Change is of often difficult, and for many, ITIL adoption has represented one of the largest IT department shifts in the past few years. In this short paper, Six Guiding Principles to Changing Behavior and Speeding the Adoption of BSM and ITIL, some good strategies are outlined.
Where does a business service start and and an application system end? What differentiates the two?
In complex environments like ERP systems, the line can be blurry. The primary determinate is usually the location of the SLA/OLA’s. ERP systems can be tricky as they are made of many modules that can act as both as their own business service, and subcomponents of an application system, depending on how they are used by various groups. For example, the warehousing module maybe the only ERP application used by the warehouse group, but is only one of several modules used by the manufacturing group. In this case, the warehouse application will exist in the CMDB as an application system, and linked Warehousing business service. Intelligent organization of these relationships is critical, and here is an interview by Jeanne Morain called CMDB Implementation-Tips from a Pro.
Service Level Management can be a great way to protect yourself. An IT service provider I know acts as a level 1 service desk to its clients. With one of their clients, they continued to have customer satisfaction issues receiving a disproportionate number of complaints about their service levels. Despite efforts to solve the issues, the complaints continued, and soon it developed into an account management issue. The customer issues got escalated to management on both sides, and the problem grew out of hand. With all hands on desk, the ITSP tried to figure out why these issues were occurring. Tt was realized that the client’s own level 2 and 3 IT support personnel, who were already somewhat disgruntled, were the cause or, or had a connection to, most of the complaints. To avoid finger pointing, and highlight the issues in an irrefutable way, the ITSP instituted shadow OLA’s for all tickets passed to the clients IT support teams. After some weeks of data gathering, the service level metrics revealed that the ITSP L1 teams met their targets 92% of time. However with the tickets passed to the client’s teams, this fell to 42%. With this data the client was forced to clean their own house.
