Activities in the information technology (IT) industry can be broadly categorized into IT projects (waterfall, agile, etc) and IT service management. The design, development, testing, and creation of computer programs, mobile applications, telecommunications, data processing, and analytics engines, among others, come under the IT projects’ scope. The IT products that are developed need to be maintained on an ongoing basis. They need to be fixed when they break down. Thus, the IT service management sector must take care of the maintenance of these IT products. Maintenance activities include upkeep of the infrastructure and software the way it was designed to work. It further includes activities like monitoring jobs, patching, performing administrative tasks, handling batch tasks, and optimizing performance.
IT projects are driven through frameworks such as Waterfall and Agile methodologies. IT service management, on the other hand, runs on frameworks such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) , COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) , or MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) .
Let’s start by discussing the importance of service management.
1.1 Importance of Service Management
When you buy a product, say a smartphone, what are some of the things that you will consider? You would look at the features, brand, and price for sure. But what else comes up on the list? Perhaps service-related options such as cost of servicing, warranty, availability of service centers, parts covered under the service, and turnaround times are important. In fact, today, a brand gets its value not only from the products it has on the market, but also on the service factor. Apple makes the most popular phone today in iPhone. What else makes the iPhone click? The international warranty , proximity to Apple stores across the globe, professional approach to fixing problems, and the no nonsense approach to keeping the customer happy are of foremost importance.
I repeat. A brand gets its value from the services it offers. Think of all the cars you have owned and the service comfort you have had within the service provider. Yes, the service provider plays a major role in keeping things in motion. It could be the tangibles such as your iPhone 7 or your Chevrolet car. Or, it could be intangibles such as electricity, mobile Internet, and landscaping. The services offered collectively fall under service management, which branches out toward various specializations like IT, hospitality, and medicine. According to the ITIL publication, service management is defined as:
A set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.
The specialized organizational capabilities point to the technical maturity, experience, customer service, and service frameworks that the service provider brings to the table in servicing the customers, meeting their needs, and creating value.
1.2 Introduction to IT Service Management
There was a time when there was business and then there was IT. Businesses had their set of practices and IT was a supporting agent, helping businesses achieve their tasks, like supplying the business with a word processor for drafting contracts and providing them the ability to compute complex formulas. Without IT, businesses could survive, although surely with some inconvenience.
Today, the world of business has been turned on its head. You take IT out of business and the business will cease to exist. In other words, there is no business without IT. The business relies on IT for its sustenance and IT is not a support function anymore. Rather, it is a partner that enables businesses to achieve their goals and succeed in beating their competitors. Try to think of a midsize business where IT may not be involved. Aha! I know your results came up blank. To reiterate, IT is a part of the business and there is no looking back.
IT service management is defined as the implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the business. IT services are provided by IT service providers (the entity that provides IT service to internal and external customers) through an appropriate mix of people, processes, and information technology.
There is increased pressure on IT to deliver on its services. IT must deliver services that not only meet its objectives, but also does it effectively and efficiently. And it must be done at a minimal possible cost. The competition in the IT service management industry is fierce. You have some of the biggest names playing ball, cutting down on the IT costs, and providing the best in class service. The world of IT service management is challenging with ever changing technology, exciting with innovative ideas coming into play, and at the same time a race that can be won only if you couple technology with management.
1.3 Welcome to the World of ITIL
The history of ITIL is nebulous and inconsistent. It started sometime during the late 1980s as a collection of best practices in IT management. A department in the UK government, known as the OGC (Office of Government Commerce) , sanctioned the coalition. Basically, the best practices of various IT departments and companies in the United Kingdom were studied and documented. It is believed that most of the initial practices that constituted ITIL came from IBM.
The first version of ITIL was bulky and lacked direction with a compilation of over 30 books. The second version of ITIL was cut down to nine books in 2000, but mainly revolved around two books: service delivery and service support. The ITIL certifications were based on these two books as well. ITIL v2 introduced ten processes, five each from service delivery and service support. I started my ITIL journey with ITIL v2.
ITIL v2 was process centric. IT organizations were expected to operate around the ITIL processes. The processes were interconnected but lacked a broader vision and a flow to move things along.
The shortcomings and inadequacies in v2 gave rise to ITIL v3 in 2007. It had an excess of 20 processes, spanning across the entire lifecycle of a service, from conception up to a point where the service runs on regular improvement cycles. I will delve into the details in the Chapter 2.
