ITIL Service Support and The Business of Change

By Carina Ferrel

Turn change into your business advantage

Today's most successful businesses are built around structured business methodologies and automated processes, allowing them to quickly meet customer demands and deliver value. The result: Increased efficiency, reduced costs, and competitive advantage. Additionally, efficiently managing processes helps enable these businesses to meet government regulations for financial reporting.

You need to control every step in your processes, identify bottlenecks, properly allocate personnel and resources, improve overall communication—and help ensure repeatable successes. Regulatory mandates mean you must establish clear accountability throughout your change lifecycle, including application development.

A true change governance initiative addresses the entire change lifecycle and enables organizations to translate changes in their business into successful business results. This will allow you to visualize changes and understand their impact before deployment, orchestrate authorized changes, and then enforce their deployment throughout all necessary areas of your organization.

Best practices can help support this initiative, including the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

ITIL and IT Service Management

ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management (ITSM) in the world. ITIL is a set of standardized IT processes developed by the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) that describes an integrated, process-based, best-practice framework for managing IT services. This proven framework can help organizations increase customer satisfaction, improve communication and collaboration, drive incremental improvements, and achieve operational excellence across the board. As more and more companies consider IT Services Management initiatives to address their challenges, they are confronted with the complexity, and possibly disjointed nature, of the existing infrastructure. Successful, results-oriented approaches consist of streamlined, consistent processes, people and automation. ITIL is not a minor project – rather it is a cultural shift and an on-going process improvement initiative.

Collaboration

To realize the true benefits of best practices such as ITIL, collaboration among stakeholders is foundational. And to turn change into your business advantage, collaboration in the Change Lifecycle chain facilitates the alignment of business and IT goals. These stakeholders can synchronize collaboration for multi-site requirements development and approvals. External parties may be granted access to submit, update, and monitor their issues; and outsourcers can collaborate with all stakeholders. All parties understand their role and why it is important to the larger process to drive the right outcome.

Collaboration among stakeholders can be easily attained with the help of process integration and automation. Let’s take a look at the 5 process areas of ITIL Service Support – one of the two key focuses in IT Service Management.

ITIL Service Support Process Goals

Below are the five process areas of ITIL Service Support. The goals of each process are designed to provide the highest quality of service with the least risk to the organization. Each of these is detailed below the chart.

ITIL: Service Support
Service Desk	A function that provides a single point of contact between users and the IT Service organization
Incident Management	Restores normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimizes adverse impact on business
Problem Management	Diagnoses underlying causes of incidents identified by the Service Desk
Change Management	Ensures that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handing of all changes to minimize impact that change-related incidents have on overall service quality
Release Management	Takes a holistic view of an IT service change to ensure that all aspects of a release, both technical and non-technical, are considered together
Configuration Management	Provides a logical model of the infrastructure or a service by identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the configuration items in existence

Incident Management

ITIL Incident Management aims to minimize disruption to the business by restoring service operation to agreed levels as quickly as possible. Incident Management is often the first process instigated when introducing the ITIL quality framework to a Service Desk, and offers the most immediate and highly visible cost reduction and quality gains. The effectiveness of Incident Management is closely aligned to the accuracy and design of the CMDB (Configuration Management Database), and its ongoing effectiveness is significantly aided by the implementation of ITIL Problem and Change Management.

In all ITIL processes, it’s the process that is most important. Getting the process and the defined roles right for your objectives is the main goal. Automating those processes makes it all easier, faster, more effective and efficient.

You will want to take into account the following items when considering possible automation tools to support your processes:

– Ability to manage an incident through the entire life cycle

– Enforcement of standardized methods and procedures ensuring efficient and prompt handling of all incidents

– An automatic escalation system that prioritizes and routes incidents according to your specific requirements – including Service Level Agreements

– Ability to classify incidents

– Ability to report on high level or down to the detail on every incident– real-time

– Ability to allow any user to request and track incident status

– An integrated and searchable knowledge base that can be populated with common solutions and work-arounds to known problems

– Ability to manage and report on Key Process Indicators (KPIs) such as number of incidents by category, priority, resolution, service level agreement, etc.

Problem Management

Problem Management investigates the underlying cause of incidents, and aims to prevent incidents of a similar nature from recurring. By removing errors, which often requires a structural change to the IT infrastructure in an organization, the number of incidents can be reduced over time.

A successful implementation will provide a complete audit trail and integration between the fault or disruption of normal operation (Incident Management), the state that indicates an error in the infrastructure (Problem Management) and the problem for which the cause is found (Known Error). This is key in determining the underlying problem and resolving the one or many Incidents caused by the Problem.

You will want to take into account the following items when considering possible automation tools to support your processes:

– Ability to manage a Problem through the entire life cycle

– Enforcement of standardized methods and procedures ensuring efficient and prompt handling of all problems

– Determine and resolve problem trends early

– Problems can be managed and follow a separate ITIL process from Incidents

– Audit trails are tracked in detail for all Problems

– Automatic routing and escalation based on Problem urgency and severity

– Ability to classify Problems

– Ability to report on high level or down to the detail on every Problem– real-time

– Ability to allow any user to request and track Problem status

– Ability to manage and report on Key Process Indicators (KPIs) such as root cause, trending in repeat problems, etc.

