ITILV3 - Day 39

ITIL Service Lifecycle

The ITIL Service Lifecycle is a public framework and standard that defines the five stages that service goes through during its life -

Service Strategy, 
Service Design, 
Service Transition, 
Service Operation, 
and Continual Service Improvement.

All five stages of the ITIL Service Lifecycle are focused on the value the IT services deliver.

Value is the heart of the service concept. A service should always deliver Value to customers.

ITILV3 - Day 38

IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM)

IT Service Continuity strategy is based on:

1. Risk assessment
2. Business continuity strategy
3. Business Impact Analysis

ITSCM analyzes and controls the risks that could affect IT Services

A risk is a possibility that something bad might happen as a result of something else happening.

Example: If I build a an oceanfront house, there is a risk that a hurricane could destroy it.

Risk Management ensures that:

1 - Operations continue after a major event. (An earthquake?)
2 - Assets (information, facilities and building) are protected.
3 - Workplace is safe for emplyees and customers.

Some times it seems to me that ITIL says, over and over again, the same thing, only changing the order of the words.

ITILV3 - Day 37

IT Operations Management

IT Operations Management performs and monitors daily operational activities and events.

Example: IT Operations Management comprises the staff in a NOC (Network Operations Center).

Operations Management objectives:

1 - Diagnose IT Operations failures quickly.
2 - Improve service and reduce costs.
3 - Maintain stable processes and activities.
When it comes to Brasil Operations Management and Área de Infraestrutura are the same thing.

ITILV3 - Day 36

Internal and External Customers and Services

Internal Customers belong to thesame organization as the service provider. For example: departments, teams, or units. Internal Services are provided to customers in the same organization.

External Customers are not part of the organization providing the service. They enter into contracts with the service provider for service and pay money for those services.

External Services are provided to external customers.

ITILV3 - Day 35

Information Security Management (ISM)

Information Security Management is a method used to ensure information availability, confidentiality and integrity.

The information security Manager ensures that the information security policy of the organization meets the Service Level Agreement (SLA) required levels of confidentiality, integrity and availability.

Information Security Management elements:

1. Control
2. Plan
3. Implement
4. Evaluate
5. Maintain

Corporate IT governance determines what needs to be protected as well as the level of protection in Information Security Management.

ITILV3 - Day 34

Incident Management

Objectives:

1. Reduce the adverse effect on business operations.

2. Return to normal service operation quickly

Incident Models and Known Error Records are used to manage an Incident.

An incident Model predefines a standard method of steps that will be taken to handle and incident.

Successful incident management begins with logging every incident, requiring and categorizing incidents to assist with trend analysis.

Incident closing procedures:
1. Assign the correct incident category.
2. Ensure user satisfaction.
(Obvius)

Hierarchic Escalation means to notify IT managers about an incident.
(It seems to me that HIerarchic Escalation has nothing to do with solving the problem)
Functional Escalation means to escalate up the service chain for support and problem resolution.

ITILV3 - Day 33

Incident

And incident is an event that causes IT service interruption or degradation.

Major incidents have severe impact to service operations and require separate procedures to handle them effectively.

Any person who notices a change in normal service operation should report it as a possible incident.

ITILV3 - Day 32

Impact, Urgency, and Priority

Impact calculates the effect an incident has on business processes.

Urgency is a calculation of how long it will be before an incident impacts business operations in a major way.

Impact and urgency combined are used to determine priority, which is a category of how important the incident is.
Nothing new, at least, not for me.

ITILV3 - Day 31

Governance

Governance drives organizations and controls them by defining directions, policies and rules used to conduct business.

Corporate Governance provides socially acceptable, truthful and responsible organizational management.

Effective Business Governance can result in improved organizational performance.

IT Governance is concerned with making sure that the IT process are implemented according to the organization's strategies and policies.

To be honest, all of those definitions are too generic. Are they valuable information? I don't think so. Sorry.

