VitAL Magazine - September 2007

Volume 1 : Issue 1 : September / October 2007

Inspiration for the modern business

itSMF Interviewprofessional service management

Service – what customers wantwhat successful businesses offer

ITIL version 3keeping ITSM true

Listeningyou’ll learn a lot

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September / October 2007 : VitAL

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LEADER

WELCOME TO A NEW SOURCE OF IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT INFORMATION

leader

John Hancock

IT’S A new magazine and there is form to follow. First of all I’m going to welcome you to the new

publication then I’m going to tell you a little about what value we hope to add for you and tell you something about this issue. Then I’ll cover a couple of generalities, fi nally concluding by ‘opening the door’ into our new magazine.

There is always a process to take us from the beginning to the end because without a process we would simply wander around doing whatever we saw or was most immediately pressing, probably to the long term detriment of our larger aims. But why am I telling you this when you, dear reader, know as much about process as anybody; it is, after all, the basis of what you do. It’s just to show that we try to think as you think because this magazine is for you.

Welcome to VitAL magazine, the fresh new publication for IT Service Management. We’re not here to tell you how to do your job but we are here to bring you the kind of information that will be useful to you. Of course, we have our own ideas of what will be useful and there will be matters of overriding importance out in the market that will, by sheer force of their relevance and importance, have to be included. ITIL v3 is an obvious example of such a topic today and this issue has a number of articles looking at this from different angles or reviewing its value in different applications. But it won’t be all about ITIL v3. We’ll be looking at security, communications, the value of feedback, the importance of SMEs not avoiding technology but rather participating in the opportunities it can create. We will look at the damage poor service can do and the value that good service can create and we will look at change, the one constant in modern management challenges.

We also interview Keith Aldis, the new CEO at itSMF (the IT Service Management Forum) about where the profession stands today and the directions it might take in the future.

There are very few people in work today whose life has not been affected by the growth of IT capabilities. Not only am I dictating this article to my computer through Dragon software but I also often write notes, including interview notes, using a Logitech digital pen, to avoid the need to retype my words. In truth I couldn’t operate in the way I do without technology

and software which don’t simply perform the old tasks more quickly but actually shape the way my business is structured.

And so it is with businesses of all sizes. IT Service Management now sits at the heart of the modern business infrastructure, a front line management discipline subject to the same constraints challenges and opportunities that fi ll the working day of every other manager in the business.

In many ways IT Service Management is what has made possible the revival of relationship based business practices in recent years. In the past most businesses traded on relationships; knowing their customer knowing what that customer liked. Early and less sophisticated applications of IT degraded that relationship basis for business and replaced it with a process or functional basis. This, putting the needs of the business before the needs of the client, gave commerce a very poor name. It also meant that businesses focused far more on value acquisition than on value retention with the result that the public increasingly saw companies as more concerned with selling them something new than with providing them with any kind of service after that fi rst sale – or, at least, until the next sale. It took some time to the penny to drop that the clients you have today are of the greatest value, if only because winning new clients is so expensive.

It is the capabilities that IT Service Management brings to the business that have made possible the restoration of relationships at the heart of the business.

VitAL will celebrate the profession as a management discipline and not simply in terms of the technology on whose management it is based. We look forward to serving you well in the years ahead and to establishing a relationship with you: a relationship in which we hope that you will tell us what you would like to see covered in the magazine and will even contact me with your ideas for future articles that you could write.

Let me not take any more of your time but without further ado invite you to enjoy this, your fi rst issue of VitAL magazine.

John Hancock

IT Service

Management is

what has made

possible the revival

of relationship

based business

practices in

recent years.

As global competition intensifies, the service delivered after the initial sale of a product is becoming increasingly strategic to revenue, profitability and customer loyalty.

This is driving companies like yours to explore creative ways to

transform global service operations and dramatically improve

revenue and profitability while efficiently delivering on the service

commitments you made to your customers.

Leading companies increasingly understand that this can only

be achieved through a Strategic Service Management Solution

— one that enables the optimisation, integration and efficient

management of their core service business processes which

include: management, scheduling and planning of service parts,

service technicians and the related pricing of such resources. At

Servigistics, we understand the strategic importance of after-sale

service and have a proven track record helping Fortune Global

500 companies achieve their service business objectives.

