Service Design 2 of 2: The Processes

There are 7 processes under Service Design. They are Service Catalog Management, Service level Management, Availability Management, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity Management, IT Security Management and Supplier Management.

1) Service Catalog Management:


A Service Catalog contains the all the Services which are operational and those being prepared to be run operationally.


Ensuring that the Service catalog is accurate, current, secure, accessible and aligned to the service portfolio  is the goal of Service Catalog Management.

Points to remember:

• Understand the differences between Service Catalog and Service Portfolio.
• The two type of Service Catalog are: Business Service Catalog and the Technical Service Catalog
• The Service Catalog is a customer facing document. Therefore, such relevant information as ordering  info, dependencies, contact details, utility, warranty, pricing etc. might be present.
• The Service Catalog  could be the starting point document for the Service Level Management to initiate discussions with Customers.
• Consultants hired to evaluate the IT organizations' capabilities, use Service catalog as the starting point.

2) Service Level Management

Service Level Management process is to ensure that an agreed level of IT service is provided for all current and future services are delivered to agreed achievable targets. To take proactive steps to improve the Service levels and Customer satisfaction.

The Service Level Manager is responsible to define, document, agree, monitor, measure, report and executes a review of the service level, with specific and measurable targets.

Points to remember:

• SLA: Service Level Agreement is between the Service Provider and the Customer
• OLA: Operation Level Agreement is between the Service Provider and the Internal teams 
• UC : Underpinning Contract is between the Service Provider and the Vendors 
• SLR: Service Level Requirements are gathered form the customers, to understand their specific requirements (may based on the Service Catalog).
• The SLM needs to choose the SLA framework has 3 type of SLAs, viz: Service based SLA (Service Levels based on Services for all customers), Customer based SLA ( (Service Levels based on Customers for each of the Services) and Multi-level SLA (A combination of above two with the required hierarchy of agreements)
• SLA  parameters needs to unambiguous, measurable and need not be written in a legal language (for the internal customers)
• The IT Service Continuity Plans are normally documented outside the SLA, but the conditions (such as duration of outage, above which the ITSCP be initiated) may be documented.
• The effectiveness of this process should be measured by the Customer satisfaction 

3) Availability Management

Availability Management is to ensure that the delivered availability level for all services complies with or exceeds the agreed requirement in a cost-effective manner for the current and future customer requirements.

Points to remember:

• The scope is restricted to the designing, implementation, measurement, management and improvement of IT service and component availability. Not the Business Process availability (as the Availability Management will not be able control them).
• Availability measures will have 3 different perspectives: Customer's, User's and the Service Provider's.
• Availability depends on Resilience, Availability (of components/services), Redundancy, Maintainability, Serviceability and Security 
• Maintainability is the ability of the Internal Teams to support/maintain the said service/component (may involve OLAs)
• Serviceability is the ability of the Vendors to support/maintain the said service/component (may involve UCs)

• MTRS: Mean Time to Restore Services
• MTTR: Mean time to Repair (= Average Downtime)
• MTBSI: Mean Time Between System Incidents
• MTBF; Mean Time Between Failures

4) Capacity Management

 

Capacity Management is to provide an IT capacity in tune with both the current and future requirements of the customers against justifiable costs

Points to remember:

• The 3 sub processes are Business Capacity Management (Business Transactions, input from Customers),  Service Capacity Management (IT Service capacity affecting the Service performance levels, due to capacity) and Component Capacity Management(Monitoring the individual IT components such as Server CPU utilization, Storage space, Thrasholds etc)

• Balances: Supply vs Demand,  Utilization vs Proposed and Costs vs Resources deployed
• The activities include Monitoring, Analyzing, Tuning, Implementing improvements, Application Sizing, Modeling Demand Management  etc.
• Creation of a Capacity Plan and its periodic review/ update.
• Assist SLM on Capacity related Service Levels 

5) IT Service Continuity Management

The IT Service Continuity Management is to support the overall Business Continuity Management process by ensuring that the required IT technical and service facilities can be recovered (back to near normal states), within required and agreed, business timescales.

Points to remember:

• The 4 crucial stages and the related activities for the IT Service Continuity Management are:

I: Initiation

Policy Setting

Specify terms of reference and scope

Define the project organization and scope

Allocate Resources

Agree on project and quality plans

II: Requirements and Strategy

Business Impact Analysis

Risk Analysis

Discuss recovery options (link to SLM)

III: Implementation

Write Continuity plans, including:

Emergency Response Plan

Damage Assessment Plan

Salvage Plan

Crisis Management and PR Plan

Implement stand-by arrangements

Implement recovery options

Test the plans

Develop and implement procedures and working instructions.

IV: Ongoing operation

Education, Awareness and training

Review 

Testing 

Change Management 

• The start of an ITSC Plan will be to understand the crucial Business processes needing the Business Continuity. This is done through a BIA (Business Impact Analysis), before anything else.
• No ITSC Plan without a Business Continuity Plan. ie.: The ITSCM is an off-shoot of the BCM (Business Continuity management)
• The choices to recover are

Gradual Recovery with a cold standby, takes longer than 72 hours to recover.

Intermediate Recovery with a warm standby, takes 24 to 72 hours to recover.

Immediate Recovery with a hot standby takes less than 4 hours to recover.

6) IT Security Management

The IT Security Management is to align the IT security with business security and ensure that the information security is effectively managed in all service and Service management activities.

Points to remember:

• It is the Business stakeholders, who decide the Security levels of their data 
• It is the responsibility of ISM to prevent the unauthorized access to data.
• Ensuring Confidentiality (No access to unauthorized people/systems), Integrity (Accuracy of data) and Availability (Data should be available only to authorized people/ systems) is the goal of the ISM.
• The Security policies must be available to all.
• Managing the policies, controls, risks and responses through the Operation teams is the responsibility of the ISM.
• A threat exploits vulnerability causing a security incident, could result in damage to finance, reputation, client data or may cause breach regulatory   

7) Supplier Management

The Supplier Management process is  ensure that all contracts with suppliers support the needs of the business and that all (underpinning) contractual commitments are met. To derive "value for money" from suppliers and contracts for the Service provider

Points to remember:

• The Supplier Manager is involved in the negotiation, renewal (or cancellation)  and approval of the contracts with the vendors.
• The Supplier Management manages the SCD (Supplier and Contract Database), provides inputs for supplier policies, evaluates suppliers and the maintains/ improves relationship with them.