ITILV3 - Day 30

Good Practices

ITIL is a Good Practice Framework for IT Service Management - it provides advice and best practices for the management of IT services.

Good Practices are best practices that work, are effective and have gained wide acceptance.

ITIL is successful because it provides value to both the business and the customer through its focus on service, value, and continual improvement of IT services.

In my opinion this explanation about good practices is completely unnecessary. The name is self explanatory.

ITILV3 - Day 29

Financial Management for IT Services

Three main activities:

1 - Budgeting

2 - Accounting

3 - Charging

Financial Management applies to all three service provider types:

1 - An internal service provider within a business unit

2 - An internal service provider that provides shared IT services to multiple units.

3 - An external service provider.

Well, according to ITIL budgeting, accouting and chargin are IT responsabilities. It means IT, when it comes to money, manages itself. Is that so?

ITILV3 - Day 28

Facilities Management

The Facilities Management function manages the physical environment of the IT infraestructure and data centers.

Facilities Management activities:

1 - Building Management (What is this?)
2 - Equipment (IT, cooling, power)
3 - Power Management
4 - Physical environment monitoring (How is this done? Is this an automated tool or a person that monitors?)
5 - Physical access control
6 - Recovery sites (What is this? Isn't it physical? Areyou talking about redundance?)

ITILV3 - Day 27

Event Management activities:

1 - Event monitoring and detection
2 - Event notification and logging
3 - Event correlation.
4 - Event categorization

The Event Management process is responsible for setting performance thresholds and then monitoring the service to detect when the performance does not meet the threshold.

I understand the expression "performance thresholds", but I have doubts about cost benefit relation. How complex is to manage events with that point of view? Correlation? Let me tell you something. To manage correlation between events it's not easy task at all. I think this topic is very sophisticated one and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to implement.

ITILV3 - Day 26

Event

An Event is any significant change to an IT service or configuration item (CI).

Three categories of Events:

1 - Information - no action required.

2 - Warning - something is close to a pre-set performance threshold.

3 - Exception - something has exceeded a threshold and needs intervention.

The question is: information for who? warning for who? exception for who?
I understand the meaning of those three items. But I think it is too much theoretical.

ITILV3 - Day 25

Deming Cycle

Goal: Steady, ongoing improvement.

Deming Cycle stages and activities:

1 - Plan - Plan for improvement, design or revise processes.

2 - Do - Implement the plan, manage the process.

3 - Check - Monitor, measure and review the processes.

4 - Act - Improve the processes

The Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) Deming Cycle should be repeated over and over to implement Continual Improvement.

It's a very good surprise to find out that ITIL has PDCA. A very effective technique and very simple to understand too.

ITILV3 - Day24

Demand Management

1 - Coordinates supply with demand.
What's the difference between Analyzing, Anticipation and Coordination? If you analyze and anticipate aren't you coordinating?


2 - Analyzes customer patterns of business activity (PBA) -  
I think here comes the Big Data phenomena.

3 - Anticipates customer demand for services -
Big Data again, or a good administration of Data Ware House.

ITILV3 - Day 23

Definitive Media LIbrary (DML)

A Definitive Media Library (DML) refers to one or more secure locations where licenses, documentation, and the authorized versions of all software configuration items (CIs) are stored.
That was always a mistery for me. How and where are all the licenses stored?

The DML is managed and controlled by Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM).

http://acolyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/service-asset-and-configuration-management.pdf
As organizations embrace the knowledge that IT service excellence is a contributor to
effective competition, many stumble when attempting to achieve this end. What these
enterprises are striving for is a true conversion to IT Service Management (ITSM),
which focuses on creating and managing services across their lifecycles — from planning
and delivering new IT services to maintaining and supporting day-to-day activities. A key
step toward meeting these goals, Software Asset and Configuration Management (SACM),
helps to manage the data needed to facilitate ITSM. Unfortunately, many organizations lack
formal guidelines for the best ways to embark on the SACM journey, and therefore struggle
when attempting to achieve true ITSM and service excellence.