ITIL v3 came out with five books, each book spanning a lifecycle phase of an IT service.
ITIL v3 has penetrated across most IT organizations. Even the conservative IT organizations have embraced the ITIL v3 service management framework with open arms. The framework is rampant in the industry today and enjoys the monopolistic nature, except for Microsoft, which adheres to a derivative version of ITIL, the Microsoft Operations Framework .
In 2011, ITIL v3 received a minor update where a couple of new processes were added along with some minute changes in definitions and concepts.
The latest version of ITIL is referred to as ITIL 2011 and some people refer to it as ITIL v3 2011, indicating the version and the revision year. It’s been close to a decade since the new stable version was introduced, and colloquially people refer to it as simply ITIL, without any versions or revision years appended to it. ITIL currently has 26 processes and four functions.
1.4 Why ITIL Is Successful
ITIL has been dominant for the past two decades. There are no other service management frameworks that are competing for space. It is also quite lonely in the club of service management frameworks . Why do you think this is the case?
A lot of things have worked in ITIL’s favor. It has a single objective—to deliver value to the business. To deliver unparalleled value, it has adopted the following characteristics :
ITIL is based on best practices
ITIL is nonprescriptive
ITIL is vendor and technology neutral
ITIL is nonproprietary
Let’s examine each of these characteristics in detail.
1.4.1 ITIL Is Based on Best Practices
One of the chief reasons why ITIL is so successful is because it was born out of the management practices across leading IT services organizations. ITIL borrowed all its concepts from the best practices that existed at the time and has built on this stable foundation since then. Don’t forget that the best practices discussed here are a result of efforts from the leaders of the IT services industry and invaluable experiences that made these companies successful in the first place.
1.4.2 ITIL Is Nonprescriptive
ITIL is a framework, not a set of policies and rules, but rather a set of guidelines and best practices. It has been time tested and adopted from the leading organizations and has gone through several iterations of improvements since its inception.
ITIL does not prescribe what the organizations must do. It describes the best practices in achieving service management-related objectives, and the organization implementing it is free to tweak and bend the process around the edges as needed. In other words, it gives you the flexibility that is needed, considering every service provider organization is different and no two businesses (customers) are the same.
1.4.3 ITIL Is Vendor and Technology Neutral
ITIL can be implemented across various technologies and across any organization. There are no limits, and any advancement in technology, including the cloud-based services, does not make ITIL obsolete.
I have seen ITIL implemented in hardcore IT services organizations, manufacturing companies, health care, retail, banking; in short, in any industry. I have worked on ITIL that was implemented in the legendary mainframe systems , as well as the modern SAP, data warehousing, mobile application, and cloud services technologies. ITIL has been just as effective with physical servers as it is with virtual machines. ITIL can work with the Waterfall methodology of project management, as well as the Agile methodology . Devops too! In short, it works no matter what you bring to the table.
1.4.4 ITIL Is Nonproprietary
ITIL is owned by the UK government. The mantle has been handed to Axelos to develop and manage the copyrighted ITIL publication, along with training and certification.
Organizations are free to implement ITIL. They are not required to pay any royalty, nor do they need to inform Axelos that they have implemented ITIL. The nonproprietary nature has made this service management framework far more popular and has brought in a number of experts to collaborate. Just like open source!
1.5 Best Practices Trump Proprietary Knowledge
As mentioned earlier, best practices are collated from various organizations. Some organizations may be doing a great job in gathering requirements, while others focus on identifying improvements. So, when you take the best of such organizations and bring that together, you have knowledge that is enviable.
Proprietary knowledge, on the other hand, stays within close quarters, and fewer heads have been banged together to come up with proprietary knowledge, which may be good, but not as diverse and experienced as public frameworks such as ITIL.
Proprietary knowledge is developed for the sole purpose of meeting the organization’s objectives. It is not meant to be adapted and flexed to meet other organization objectives. Moreover, if you are adopting proprietary knowledge, you are expected to pay a fee or royalty of some kind. Public frameworks are free.
When you can get an all-you-can-eat buffet for free, why would you opt for a paid a-la-carte dinner?
1.6 Introduction to IT Service
As mentioned earlier, ITIL v3 is a framework that is centered on IT services. So, it is imperative to first understand the meaning of a service, according to ITIL. Here is the official definition of an IT service:
A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
I will break the definition down, part by part, and also provide examples to help you comprehend the concept, which will be the core for everything else you will learn from this point forward.