If service is strategic to your business, call +44 1454 419191

or visit www.servigistics.com to learn how Servigistics Strategic

Service Management Solutions can help you transform your

service business.

Service Has Turned Strategic

uk_generic.indd 1 12/15/2006 11:32:29 AM

contents

5


Contents

10 NEWSThis issue’s news highlights a very novel application of IT, the latest version of a much loved capability and news from the Spam front – they’re back, and this time it’s serious, as if it wasn’t before

14 A NEW HAND ON THE TILLERJOHN HANCOCK

Keith Aldis has only recently taken on the role of CEO at itSMF. How does he fi nd the organisation and where does he see it going in the future?

16 IN THE BEGINNINGROSEMARY GURNEY

IT Service Management created a whole new raft of management challenges; ITIL has made it possible to tackle those challenges within a set of universal standards. Rosemary explains how it all came about.

22 IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE, BUT…DAVID ROBERTSON

Too often experts try to explain the benefi ts of IT to a layperson, through the features; whereas, as David shows, compelling arguments focus on the business

24 ORGANISATIONAL & CULTURAL CHANGE CAROLINE WYATT

While ITIL® v3 may provide a great set of tools, to get the best from its implementation will require good management processes and vision says Caroline

25 NEW STANDARDS FOR CATALOGUE & SERVICE MANAGEMENTDAVID PERCY

The recent launch of ITIL® v3 heralds a change in emphasis, according to David

27 SERVICE MANAGEMENT – THEN AND NOWJACK ROBERTSON-WORSFOLD

ITIL® and Service management have evolved to meet changing needs, as Jack explains

28 ISO/IEC 20000 GETS STRUCTURAL SUPPORTSHIRLEY LACY

Shirley explains one of the practical applications for ITIL® v3

Editor John Hancock [email protected]

Advertising SalesGrant [email protected]

Production & DesignDean Cook [email protected]

Editorial & Advertising Enquiries 31 Media Limited, Media House, 16 Rippolson Road, London, SE18 1NSTel: +44 (0) 208 316 7433Fax: +44 (0) 208 316 5233email: [email protected] web: www.vital-mag.net

Subscribing to VitAL MagazineVitAL Magazine is published six times per year for directors, department heads, and managers who are looking to improve the impact that IT implementation has on their customers and business.

Subscription Rates: UK £30.00 per year Rest of the World £60.00 per year

Please direct all subscription enquiries to: [email protected]

Printed by Pensord, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood. NP12 2YA

© 2007 31 Media Limited. All rights reserved.

VitAL Magazine is edited, designed, and published by 31 Media Limited. No part of VitAL Magazine may be reproduced, transmitted, stored electronically, distributed, or copied, in whole or part without the prior written consent of the publisher. A reprint service is available.

Opinions expressed in this journal do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or VitAL Magazine or its publisher, 31 Media Limited.

ISSN 1755-6465

SUBSCRIBING TO VITAL MAGAZINEVitAL Magazine is published six times per year for directors, department heads, and managers who are looking to improve the impact that IT implementation has on their customers and business.Subscription Rates: UK £30.00 per year, Rest of the World £60.00 per yearPlease direct all subscription enquiries to: [email protected]

All Images © iStockPhoto.com 2007

As global competition intensifies, the service delivered after the initial sale of a product is becoming increasingly strategic to revenue, profitability and customer loyalty.

This is driving companies like yours to explore creative ways to

transform global service operations and dramatically improve

revenue and profitability while efficiently delivering on the service

commitments you made to your customers.

Leading companies increasingly understand that this can only

be achieved through a Strategic Service Management Solution

— one that enables the optimisation, integration and efficient

management of their core service business processes which

include: management, scheduling and planning of service parts,

service technicians and the related pricing of such resources. At

Servigistics, we understand the strategic importance of after-sale

service and have a proven track record helping Fortune Global

500 companies achieve their service business objectives.

If service is strategic to your business, call +44 1454 419191

or visit www.servigistics.com to learn how Servigistics Strategic

Service Management Solutions can help you transform your

service business.