My question is: Is SACM a software? Is it a concept?

ITILV3 - Day 22

Core ITIL Publications

The Five Core ITIL Publications cover each stage of the service lifecycle:

1 - Service Strategy

2 - Service Design

3 - Service Transition

4 - Service Operation

5 - Continual Service Improvement

I didn't get it.
What are the five core ITIL Publications? Service lifecycle? Service Strategy is a core publication or a service stage? For me it's service stage.
What do you think about it?

ITILv3 - Day 21

Continual Service Improvement: Role of Measurement

Measurements are the actual readings of a specific metric.

In CSI (as well as all processes), measurements are used for four reasons:

1 - Validate (actions already taken)
OK
2 - Direct (activity)
OK
3 - Justify (a course of action)
OK
4 - Intervene (when necessary)

The reasons why measurments are important are pretty obvious. No comments are necessary about day 21.
As I said in the beginning, ITIL is the science of the obvious.

ITILV3 - Day 20

Continual Service Improvement (CSI);

Purpose

Continual Service Improvement vital questions to consider:

What do we need to measure?
Huummmm, maybe that is easy.

Why do we need to measure it?
Huuummm, without numbers any discussion is void.

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) Objectives:

1 - Improve service quality
Quality is not a very trivial thing to define.

2 - Improve process efficiency
Efficiency, well... if I define performance as a sign of efficiency, it would make sense.

3 - Improve cost effectiveness
Does it mean to save money, or somehting like that?

The CSI Register is a database (part of the SKMS) that records every improvement initiative.

Well, I found out something about SKMS and CMS. Bottomline, SKMS is God!

http://www.itskeptic.org/what-difference-between-cms-and-skms

The SKMS contains everything you can possibly imagine:

    provide full lifecycle management from acquisition to disposal for a 'complete' inventory of CIs ST p65
    ...where those CIs include business cases, plans, managemkent, organisation, knowledge, people, processes, capital, systems, apps, information, infrastructure, facilities, people, service models, acceptance criteria, tangible and intangible assets, software, requirements and agreements, media, spares... ST p67-68
    Contain the "experience of staff" ST p 147
    contain data about "weather, user numbers and behaviour, organisation's performance figures" ST p 147
    record supplier's and partners' requirements, abilities and expectations ST p 147
    record user skill levels ST p 147
    record and relate all RFCs, incidents, problems, known errors and releases ST p77
    group, classify and define CIs ST p72
    uniquely name and label all CIs ST p72
    relate all these items with multiple types of relationships including compoentn breakdown structure, composition of a service, ownership, dependencies, release packaging, product makeup, supporting documentation... ST p72-73 including "part of", "connected to", "uses" and "installed on" ST p77
    integrate data from document stores, file stores, CMDB, events and alerts, legacy systems, and enterprise applications, integrated via schema mapping, reconcilaition, synchronisation, ETL and/or mining ST fig4.39 p151
    provide tools against this integrated data for query and analysis, reporting, forecasting, modelling and dashboards ST fig4.39 p151
    take baselines and snapshots of all this dataST p77
    perform verification and audit of all this data ST p81
    be based on a Service Management information model ST p150
    measure the use made of the data ST p151
    evaluate usefulness of reports produced ST p151

whereas the CMS only contains NEARLY everything you can possibly imagine. The CMS contains ALL the information and related files for the following CI types (ST p67)

    business case, service management plans, lifecycle plans, service design packages, release and change plans, test plans
    management, organisation, processes, knowledge [???], people
    financial capital, systems, applications, information, data, infrastructure and facilities, financial capital [again, must be important], people [again]
    service model
    service package [not to be confused with a service design package]
    release package
    service acceptance criteria
    business strategy or other policies, regulatory or statutory requirements
    tangible (datacentre) and intangible assets such as software
    customer requirements and agreements,
    releases from suppliers
    external services
    interface CIs [wtf they are]