Service Level Management

Service level management is the name given to the processes of planning, negotiating, co-coordinating, monitoring, and reporting on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The process includes the on-going review of service achievement to ascertain that the required service quality is maintained and wherever necessary improved.

SLAs contain specific targets against which performance can be evaluated. They also define the responsibilities placed on all parties, in particular binding Service Delivery to offer an agreed quality of service so long as the users constrain their demands within agreed limits. The relationship between Service Delivery and its customers is therefore put on to a formal business-like footing similar to those which exist between Service Delivery and its suppliers. When used in conjunction with the financial management process, service level management provides the basis for running Service Delivery as a business or profit centre.

Service level management provides a number of benefits not least of which is that it enables specific targets to aim for and against which service quality can be monitored and measured. Furthermore, service monitoring will allow weaknesses in existing services to be identified, so that the quality of service provision can be improved.

Financial Management for IT Services

Financial management for IT services is concerned with helping the business to assess whether its IT Service is doing the best it can with the money it has.  The business has to understand the true costs of providing a service and manage these costs professionally.  Financial Management of IT Services implements IT Accounting and Budgeting processes, and often Charging processes for these IT Services, allocating IT expenditure to services and recovering the costs of those services from the business customers to whom they are provided.

Budgeting enables an organization to:

-Predict the money required to run IT Services for a given period

-Ensure that actual spend can be compared with predicted spend at any point

 -Reduce the risk of overspending

-Ensure that revenues are available to cover predicted spend (where charging is in   place)

IT accounting enables an organization to:

-Account for the money spent in providing IT Services

-Calculate the cost of providing IT Services to both internal and external customers

-Perform cost-benefit or Return-on-Investment analyses

-Identify the cost of changes

Charging enables an organization to:

-Recover the costs of the IT Services from the customer of the service

-Operate the IT organization as a business unit if required

-Influence user and customer behaviors

The scope of Financial Management of IT Services is taken to cover hardware, software, people, accommodation, external services (e.g. outsourced application development), and transfers (e.g. IT Service buying PCs on behalf of a business customer).

Capacity Management

The aim of Capacity Management is to match the supply of IT resources to customer demands for them. The process is needed to support the optimum and cost-effective provision of IT services by helping organizations to match their IT resources to the demands of the business. It is concerned with having the appropriate IT capacity and with making the best use of it.

The demand for IT resources is based on agreeing with users of IT services, levels to which those services will be delivered, based on business requirements and embodied within service level agreements.

The customer’s needs are assessed by forecasting the likely growth in demand for current services and by sizing new service elements. The desired service levels required can then be agreed with service users, based on business needs. The sub-processes associated with capacity management are concerned with forecasting workload, sizing applications, and maintaining a Capacity Plan in order to meet existing and future needs.

The Capacity Plan is beneficial to both Systems Management and Purchasing in order to gain visibility of the schedule and likely infrastructure changes necessary to maintain service at the required levels.

Assumed process conditions:

The scope of Capacity Management is assumed to be such that the entire technical IT infrastructure is embraced. The infrastructure will include the network and everything that is attached to the network such as servers and access points (terminals and PCs). The scope of the process should include both operational and development environments.

IT Service Continuity Management

IT service continuity management (ITSCM) is concerned with the organization’s ability to continue to provide a pre-determined and agreed level of IT services to support the minimum business requirements following a business service interruption.

ITSCM is a vital subset of, and provides support to the overall business continuity management (BCM) process by ensuring that the required IT services / facilities (including computer systems, networks, applications, telecommunications, technical support and Service Desk) can be recovered within required and agreed business time-scales.

The ITSCM process is based on the identification of the required, minimum levels of business operation that are required following an incident, and the necessary systems, facilities and service requirements.  It is driven by these business needs, not by the perceived needs of the IT community, and requires senior management commitment.

The process covers:

Risk / Priority Analysis:

Examining the risks and threats to IS services, and the development of an IT risk reduction or mitigation program to deliver the continuity requirements necessary to provide the required level of business operation.

The identification of business operational priorities influences the determination of critical services and data, and their relative priorities in the event of a contingency situation (e.g. a disaster).

Planning for Contingency:

This covers the development, proving, sign-off and ongoing maintenance of plans to be invoked in the event of a range of contingency scenarios. The main product is a detailed set of contingency plans.

Risk Management:

This covers the active management of identified risks, beyond the normal recovery procedures embodied in the contingency plans, with particular emphasis on prevention or reduction of risk.

Availability Management

Availability management is the optimization of the availability and reliability of IT services and of the supporting IT infrastructure and organization, in order to ensure that the requirements of the business are met.

Availability management entails systematically undertaking preventative and corrective maintenance of IT services, within justifiable cost. Technical, organizational, procedural, security and contractual aspects have an important role in this process.

The aspects of availability management to be covered by this questionnaire are:

Reliability:

The capability of an IT component to perform a required function under stated conditions for a stated period of time.

Maintainability:

The capability of an IT component or IT service to be retained in, or restored to, a state in which it can perform its required functions.

Serviceability:

A contractual term which is used to define the availability of IT components as agreed with external organizations supplying and maintaining these components.

Security:

Providing access to IT components or IT services under secure conditions.

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