IT Service Week

While this is a good definition for someone who understands the vernacular of ITIL, it isn’t easily understood by the layman. Let’s dissect the definition and put it into terms the general population can understand. The IT Service provider is the organization that has been hired by the Customer to perform a service, for example, answer calls. The service level agreement is the document, which can be a few brief lines or it can be a hundreds of pages, which describes each service level target(s). These service targets are based on the customers business needs. For example, if Large Corp. sells their products worldwide, they may have a need to have a call center that is available 24×7. This one business objective, call center available 24×7, could produce multiple service level targets such as:

Call Center is available to take calls 99.99% of the time each month.

No more than 5% of calls will abandon each month.

99% of all incoming calls must be answered within 30 seconds.

All of the service level targets must be agreed upon by both parties. Once both parties agree to all of the service level targets, they are assembled into the Service Level Agreement document. The service level targets will each have a description that identifies the expectation, how it will be measured and penalties, if missed. For example:

Call center must answer all incoming calls within 30 seconds

Measurement period: 1 month

Report(s): ASA Report 101 – monthly

Penalty: $10,000

The SLA is a joint goal between the IT Service Provider and the Customer. Although penalties do reduce costs and they do send a strong signal to service providers to improve their service, neither you nor the service provider “win” if an SLA is missed. Think of an SLA as a shared goal.

It should be noted that the term Service Level Agreement is used in many companies when discussing agreements between two internal groups, such as the Procurement Department will process all purchase requests by the Engineering Department within 5 business days. Technically, per ITIL, this is not a Service Level Agreement, but instead an Operational Level Agreement.

Webster’s dictionary defines the word, “expectation” as the act or state of looking forward or anticipating the degree of probability that something will occur. How does this relate to the ITIL standards? Not setting proper expectations with the customer can result in dialogs such as:

CUSTOMER: I submitted a ticket to have someone map a new printer to my laptop, but nobody has come by or called me back.

HELP DESK:  I am sorry to hear that but we are busy with a network outage, it may be awhile before somebody comes by to assist you in your request.

CUSTOMER: Can you give me some timeframe on when to expect a visit from a technician?

HELP DESK: It all depends on when we get the network outage repaired; it could be then next 5 minutes or the next 5 days.

CUSTOMER: It is no wonder your area is referred to as the helpless desk. CLICK! 

Unfortunately, the above conversation is all too familiar in many help desks across the world because expectations are never set with customer. One way of setting expectations with the customer, even before they call or write, is to establish Service Level Objectives, such as:

Ultimately, service level objectives will benefit the help desk in a number of ways such as:

Configuration Management Database (CMDB) adoption is at an increase of 24% in the past two years according to a recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) survey conducted in May 2008. EMA goes on to note that the adoption of a CMDB has become a crucial aspect of enterprise IT operations in much the same way that firewalls and network clusters are a part of the operations center. The survey was taken from 91 IT Professionals from large organizations earning over $1 billion dollars a year in sales. They also note that 84% of the surveyed expect to break-even on the ROI within six months to three years. The survey also noted that the key driver in initiating a CMDB project is to support change management and that the number 1 key success factor in delivering a successful CMDB project was securing upper management support.

From my perspective, the survey data shows that again the key factor is to obtain that key CIO or VP of IT to deliver a keynote project kick-off speech. I was at a client recently in which we were brought in to implement HP ServiceCenter to align with their Incident Management process. As a general rule of thumb we let our client do the initial kick-off note to their user base and project stakeholders. The project manager asked the VP of IT Service Management to give a small keynote on their vision going forward with Incident Management. The speech did not contain any of the ITIL jargon, nor did it contain any details about how the project was completed. The key ingredient was “Who” gave the speech and by showing their endorsement of the project the project team was able to get the stakeholder support it needed to become a successful project.

As this survey notes, the implementation of a CMDB has become a crucial part of IT operations. Your enterprise’s success in change management relies on a CMDB built with best practices and scalability in mind. Providing a keynote speech by an upper management executive won’t solve all of your project needs but it certainly will get your project off on the right foot. Waging corporate politics half way through the project to get sign off on a test case is not a project risk any project manager wants.

Tomorrow (March 18, 2008) AJAXWorld kicks off in New York. The conference will feature 80+ technical sessions, Keynotes, Power Panels and General Session Demos on the Rich Internet Technology and how to build front-end applications for users. What does it mean for IT Services? AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, has really had a few years to mature since Jesse James Garrett made it popular back in 2005. Now, more than ever, enterprises are taking advantage of building AJAX applications to meet business critical situations.

An interesting technical session that will be available at AJAXWorld this year is Mission Critical AJAX: Making Test Ordering Easier and Faster at Quest Diagnostics by David Rapperport and Rob Tweed. The session will detail how Quest Diagnostics needed to create a mission critical service catalog for it’s lab techs to order new lab equipment and diagnostic supplies. Quest used the technology of AJAX to build a custom internal interface that would be reliable, stable, and achieve it’s mission critical service levels.

Not only Service Catalogs can take advantage of AJAX for IT Service Management applications. IT Service Desk applications such as HP Service Manager takes advantage of the web tier delivering a Change Management Calendar and Employee Self Service (ESS) Tier for an enterprise’s end-users to quickly get help when they do not want to wait on the phone for a Help Desk Analyst. LiveTime Service Manager, a Service Desk product for Small to Medium Businesses, is built completely out of Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies. Every year Pink Elephant gives out an Innovation of the Year award to the most innovative idea in ITIL. Maybe this is the year that someone integrates ITIL Strategies that effectively utilize the iPhone? I recently downloaded my copy of the SDK to start on a few little side projects. Imagine what the world would be like if your Desktop Engineers didn’t have to walk back to their desk to update an Incident Ticket? What if they could do it straight from their iPhone? Now that’s what I call Service!