Change Management

Change management ensures that standard methods and procedures are used to quickly evaluate and approve/ disapprove every proposed change. The goal is to minimize any negative impact of change-related incidents on IT services. Different types of changes require different change management procedures. In today’s world of compliance, all changes require an approval cycle.

You will want to ensure that the Change Advisory Board (CAB) has the knowledge of how a proposed change in one part of an application or IT process will impact other parts, and what services could be impacted by the proposed change. With this information the CAB can develop accurate cost and time estimates for implementing the change, and they can eliminate surprise side effects that cause unplanned downtime.

You will want to take into account the following items when considering possible automation tools to support your processes:

• Enforcement of standardized methods and procedures ensuring efficient and prompt handling of all changes
• Impact Analysis capabilities that provide an automated means to report on the impact of proposed changes
• Approval capabilities that restrict changes from taking place without the proper authorization
• Scheduling capabilities that support the orderly implementation of scheduled releases
• Build capabilities that ensure that new or changed components are developed using established standards
• Unplanned change capabilities that allow for emergency changes to be implemented using established standards
• Track change history throughout lifecycle
• Ability to manage and report on Key Process Indicators (KPIs) such as number of change requests resulting in an incident, reduced number of emergency fixes, etc.

Release Management

Release management oversees the implementation and rollout of approved changes in new or updated software. Release management often spans multiple departments and activities, including builds and deployment to production. Another release management activity is updating the asset database to reflect the release.

You will want to ensure that you have a system that captures development and project assets, as well as their attributes and relationships, into a release baseline. It then uses filters to select files from the baseline for a specific purpose, such as QA testing. Files and other assets cannot get out of sync because they are stored and retrieved from a single configuration management database (CMDB).

You will want to take into account the following items when considering possible automation tools to support your processes:

– Automation of the management of the primary requirements of a release management system:

• Release packages
• Release testing
• Authorized sign-off
• Audit
• Backout planning
• DSL & CMDB
• Archiving of CIs

– Ability to manage and report on Key Process Indicators (KPIs) such as number of releases that satisfy the release requirements, number of releases that bypass the process, etc.

Configuration Management

Configuration Management is at the core of effective service management. The quality of data within the CMDB (Configuration Management) affects the efficiency of the entire corporate service management strategy, as all processes utilize and feed into configuration management. As defined by ITIL, Configuration Management is more than a simple registry of physical assets; it includes documentation, service level agreements, service catalogs, warranties and knowledge. It enables the enterprise to manage the evolving relationships of those assets with customers, internal departments and locations, other organizations and external suppliers.

You will want to take into account the following items when considering possible automation tools to support your processes:

– Ability to store all IT configuration information (software, hardware, equipment) in a database, and provide links and dependencies to ensure full understanding of impact prior to implementing a change

– Enforcement of standardized Configuration Management methods and procedures

– Changes and updates to CI’s are recorded, tracked and verified

– Unauthorized and invalid changes are eliminated with process enforcement and approval cycles

– Full reporting capabilities from the high-level down to the smallest details

– Ability to manage and report on Key Process Indicators (KPIs) such as accurate configuration data and linkages

Process & Tool Integration

Clearly each of these processes stand alone in terms of their desired results, however the outcome is highly leveraged by the other processes in ITIL Service Support. Therefore, process integration is mandatory for an effective implementation that will drive efficiency, cost reduction, improved service quality and decreased risk throughout IT and the business.

Many vendors are interested in complementing each other’s areas of expertise, to provide access to and visibility into the range of IT Service Support and Delivery areas. It is likely that you already have a tool in-house to manage a specific area of ITIL. It is important to select the right tool for the right job, therefore it is critical that the applications that you choose to support your ITIL initiative integrate together well to ensure optimal results through the entire process flow.

Carina Ferrel
Vice President of Information Technology

Carina Ferrel has been with Serena Software, Inc., the largest company solely focused on managing change in the IT environment and the leader in change governance, for 13 years. For over 25 years, Serena has been committed to helping customers transform change into bottom-line efficiencies.

Ms. Ferrel has held various IT roles during her tenure and is currently the Vice President of Information Technology. She has played an active role in the company's growth. In 1993, when Ms. Ferrel started with the company, Serena was a small privately held software company with 35 employees in North America. Today the company employs nearly one thousand employees globally with over 250 million in annual revenue.

Serena was recently acquired by Silver Lake Partners and is now majority owned by Silver Lake, a leading private equity firm focused exclusively on large-scale investments in technology and related growth industries.

Ms. Ferrel is responsible for all IT functions world wide with a global staff of 50. She has been instrumental successfully integrating numerous small and large acquisitions by Serena. The focus this year is to expand the use of the Serena Technologies internally and to create a show case IT environment based on the ITIL practice.

Ms. Ferrel is a native of Uppsala, Sweden and received her Economics degree from Linnè Skolan, Uppsala, Sweden.