Service Has Turned Strategic

uk_generic.indd 1 12/15/2006 11:32:29 AM


■

ViTAL Sub FP 0807.indd 1 22/8/07 18:25:34

contents

7

Contents

32 THE RICHES OF RELEVANCEYOLANDA NOBLE

Properly targeted campaigns were once the reserve of the large and wealthy corporation but, as Yolanda explains, all that has changed with technology in printing

36 EASY PAYMENTS ARE SMART PAYMENTSDR GARRY HOMER

The boundaries between academia and the world of commerce grow ever more blurred: in fact when they collaborate, great things can happen, as Garry demonstrates

40 FROM LISTENING COMES WISDOMJAMES HEAVEY

Feedback is free management information with the advantage that it refl ects the customer’s feelings which, as James explains, is what you really need to know

44 BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?STEVE WHITE

ITIL® is now commonly quoted in IT Service Management but knowing what it is only useful to a point; knowing also what it does (and how to use it) is what Steve tells us

48 IS SERVICE LETTING YOU DOWN?GAVIN HARTLAND

Will customers stay long enough to learn that you don’t care what happens after the sale or, asks Gavin, will dazzling service cement a mutually advantageous relationship?

50 EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION?MARKOS SYMEONIDES

There was nothing wrong with the principles that underpin ITIL but as Mark explains, it needed bringing up to speed with today’s IT Service management environment

52 OFF AND RUNNINGROBERT STROUD

ITIL® version 3 is not just about how to manage the latest kit and software, its about running a business with IT at its heart (an increasingly common situation) as Robert explains

54 WHO’S CONNECTED?LUKE BROWN

Luke examines how enterprises can apply four techniques to assure network performance, reduce the introduction of new security risks and ensure compliance with industry regulations

56 MAKING SERVICES PAYPHILIP SANSOM

The traditional break/fi x IT services model has had its day but what will replace it? Philip offers a very up to date technology solution for a technology challenge

58 WEB SELF SERVICEIAN JONES

It may be on the web but a retail environment, even a virtual one, as Ian says, still has to set out a stall if visitors are to become customers today and in the future

60 A NEW WAY OF WALKINGMARK SYKES & RALPH GRAY

ITIL® v3 allows more sensitive and fl exible service management tools but will vendors be up to the responsibilities or users to the possibilities? Mark and Ralph weigh up the facts

62 IT TRANSFORMED BY ‘Y2K’ HYSTERIARICHARD ALTHORP

Richard looks at the development of business processes throughout IT and the systems being used to enhance service delivery


VitAL : September / October 2007

8

contrbutors

THIS ISSUE’S CONTRIBUTORS

Rosemary Gurney

TitleDirectorCompanyWardown Consulting LtdNature of BusinessIT Service Management training and consultancyContact Telephoneephone01582 488242Emailrosemary.gurney@wardownconsulting.co.ukWebsitewww.wardownconsulting.co.uk

David Robertson

TitleChief Executive CompanyBibby Financial ServicesNature of BusinessBusiness cashfl ow solutions to SMEsContact Telephone0800 91 95 92Emailmarketing@bibbyfi nancialservices.comWebwww.bibbyfi nancialservices.com

Caroline Wyatt

TitleServices & Marketing ManagerCompanyPink ElephantNature of BusinessITSM Consulting & EducationContact Telephone01189 036 [email protected]

DavidPercy

TitleDirector of Service and DeliveryCompanyInfra CorporationNature of BusinessDeveloper of softwareWebwww.infra.co.uk

Jack Robertson-Worsfold

TitleSenior Service Management ConsultantCompanyiCore LtdNature of BusinessSpecialist IT management consultancyContact Telephone0207 464 [email protected]

Shirley Lacy

TitleDirectorCompanyConnectSphereNature of BusinessITSM consulting and trainingContact Telephone0845 838 [email protected]

Yolanda Noble

TitleCEOCompanydsicmm LimitedNature of BusinessEnd to end customer communicationsContact Telephone020 7531 [email protected] / www.dsigroup.com

Dr Garry Homer

TitleDirector of TechnologyCompany University of Wolverhampton – IT Futures CentreNature of Business IT Consultancy, Advice, Support, Application-Research

