CHAPTER 5: SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT

“Well done is better than well said.” Benjamin Franklin

According to ITIL^®, the primary objective of service management is to ensure that “the IT services are aligned to the business needs and actively support them.” IT supports the business, but also acts as a change agent for business transformation.

Service management is critical to successful change in adopting new technology for cutting edge IT. The lifecycle Plan-Do-Check-Act is elegantly simple as a high-level process, as defined in the ISO quality standards including ISO20000 (Information Technology – Service Management). Service management does not begin with operations after technology deployment, but is part of the earliest planning and design stages to ensure that the means to meet client expectations are “built in” as part of new technology adoption.

Overview of ISO/IEC 20000

Similar to COBIT 5^® and ISO27001, the ISO standard for service management promotes an integrated process approach to deliver services that meet the needs of business. It describes an integrated implementation of services management processes including service level management, service reporting, service continuity and availability management, budgeting and accounting for IT services, capacity management, information security management, incident handling, and problem management. Control processes included in the standard are configuration, change, and release management. The standard also defines relationship management between the service provider, business, and suppliers.

Within the context of a COBIT 5^® organization, these processes dovetail well within the COBIT^® framework and can be used to supplement the processes described in the management domains.

From a control perspective, focus on the control processes makes sense particularly when adopting new technology. Configuration, change, and release management are essential to ensuring that the “state” of IT is known throughout the lifecycle of technology.

Overview of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL^® V3)

ITIL^® is a public framework, today consisting of five books covering Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement. ITIL^®’s framework served with great success as the foundation for establishing IT methods and processes in an organization where a rapid IT transformation effort was underway, to standardize operational tasks, to provide templates to ensure consistency, and to facilitate local decision making wherever appropriate. Today, ITIL^® processes, templates, and tools are available via the Web at http://www.bestpracticelive.com/.

ITIL^® provides the flexibility for an organization using COBIT 5^® to adopt and expand service management processes according to organizational goals. Both ISO20000 and ITIL^® supplement the COBIT 5^® framework, with COBIT^® providing many additional tools and techniques to guide an organization through successful implementation of service management processes.