1.6.1 Understanding the Definition
The best way to understand anything that is complex is to break it into parts. This is my method for understanding the concept of IT services.
The first section of the definition states: means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve.
IT services in ITIL are defined from a customer viewpoint. Essentially, an IT service must deliver value to the customer. The value delivered must be something that the customer considers as helpful. Let’s take the example of an IT service that is quite common across the board: the Internet. An Internet service delivers value to customers to help them achieve their objectives. So, it fits the bill of what an IT service is all about. If the Internet service provider (ISP) were to provide speeds upward of 100MB per second for a customer who only checks e-mails, it would be overkill. The high speeds offered by ISPs are generally appreciated by gamers and social networking users. In contrast, the customer who uses Internet for checking e-mails does not find any special value between a high-speed Internet and a normal Internet connection. But for a user who hogs a lot of bandwidth, it is valuable. To summarize, the value of an IT service is derived from the customer’s standpoint. So from this example, value to one customer may not be value to another.
Now the last part of the definition states: without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
The customer enjoys the service but does not pay for specific costs. Instead, they pay for the service as a lump sum. For example, in the Internet example, the customer pays for the high-speed Internet a fixed sum every month, not a specific price for the elements that make up a service, such as the infrastructure that supports it, the people who maintain and design, and the other governmental regulation costs. Instead, the customer just pays an agreed amount.
The final part of the definition states that the customer does not take ownership of the risks. Yes, but the Internet service provider does. What are some of the risks that exist in the IT world pertaining to ISPs?
Fiber cuts
Availability of support technicians
Infrastructure stability among others
1.6.2 Understanding ITIL with a Non-IT Example
When I train ITIL students in a classroom setting, they often understand ITIL better when I relate the concepts of ITIL with non-IT examples. I am going to leverage on this teaching maturity in this book and provide non-IT examples at all crucial junctures.
Let’s take an example of a lawn mowing service. It’s a simple service and quite common in most parts of the world. The customer hires a landscaping company to mow the vast areas of lush lawn. The landscaping company sends in two landscapers, each handling a lawn mowing machine.
In this example, the customer pays an agreed rate to the landscaping company, and as per the agreement, the entire area where there is overgrown lawn will be mowed to 25 mm height. The landscaping company conveys the requirements to their landscapers, who go ahead and do what they are supposed to.
Let’s relate this example to the ITIL service definition: delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve. The customer gets value through the mowing of the lawn. This is exactly the service that the customer wanted in the first place and he has gotten it.
From the definition: without the ownership of specific costs and risks. The customer is paying a certain agreed amount to the landscaping company and not paying the specifics, such as the hourly wage for the landscapers, rent for the mowing machines, and other costs like fuel for mowing machines. The customer also does not own the risks. If the landscapers get hurt during the lawn mowing operation, it is not the customer’s problem. If the mowing machines stutter and stop working, once again, the customer is not responsible. In other words, the customer does not own the risks that come from the service.
Thus, both parts of ITIL service are satisfied with the lawn mowing service example. I hope you now have a better understanding of the concept of ITIL service. If you have doubts, I suggest you reread these sections before proceeding any further.
1.7 Main Stakeholders in Service Management
Who are the stakeholders? The Oxford dictionary states a stakeholder is a person or persons having an interest or concern in something. So, this something here is service management. In a service management organization, you have a number of stakeholders, whom you’ll learn about during our journey in learning ITIL. But the main ones who are absolutely necessary are:
Customers
Users
Suppliers
1.7.1 Customers
Customers are perhaps the most common group across all businesses, projects, and management frameworks. The person who pays for the commodity or the delivery that he is getting in return is a customer. In service management, a customer pays for the service.
I will again explain with an example. An accounting company contracts with an Internet service provider to provide high-speed Internet. The accounting company is the customer as it is paying for the services. Simple enough?
1.7.2 Users
Now it gets confusing. You thought that a user was a customer, and now you will see that they have a different role, a prominent one, differentiated from the customer role. A user is someone who uses the service, not necessarily the one who pays for the service. A customer can also be a user, but the distinction is between the person paying and the one using the services.
In the earlier example, the accounting company’s employees will use the Internet. They are the users. They don’t pay for the service, they only use it.
At home, I pay for my Internet connection. I use the Internet as well. So, I am both the customer and the user.
1.7.3 Suppliers
The service provider leverages other parties to deliver the services. These third parties are referred to as suppliers, and they could provide hardware, software, services, or people.