Contact Telephone01902 [email protected]

James Heavey

TitleVice President for CDC RespondCompanyCDC SoftwareNature of BusinessEnterprise feedback management softwareContact Telephone0870 735 [email protected]

9


contributors

Steve White

TitleKT Resolve Application ManagerCompanyKepner-Tregoe Inc.Nature of BusinessGlobal Consulting and Training CompanyContact Telephone01753 [email protected]

Gavin Hartland

TitleDirector of marketing and alliances EMEACompanyServigisticsNature of BusinessStrategic Service Management softwareContact Telephone01454 [email protected]

Markos Symeonides

TitleVP of Business DevelopmentCompanyAxios SystemsNature of BusinessITIL based ITSM providerContact Telephone0131 220 [email protected]

Rob Stroud

TitleIT service management evangelistCompanyCANature of BusinessIT management softwareContact Telephone01753 [email protected]://ca.com/gb/

Luke Brown

TitleVP, Europe, Middle East & AfricaCompanyLumetaNature of BusinessNetwork Assurance Contact Telephone020 7194 [email protected]

PhilSansom

TitleSenior Vice PresidentCompanyKaseya UKNature of BusinessManaged Service Automation Software ProviderContact Telephone0870 [email protected]

Ian Jones

TitleHead of Strategic SolutionsCompanyeGain Communications LtdNature of BusinessCustomer Service and Contact Centre SoftwareContact Telephone01753 [email protected]

Ralph Gray & Mark SykesTitlePrincipal Service Management ConsultantsCompanyFox IT Nature of BusinessThe Authority in Service ManagementContact Telephone01483 [email protected] / [email protected] Webwww.foxit.net

Richard Althorp

TitleManaging DirectorCompanye-Warehouse LtdNature of BusinessIndependent Vendor of Service Desk [email protected]


news

10

Bloodstock, paper and spam

HORSE TRAINERS who have traditionally relied on experience and intuition to

gauge the performance of horses will soon be able to apply some of the same methods that sports scientists use to train elite athletes.

Gmax Ltd, a new spin out company from technology and product development consultancy Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) was launched in July 2007. It has developed a novel GPS product that will send essential physical, physiological and environmental information about a training workout from horse to trainer, via the internet.

Having immediate access to information detailing the work the horse is doing,

its gait, temperature, breathing and the environmental conditions means that trainers and vets will be able to optimise training regimes while at the same time ensuring the horse’s welfare.

The monitoring electronics to achieve this are built in to a sleeve that slides over the girth. Real time information is transmitted wirelessly to a trainer’s mobile, PDA or laptop anywhere in the world. Information to help control the workout can also be sent to the jockey via a specially designed wristwatch.

Commenting, Mike Cane a director of CDP who has led the development of Gmax said: “Often the difference between fi rst and second in a race is fractions of a second, just as it is

in human athletics. Gmax has an important role to play in bringing the principles of sports medicine to thoroughbred racing to maximise a horse’s chances of winning.”

“Using detailed information provided by the Gmax system, trainers will be able to implement training schedules that bring a horse progressively to the peak of fi tness.”

“Current training methods rely heavily on visual assessments coupled with years of experience. While Gmax will never replace good horsemanship, it will provide trainers with objective measurements of training workload and response; replacing guesswork with scientifi c evidence and making elite training methods accessible to all.”

SPAM VOLUME REACHES ALL-TIME HIGH AFTER STORM SURGESpam Storms and botnets; the nuisance gets worse10th August 2007: After a recent surge in email distributing the Storm Trojan, spam has reached an all time high. According to the Spam Volume Index (SVI) of email and Internet content security provider Marshal, spam has increased by 12 per cent over the past four weeks and now exceeds any previously recorded level.

Marshal’s SVI is a representative measure of all the spam monitored and analysed by Marshal’s TRACE Team.

Bradley Anstis, Marshal’s Director of Product Management commented, “The overall increase in spam follows an intense period of malicious spam activity, notably the widespread and prolonged distribution of fake greeting cards which contain links to the Storm Trojan, which in turn seeks to establish spambots on compromised hosts. After seeing the huge volume of malicious spam being distributed over the last two months, we were fully expecting spam volumes to increase.”

