Service Design Management - Term Paper Example

Service Design Management Name Instructor’s Name Course Name and Code Date Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Service design Objectives 3 Service Design Process 5 Service level management 5 Capacity management 6 Availability management 7 IT service continuity management (ITSCM) 8 Information security management (ISM) 9 Service catalogue management 10 Supplier management 11 Conclusion 12 References 12 Introduction Service design management is tasked with the designing of appropriate and innovative IT services together with their architectures, processes, policies and documentation, in order to meet the current and agreed future business requirements. Service designing has five main aspects including new or changed services, tools and systems for service management particularly the service portfolio such as the service catalogue, the technology architecture together with management systems, the required processes, and above all, measurements metrics and methods. The lifecycle of service design always starts with a set of changed or new business requirements, which then culminates into the development of a service solution that satisfies the documented business requirements. The service solution developed is then passed over to service transition to evaluate, build, test and finally deploy the new or changed service. This report extensively and comprehensively discusses service design management: in order to meet this objective, service design objectives, and service design process including service level management, capacity management, availability management, IT service continuity management, service catalogue management, and supplier management will be discussed. Service design Objectives a) The services designed must meet business goals and objectives with regard to compliance, quality, risk and security demands, delivering efficient and effective IT together with organization solutions as well services aligned to organization requirements (Chary, 2009). b) The designed service must and should be easy to develop and enhanced within appropriate timescales and costs; it should also minimize on the long term costs of service provision. c) Designing secure and resilient IT infrastructures, applications, environments together with data and information resources as well as capability that satisfies the organizations’ current and future needs (Chary, 2009) d) Measurement methods and metrics should be designed for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of the design processes coupled with their deliverables. e) They should assist in policy development in all area of design (Macintyre, Parry and Angelis, 2011) f) Produce and maintain IT plans, policies, architectures, processes, frameworks and documents for the design of quality IT solutions for meeting current and future needs of the organization (Chary, 2009). g) Develop skills and capabilities within IT through transforming the strategy and design activities into operational tasks and making use of IT service resources efficiently and effectively (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). h) The designs should also contribute to the enhancement of the overall IT service quality within the design constraints, particularly through reducing the need for reworking and improving services after their implementation in the live environment. Service Design Process The discussion below is the service design processes Service level management This is tasked with why the organization should have service level management; for instance, as the firm continuously depends on IT, it will always demand for higher service quality (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). For this matter, through creation of an IT service management strategy, the organization will be able to maximize end user productivity while at the same time improve operational effectiveness as well as enhance the organizations’ overall business performance. Accordingly, it will create an improved forum for communication between the firms’ Information System and the business units (Chary, 2009). Similarly, the IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy provides the foundation for integrating IT measurements into the operational together with IT management. The service level management principles in this regard, for the basis on how to contribute to ITSM culture that ensures that right service coupled with appropriate quality are developed and delivered at the right cost to the end users. Important to note, although Service Level Management is strongly focused on CSI, it also plays a significant role in the service design book, particularly in service catalogue management and supplier management. The key activities of SLM include: Identification; this involves the analysis of current services and service level requirements, and recording the present service provision in a service catalogue Definition; this is the matching and customizing the right service provision against the right costs: the service catalogue, and customer demands (Chary, 2009) Agreement; this is the defining and signing SLAs; service level agreements which are supported by operation level agreements together with the underpinning contracts (Macintyre, Parry and Angelis, 2011). Monitoring; this is the measuring the actual service level against the agreed service levels Reporting; this involves the reporting on service provision to the customer and the IT organization (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006) Evaluation: this involves reviewing service provision with the customer, adjust service provisions if required, and adjust Sla is required. Capacity management This defines why that organization should have capacity management; it has been established that each application has its own demands on the IT environment and some of these demands are unavoidable including enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management, and/or human resource management (Chary, 2009). There is also a continued emergence of new applications that have potential impacts on the IT particularly due to their bandwidth demands. Similarly, new applications are required to anchor the ever growing IT infrastructure of the organization like the off-site storage of back-up data (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). When, the organization fails to take into consideration these issues, they might negatively impact the firm mainly because the capacity of the IT environment available does not match the business requirements (Macintyre, Parry and Angelis, 2011). For this matter, there is need to balance costs and supply against demand as well as balancing costs against the needed resources. The main activities of capacity management include: Business capacity management; this is responsible for making sure that future IT requirements of the business are considered, planned, and implemented within the required time (Chary, 2009). Service Capacity management; this involves the performance management of IT services by customers; in essence, it is responsible for making sure that all service performance as detailed in the SLA and SLR targets are monitored as well as measured and ensuring that the data collected is recorded, analyzed and reported. Component capacity management; this is tasked with individual IT infrastructure components management. This is done by ensuring that all IT infrastructure components have finite resources which are monitored and measured as well as making sure the data collected is recorder, analyzed and reported (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). Availability management Various studies have established that process and/or people failures directly account for 80% of mission vital applications service downtime while the remaining 20% is as a result of technology failure, environmental failure or due to disasters (Chary, 2009). The current complexities in IT infrastructure together applications have resulted into difficulties in management of high system availability (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). In this regard, applications that demand for high level availability need to be managed with operational disciplines including system