Let’s go back to the earlier example involving the accounting company obtaining Internet service through an ISP. The cabling between the ISP and the accounting company is managed by a different company. This other company is referred to as a supplier, as they are supplying their goods and services to the service provider, not to the customer.
1.8 Internal and External Customers
Not all customers are the same. They come in different shapes and colors. However, in the IT service management area, customers can be broadly divided into two types:
Internal customers
External customers
In this section, I’ll explain the two types of customers and the differences between them. Figure 1-1 depicts the concepts of internal and external customers.
Figure 1-1. Internal and external customers
1.8.1 The Concept
In Figure 1-1, you will see two organizations : A and B. Organization B has multiple business units and an IT team as well. Organization A merely has business units and no IT team.
The business units within Organization B get their IT support from their own organization’s IT team. As the business units and the IT teams are embedded within the same organization, the business units are considered to be internal customers for the IT teams.
Now you can guess who the external customers are, can’t you? Organization A’s business units get their IT support from Organization B . The key here is that the IT support is being provided for an entity outside the organization. This setup essentially makes Organization A external customers for the IT team sitting in Organization B.
1.8.2 The Difference
There is a world of difference between internal and external customers. Because internal customers are from the same organization, the level of service offered can be lax compared to that for an external customer. It is quite likely that an IT team could find themselves relaxed with the internal customers compared to external customers. Ideally, no organization would like their internal users being treated unequally over external customers. So, as a good practice, there are similar service-level agreements (SLA) in place between customers (for both internal and external) to set an expectation and to measure against it.
At the end of the day, it is really just business. The difference between internal and external customers is merely measured in terms of finances. External customers pay real money, and hence their importance is at a high. Internal customers, on the other hand, are an obligation, something that organization must tend to and cannot live without. The internal IT team charges the internal business units notionally. No real money gets transferred between the business units and the IT team, but is noted only in the ledgers. It’s like taking money out of your left pocket and depositing it into your right pocket.
1.9 Processes
ITIL is made up of processes. Just as with services, you cannot get into the nitty gritty of ITIL if you don’t understand the concept of a process. I will give you some examples to emphasize its importance, so that your foundation is strong for what you have to build on for your career. First, the official definition. ITIL defines a process as :
A structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective. A process takes one or more inputs and turns them into defined outputs.
You could envision a process as a set of activities that you need to perform, one after another, to achieve something. Each activity that you perform sets the precedence for the next one, and then the next. The objective of a process would be to achieve an output that is along the expected lines and as desired.
Now for an example to make the concept simple and digestible. A process is very similar to a recipe for cooking a dish. In a recipe, you have several steps that you need to follow, as instructed, to get the dish you desire.
Let’s look at the recipe for an egg omelet. It goes something like this :
Step 1: Break a couple of eggs into a bowl
Step 2: Whisk it until it becomes fluffy
Step 3: Add salt and pepper to the mixture
Step 4: Heat a nonstick frying pan, and melt some butter until it foams
Step 5: Pour the egg mixture onto the pan, and tilt the pan until it covers the base
Step 6: Cook for a minute or two, and flip the omelet and cook it for a minute more
Step 7: Serve the omelet hot with toasted bread
You need to follow the steps to the tee to get an egg omelet. You cannot interchange any two steps to get the same output. In IT language, this is the process to make an egg omelet.
The main aspect of a process is the interconnectivity between the individual steps, and collectively, all the steps work toward a common goal, a common objective that is desired.
1.9.1 Characteristics of a Process
The comparison of a recipe with the ITIL process is the first step toward understanding it. Going one level deeper, every process has characteristics that orient the outcome toward the objective at hand.
There are a number of characteristics that a process must possess in order to be one, and the main ones are:
Processes are measurable
Processes deliver specific results
Processes serve customers
Processes respond to specific triggers
Let’s looks at these characteristics in detail.
1.9.1.1 Processes Are Measurable
Every process that is defined in ITIL must be measurable. This is the only way to understand how the process is performing, and the only way you can set benchmarks for future improvements.
Some measurements could be derived from the triple constraints of project management , such as time, cost, and scope. Along with it, a process could be measured on productivity (efficiency) and the quality it delivers (effectiveness).
1.9.1.2 Process Deliver Specific Results
If you start following the recipe for an egg omelet but end up fixing scrambled eggs, the recipe has failed in its purpose and its reason to exist. Likewise, a process exists to deliver results that are predefined and as desired. In other words, there is an outcome that is along the expected lines at the end of a process cycle.
