INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT – Part 1

 This is first of the series which I am discussing on IT AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT

What is Service?

“A service is a mean of delivering values to customers by facilitating outcomes that they want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks”

Now few things comes up in your mind by reading the above definition is that what does facilitating outcomes means and what are the effects and how does it relates to IT industry, what is meant by delivering values.

By facilitating outcomes I mean to say that it will enhance the performance and reduce the effect of constraints. It also increases the probability of desired outcomes. And it also affects the resources and their capabilities and also performance of the customer tasks. Now with the service there is service management comes up.

Service Management idea or rather we can say that the theme comes up with the idea of service providers. The origins of service management are in traditional forms with the businesses likes of airplanes, banks, telecommunications providers, hotels etc. so as the IT industry grows up the concept and adaption of service management grows as well and it now the most lethal part in any IT organization.  As IT organization has adapted the service- oriented approach for managing IT applications, infrastructure and processes. Business Problems and support for business models, strategies and operations are increasingly dependent upon the service management.

The service management according to me 

“A set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services”

Now with the service management the standards come up in our minds which are being followed all around the world. ITIL service management concept is one of them. In the next following parts and in this write up I will go into the detail of ITIL service management concepts

What is ITIL?

ITIL is the abbreviation of Information Technology Infrastructure Library which gives us the framework or rather we can say that standards sort of stuffs by following it we can implement the best practices being followed in the IT industry related to service management. ITIL is basically owned by UK Government and not by any commercial proprietary solution or practice.

ITIL is basically comprises of the following characteristics

Ø  Non- Proprietary — which tells us that ITIL Service Management Best Practices are being put on i.e. applicable in any  industry which have the concerns of IT Service Management because they are not based on any particular technology platform or industry type.

 

Ø  Non Perspective — ITIL offers robust, mature and time valued and times tested best practices that have applicability to all types of service organizations. Helps the organization determine where it is today, and where it wants to be. It continues to be helpful in public as well as private organization to its  internal and external customers whether they belong to SME’s or Large Organizations or within any technical environments

 

Ø  Best Practices — ITIL Service Management practices represent the learning experiences and thoughts leaderships of the world’s best in class of service providers. The approach to an  understanding that has already been proved to be the most effective by the leading organizations and it is derived  from the practices of the most  effective and successful people in the field

 

Ø  Good Practices — By good practices means that what everybody is doing as it’s seen as complete with no gaps, and often referred to as the most appropriate  and also the fact that there is always a continual search for improvement as well know nobody is perfect so we can imply this rule in here.

 

Ø  Systematic Usage — it is the systematic usage of the Service Management practices that are responsive, consistent and measurable and this also defines the quality of the service provider in the eyes of their customer.

 

Ø  Continuously Analization — it is the provider’s ability to continuously analyze and fine tune the service provision to maintain stable, reliable yet adaptive and responsive services that allows the customer to focus on their business without the concern of IT service availability.

 

The ITIL service management practices are comprised off three main sets of practices and services

 

Ø  ITIL Service management  practices — Core Guidance

Ø  ITIL Service management practices — complementary

Ø  ITIL Web support

 

Now In my next write up I will go into the details of ITIL Service management — Core Guidance