management activities, and network monitoring in order to avoid unnecessary outages (Macintyre, Parry and Angelis, 2011). The main objective of availability management is to optimize the IT infrastructure, services and support organization capabilities in order to deliver a sustainable and cost effective level; of availability that will allow the business to meet the organization’s goals and objectives. Availability management activities include: Proactive activities: this ensure that appropriate design planning of availability is undertaken for all new services; planning, design and improvement of availability; provide cost effective availability enhancements that deliver business and customer benefits; providing all agreed levels of availability; and producing and maintaining an availability plan (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). Reactive activities: this involves monitoring, analysis and management of all events, incidents together with problems with regard to availability; continued optimization and improvement of availability of IT infrastructure services; assisting security and ITSCM in the assessment and management of risk; and attending CAB as required. Other service availability management includes determining availability requirements, determining vital business functions, business impact analysis, defining availability, reliability and maintainability targets, monitoring and trend analysis, root cause analysis of availability, and producing and maintaining an availability plan. IT service continuity management (ITSCM) Technology is a key component in business processes; the continued high availability of IT is vital to the survival of the business organization in its entirety (Macintyre, Parry and Angelis, 2011). Achieving this core business objective is only through introduction of risk reduction measures and recovery options. Successful implementation of ITSCM can only be achieved through senior management commitment and support from the members of the organization (Chary, 2009). The continued maintenance of recovery capabilities is extremely essential for its persistent effectiveness. In this regard, the main objective for ITSCM is to maintain continued recovery capability within the IT services together with their supporting components (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). The overall goal for ITSCM is to support the continuity of the business management process through ensuring that the required ITSCM activities include: Initiation: this is concerned with the link with the business continuity plan, policy setting, terms of reference scope and allocation of resources (Chary, 2009) Requirements and strategy: this includes input from the availability management and security management, business impact analysis, and discussing recovery options. Implementation: this involves writing continuity plan such as emergence response plan, damage assessment plan, salvage plan, and crisis management and PR plan; implementing standby arrangements; implementing recovery options; testing the plans; and developing and implementing procedures and working instructions (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). Operational management: this is the linking ITSCM to change management and keeping plans and recovery options up to date, making sure the IT staff is aware and trained to use the plans, testing and reviewing plans continuously to ensure improvement. Information security management (ISM) This must be considered within the entire corporate governance framework; the set of responsibilities and practices exercised by the executive management and the board of the organization with a singular goal of providing strategic direction through achievement of objectives, managing risks appropriately, as well as verifying that enterprise resources are effectively being used (Chary, 2009). Information security is one of management activities found within corporate governance framework that is essential in providing strategic direction for security activities while at the same time making sure that objectives are met. Accordingly, it ensures that information security risks are effectively managed as well as making sure that information resources of the organization are used responsibly (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006). In essence, ISM focus is to provide all aspects of IT security together with managing all IT security activities. The main activities here are: Production, review and revision of the overall information security policy and a set of supporting specific policies (Chary, 2009) Communicating, implementing as well as enforcing the security policies Assessing and clarifying all assets of information and documentation Implementation, review, revision together of a set of security controls and risk management and responses Scheduling and completing of security reviews, audits, and penetration tests. Service catalogue management This is the process that is responsible for service catalogue production, maintenance, and contains accurate information with regard to all operational services together with those under development. Service catalogue management is purposed with providing a single source of consistent information on all agreed services as well ensuring that it is abundantly available to those with authority to access it. Similarly, it helps in the management of the information contained the service catalogue ensuring that it is accurate and reflects up to date details, status, interfaces and dependencies of all services that are being run, or being prepared to run in the live environment. The activities involved here include: Service definition (Chary, 2009) Production together with maintenance of accurate service catalogue Interface, dependencies as well as consistence between service catalogue and service portfolio Interfaces and dependencies with regard to all services while at the same time anchoring components and configuration items (Hollins and Shinkins, 2006) Interface and dependencies between all services and supporting services within the catalogue and the CMS Supplier management This is the process of ensuring that suppliers together with the services they provided are well managed in order to support IT service targets and business expectations (Chary, 2009). For this matter, it is vitally important that supplier management processes and planning are incorporate in all service lifecycle stages, including, strategy, design, transition, operation, and improvement. With regard to the complexity of organizational demands, skills and capability to support provision of a comprehensive set of IT services to a business must be provided (Hernandez and O’Connor, 2009). Using value networks and suppliers is very important in ensuring end to end solutions. Suppliers and the art of supplier management are strongly related and hence essential in provision of quality IT services. The main objective of supplier management process is to help the organization realize the value for money from suppliers and ensuring that suppliers work to meet the targets as stated in their contracts. Conclusion Service design management as discussed above is involved with designing of appropriate and innovative IT services together with their architectures, processes, policies and documentation, in order to meet the current and agreed future business requirements. The report has expansively discussed all aspects of service design and management including service design process including service level management, capacity management, availability management, IT service continuity management, service catalogue management, and supplier management. References Chary, K. 2009. Production and operations management. Jakarta: Tata McGraw Hill Education Hollins, B., and Shinkins, S. 2006. Managing Service Operations: Design and Implementation. London: Sage Publishers Macintyre, M., Parry, G., and Angelis, J. 2011. Service design and delivery. New York: Springer Publishers Pang, S. 2009. Successful Service Design for Telecommunications: A comprehensive guide to design and implementation. New York: John Wiley and Sons Hernandez, S., and O’Connor, S. 2009. Strategic Human Resources Management in Health Services Organizations. London: Cengage Learning Read More