1.9.1.3 Processes Serve Customers
Without customers, service management has no meaning. ITIL has no basis. And, that translates to processes being irrelevant. So, in order for a process to function, it needs to serve a customer. Whether the customer is internal or external is irrelevant.
1.9.1.4 Processes Respond to Specific Triggers
When do you start fixing an egg omelet? When you are hungry. When your loved ones are hungry. When your customers order one (if you are a restaurateur). The common thread is that there is a spark that sets off the need to prepare an egg omelet. This spark is the trigger that sets the motion in play. I will discuss this further in the next section.
1.9.2 The Process Model
One level deeper takes us to processes. I mentioned earlier that a process will contain a specific trigger, an input, and an output. Apart from the core basics, there are other components that make a process rugged and open for improvements.
In Figure 1-2, the middle block (process) consists of the essentials. It contains the list of activities (remember the steps in the recipe example?), procedures and work instructions for detailing the activities, roles for those who play their part in the process, improvements if any, and metrics for measuring performance.
Figure 1-2. The Process Model
Every process needs governance to control and guide the process toward efficiency and effectiveness. This is represented in the top block: process control. It contains policies, identifies process owners, lists process objectives, and, most importantly, receives feedback about a process (generally from the output) and uses it to improve the process.
The final block in the process model is the process enabler. Basically, this block consists of components that are needed to support the process and its activities. For a process to be implemented and operationalized, you need resources such as people, capital, infrastructure, application, and information. You would also need expertise or capabilities that come from people, knowledge, management, organization, and other processes.
1.10 Functions
Before I discuss functions, let’s take a look at organization structures. It is quite common these days for there to be teams with people who have expertise in one area. Examples could be the networking team, the Unix team, the Windows team, the Java team, and the web development team. It is also in vogue that teams are carved out based on the depth of knowledge. An example would be a Network L1 team (junior), Network L2 team (senior), and Network L3 team (expert teams, the architects). L1 teams consist of people with less experience and the tasks they are asked to take care of are quite basic and administrative in nature. For an L2 team, it gets a little more complicated, and they could be asked to troubleshoot and diagnose outages. A L3 team could be your top notch team who not only provides support when L2 needed but also helps architecting networks.
The teams that I have been referring to are known as functions in ITIL, nothing more, nothing less. There are only four functions that are defined in ITIL, and all of them come into play during the entire lifecycle of ITIL framework. The official definition of a function is:
A team or group of people and the tools or other resources they use to carry out one or more processes or activities.
1.11 Intersect Between Processes and Functions
There are processes and there are functions in ITIL. While there are 26 processes, there are only four functions. Processes don’t run by themselves. They need people to carry out the individual process activities. And the people the processes look for come from functions. To state it simply, functions provide the resources needed by the processes to complete their objectives.
Within the organization where you work, there are verticals—say banking, retail, and insurance. There are processes that cut across all the verticals of the organization such as human resources. The people in the verticals perform their role in the human resources process, which is horizontal cutting across all verticals, even though they are a part of a function. This would be an example of how a process leverages on functions for carrying out the set objectives.
Figure 1-3 illustrates the intersect that I have explained. You can replace the functions with the verticals in your organization and the processes with the common processes such as travel process, promotion processes , and others to establish a better understanding.
Figure 1-3. Intersect between processes and functions
1.12 Practice Exercises
Which of the following is NOT defined as a part of a typical process?
Inputs
Metrics
Work instructions
Tools
ITIL is developed based on:
Proprietary knowledge
Best practices
Existing standards
Customer requirements
Who is an internal customer?
Teams within the customer organization
Separate organization
Same organization as the service provider
Supplier organization
What does an IT service offer customers?
Value and outcomes
Contracts and agreements
Customer service and technology
Processes and functions
Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of a process?
Processes deliver specific results
Processes are measurable
Processes are prescriptive
Processes serve customers
1.13 Summary
In this chapter you were introduced to the exciting world of ITIL, its importance, its history, and the IT service management industry. I introduced the concept of an IT service, which is the fulcrum on which ITIL runs its processes. I also presented the various stakeholders that you can expect to find in an ITIL environment. Lastly, I discussed processes and functions. I will delve deeper into the individual processes from Chapters 4 onward. Functions are discussed in detail in Chapter 7.
In the next chapter, you will be introduced to the concepts that are an integral part of the ITIL environment.