in delivering significant benefits.

Adopting and implementing standard and consistent approach for service strategy will support the ability to link activities performed by the service provider to the outcomes that are critical to internal or external customers. As a result, the service provider will be seen to contribute to the value (and not just the costs) of the organization. Enabling the service provider to have a clear understanding of what type and levels of service will make its customers successful.The service provider will achieve this through a process of defining strategies and services, ensuring a consistent repeatable approach to define how value will be built and delivered that is accessible to all stakeholders. Enable the service provider to respond quickly and effectively to changes in the business environment, ensuring increased competitive advantage over time.

Strategy Management for IT Services:

Service Strategy has 4 processes. They are as follows:

1. Service Portfolio Management: Service portfolio management will ensure that every proposed new service or any strategic change to an existing service is analyzed to determine the level of investment required.

2. Financial Management for IT Services: Financial management for IT services indicates that the service cost is significantly more or less than anticipated, thus impacting the potential return on investment for that service.

3. Demand Management : Demand management provides information about the patterns of business activities that is used to determine the utilization and expected return on investment for the service.

4. Business Relationship Management: Business relationship management initiates requests, obtains business information and requirements that are used in defining services.

Service Design has 8 processes. They are as follows:

1. Design Coordination: The goals and objectives of the service design stage are met by providing and maintaining a single point of coordination and control for all the activities and processes within this stage of the service life-cycle.

2. Service Catalogue Management: Provides the means of devoting the care and attention in a consistent fashion, ensuring that the organization accrues all of the potential benefits of a service catalogue in the most efficient manner possible.

3. Service Level Management: Ensures that all current and planned IT services are delivered to agree achievable targets.

4. Availability Management: Ensures that the level of availability delivered in all IT services meets the availability needs and/or service level targets in cost-effective and timely manner.

5. Capacity Management: Provides an appropriate capacity to support resilience and overall service availability

6. IT Service Continuity Management: To support the overall business continuity management (BCM) process by ensuring that, by managing the risks that could seriously affect IT services, theIT service provider can always provide minimum agreed business continuity related service levels.

7. Information Security Management: Information security is a management process within the corporate governance framework which provides the strategic direction for security activities and ensures that objectives are achieved.

8. Supplier Management: Ensures that suppliers and their services are managed to support IT service targets and business expectations. The aim of this section is to raise awareness on the business context of working with partners as well as suppliers and how this work can be directed towards realizing business benefits of the organization.

Service Transition

The purpose of the service transition stage of the service lifecycle is to ensure that new, modified or retired services meet the expectations of the business as documented in the service strategy and service design stages of the lifecycle.

The objectives of service transition are to:

• Plan and manage service changes efficiently and effectively

• Manage risks related to new, changed or retired services

• Successfully deploy service releases into supported environments

• Set correct expectations on the performance

• Use of new or changed services

ITIL Service Transition provides guidance for the development and improvement of capabilities for transitioning new and changed services to supported environments, which includes release planning, building, testing, evaluation and deployment. The publication will consider service retirement and transfer of services between service providers. This Service Transition provides access to prove best practices based on the skill and knowledge of experienced industry practitioners in adopting a standardized and controlled approach to service management.

Selecting and adopting the best practice will assist organizations in delivering significant benefits. It will help readers to set up service transition and the processes that support it and to make effective use of those processes to facilitate the effective transitioning of new, changed or decommissioned services.

Service Transition has 7 processes. They are as follows:

1. Transition Planning & Support: Is the process used to provide overall planning for service transitions and to coordinate the resources that they require.

2. Change Management: Is the process used to control the life-cycle of all changes while enabling beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT services.

3. Service Asset & Configuration Management: (SACM) is the process used to ensure that the assets required to deliver services are properly controlled and that accurate as reliable information about those assets is available when and where it is needed.

4. Release & Deployment Management: Is the process used to plan, schedule and control the build, test and deployment of releases and to deliver new functionality required by the business while protecting the integrity of existing services.

5. Service Validation & Testing is the process: Is the process used to ensure that a new or changed IT service matches its design specification and will meet the needs of the business.

6. Change Evaluation: Is the process used to provide a consistent and standardized means of determining the performance of a service. In the context of likely impact on business outcomes and on existing as well as proposed services and IT infrastructure.

7. Knowledge Management: Is the process used to ensure that these are available in the right place at the right time to enable informed decisions.

Service Operation has 5 processes. They are as follows:

1. Event Management: Is the process used to manage events throughout their life-cycle. This life-cycle of activities to detect events, make sense of them and determining the appropriate control action is coordinated by the event management process.

2. Incident Management: Is the process to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations. Thus ensuring that agreed levels of service quality are maintained.

3. Request Fulfillment: Request fulfillment is the process responsible for managing the life-cycle of all service requests from the users.

4. Problem Management: Problem management is the process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems. ITIL defines a ‘problem’ as the underlying cause of one or more incidents.

5. Access Management: To provide the right path for the users to use a service or group of services, the execution of policies and actions are defined in information security management.