Service Delivery

The ITIL implementation is one of the hottest topics in IT today. In order to gain a good understanding of the value of configuration management, we must clearly understand what ITIL is and what it is not. Fundamentally, ITIL is exactly what its name implies—a collection of books. The common theme of the library is that all of the books provide guidelines that can help organizations implement the best practices that have been learned the hard way by the pioneering few. There is a volume about security, one about planning, one about software assets, and one about managing applications. The library continues to grow as more successful techniques are documented and guidelines established for what can make others successful.

The latest information on ITIL comes from the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) through its web site at http://www.best-management-practice.com/. Be sure to visit the “Terms and Conditions” link at the bottom of the page for the appropriate uses of that web site.

Willcocks et al. (1999) have collated a Top Ten list of the main reasons for failure or negative outcomes in IT outsourcing deals and refer to these as risk factors:
1. Treating IT as an undifferentiated commodity to be outsourced;
2. Incomplete contracting;
3. Lack of active management of the supplier on contract and relationship dimensions;
4. Failure to build and retain requisite in-house capabilities and skills;
5. Power asymmetries developing in favour of the vendor;
6. Difficulties in constructing and adapting deals in the face of rapid business / technical change;
7. Lack of maturity and experience of contracting for and managing ‘total’ outsourcing arrangements;
8. Outsourcing for short-term financial restructuring or cash injection rather than to leverage IT assets for business advantage;
9. Unrealistic expectations with multiple objectives for outsourcing;
10. Poor sourcing and contracting for development and new technologies.
(Willcocks et al., 1999, p. 290).

It is typically at the system level that service failures are detected. The helpdesk staff gets a call that the customer quotation system is down. The included services are not apparent to the helpdesk person and so system level procedures will be used. Every failure must be treated as an incident. Formal incident recording, tracking, management and monitoring will be needed if an organization is to be able to understand its current performance level and also develop the potential for long-term improvement of its incident management. Only in the case of life-threatening, hazardous situations should incident recording not be commenced immediately.

Historically IT staff have been disproportionately involved in service continuity as they were the suppliers of IT services that were particularly unreliable. Now that IT hardware is much more reliable, the emphasis has changed to focus on the complexity of the IT installations and the dependence for these services within the organization.

There are several challenges every business user should facing about managing the SLA (Service Level Agreement) compliances

• Establish performance-based SLAs with your service providers that reflect how you actually use business services, instead of just measuring the availability of generic IT components.
• Independently verify real-time SLA compliance so that you will have first-hand knowledge of how well your service providers are performing.
• Understand the quality of your end-users’ experience with each particular application or service.

However this challenges facing a lot of difficulties about how to measure the network compliance