“The increase also coincides with a return of stock spam. Stock spam had dwindled to less than two per cent last week, but this week has jumped back to represent

between 15 to 20 per cent of all spam. While stock spam with PDF attachments is on the rise, Marshal’s TRACE team has also identifi ed a return of plain text stock spam. The stock spammers seem to be back in business after a brief vacation,” said Anstis.

On August 3, 2007, Marshal reported a surge in ‘attachment spam’ - spam messages containing a PDF, Excel or Zip fi le attachment. “After an increase from three per cent to 20 per cent of all spam in the fi rst week of August 2007, attachment spam fell away again to almost nothing by the end of the week. However, during this second week of August, it has surged back to represent almost 25 per cent of all spam. The widespread distribution of the Storm Trojan and the signifi cant fl uctuations in spam confi rms our belief that relatively few spammers, operating vast botnets, are responsible for the bulk of spam sent,” commented Anstis.

Botnets are large networks of compromised personal computers that spammers and malicious users can command from a central, controlling server. With the Storm Trojan consisting of an estimated 1.5 million bots, spammers are able to send signifi cantly more spam than ever before

“After successfully establishing their botnets, spammers can rapidly and dramatically change the volume, type and composition of spam they send. The degree of control that the spammers have over their botnets is impressive. They can simultaneously command different spam campaigns, such as stock spam in PDF attachments, or Viagra advertised in plain text. Those behind the Storm Trojan control a massive number of computers; therefore can signifi cantly affect the spam landscape overnight. This is one of the main reasons for such signifi cant and rapid changes in spam today,” concluded Anstis.

Winning technology applied to the sport of kings. IT’s not all work

First it’s fast: ITSM software that’s designed for rapiddeployment and easy integration with your existing infrastructure.

Then it’s smart: Automation minimises processcomplexity and simplifies audit compliance.

And forward thinking: with all ITIL processes in oneapplication, future integration is never an issue.

Putting ITIL to work within your organisation… There’s the hard way… then there’s the Infra way.

The IT service management specialists

infraEnterprise is the solution!

Email [email protected] for your FREE whitepaper;‘Achieving Best Practices with

service desk automation’www.infra.co.uk

IT’s hottest topic.

Are you prepared?

VITAL_Infra_ITIL_297x210 8/9/07 1:33 PM Page 1


news

12

RECENT RESEARCH fi ndings from a survey, ‘IT Service Management – is it Worth the Money?’ conducted for Partners in IT (PIIT) illustrate some signifi cant insights into how UK businesses manage their IT systems. The fi ndings highlight that there are some real issues affecting UK businesses that generate a multitude of problems – not least the annual cost to the business as a direct result of poor IT management.

The key fi ndings are:• 80% of companies admit that they have a problem with downtime

of their IT systems and 38% say that this problem is serious. Breaking out the fi gures for the large organisations we fi nd that 51% of IT managers believe that downtime is a serious problem in their business.

• The average amount of a business manager’s time spent fi re fi ghting equates to 31 full working days per year.

• 55% of mid sized businesses feel that their IT set up does not give good value for money.

• 77% of business managers in mid sized companies think that some of their company’s investment is wasted due to poor maintenance.

• Only 3% of the companies surveyed have successfully adopted ITIL and 75% have never even heard of it.

• Breaking out the fi gures for the large organisations we fi nd that 53% of IT managers have not heard of ITIL and 93% of the organisations have not adopted ITIL.

• Only 18% of mid sized companies have a formal IT plan approved by the Board, and only 16% plan their IT investment on a 3-5

year timeline, inline with current business plans. • In mid sized companies, 28% of managers admit there is no

IT strategy, 29% work to an informal loose plan and 34% buy IT systems as they are needed. This all adds up to an ad hoc IT infrastructure that is diffi cult to manage, does not give value for money, steals time from business people due to downtime or fi re fi ghting and creates a negative impression of IT within the business.

• Only 34% of mid sized companies have access to the best IT people that they can afford.

• 79% of IT managers in large companies believe that even free software can be expensive to manage and maintain.

The main conclusions from this survey can be grouped into four key areas:1. IT systems and services are not well managed within both large

and mid sized companies. This creates a serious issue – the wasting of business managers’ valuable time;

2. There is a huge lack of awareness and understanding of ITIL and the benefi ts and effi ciencies that can be generated by adoption of its principles and processes;

3. Technology is still not being seen as a strategic tool and is being used in an ad hoc way to support businesses. This has a knock on effect when companies are buying technology and IT personnel;

4. IT managers believe that even free software is expensive to manage and maintain.

New request submission designer

NEW FROM ITIL Service Management software

developer Infra Corporation is Request Submission Designer, the latest advance in automated online Workfl ow Management. Request Submission Designer makes it easy to create customised submission forms for requests raised through the Customer Portal - the Infra Graphical User Interface means that no programming skills are required. The tool simplifi es the process of moving everyday paper based forms (such as New Starter/Leaver requests) online. The online forms use infraEnterprise

Workfl ow engine to collect and use form data in the automated processing of requests.

According to Infra Director David Percy, “The Request Submission Designer makes it easier for the IT department to support effi cient working practices throughout the organisation. It might be the HR department trying to organise the laptop, phone and email address for a new member of staff; or the Reprographics department providing 24X7 access to its myriad of services via a Customer Portal. In every case, creating the required request form and linking it to the

Workfl ow is extremely quick and simple for administrators using this new Infra tool.”

With Request Submission Designer, forms are created as part of a Workfl ow template. The intuitive graphical user interface allows users to import a complete set of fi elds, or add individual items such as drop down lists, check boxes, radio buttons and images at the click of a mouse. A single submission form can be used with multiple Workfl ow templates with no limit on the number of fi elds per form.

Infra’s online Workfl ows enable

customers to initiate service requests more easily. Once created, workfl ows are completely automated, ensuring adherence to best practice processes and that a complete audit trail is maintained for verification and compliance purposes. The ability to assign work automatically improves efficiency and reduces costs by removing the time consuming need for manual monitoring and detailed management of each Workfl ow. Infra also provides out of the box templates to accelerate key processes such as Change and Release Management.

Sophisticated online forms made simple with

A DOSE OF REALITYResearch shows IT management truths

FrontRange Solutions IT Service Management: Out of the box ITIL® Alignment

You know that ITIL best practices radically improve your ability to deliver IT services and support and meet regulatory requirements. The question is how can you implement ITIL?

Here’s your answer: FrontRange IT Service Management (ITSM) gives you the tools you need to embrace the ITIL framework—at your own pace, cost-effectively, and with minimal disruption.Built on the Microsoft® .NET architecture, ITSM modules integrate easily with each other, so you can address your most pressing IT problems now and add new capabilities as your needs grow, without the need for lengthy development and configuration.

The results: streamlined IT practices, better IT service and support, tighter alignment between business goals and IT realities, and no more exorbitant consulting fees as you integrate new functionality.

FrontRange Solutions Offers Powerful ITIL Aligned Modules:

ITIL Service Support • Incident Management • Problem Management • Change Management • Release Management • Configuration Management

ITIL Service Delivery • Service Level Management • Availability Management

Alignment is a beautiful thing ...

FrontRange Solutions

IT Service Management

SERVICE MANAGEMENT

™

Learn how you can easily align IT with the needs of your business through a proactive, strategic solution from FrontRange Solutions.

Visit: www.itsmsoftware.comCall: +44 (0)870 401 7300

FRSad_itsm_alignment.indd 1 08/08/2007 18:16:27

A new hand on the tiller

ONE OF the things that we know for certain about the world today is

that things don’t stay the same for very long. That truth, applicable as it is to any management discipline is especially apposite when discussing the application of IT to the business. Change in technology sectors seems not only to be more rapid than in other fields but often also has far more fundamental impacts not only on how an automated job can be faster but even how the objective might be achieved by a wholly different process made available by the power of IT.

It is also usually the truth that the greatest repository of knowledge in any profession will be the people practising in that profession. In order to keep up with change and to be able to exchange ideas and to tap into the knowledge of current professionals wherever they may be, members of any particular profession will often group together in a professional body to share ideas and experience as well as to develop standards and protocols. IT Service Management professionals are very well served in this respect through the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF).

itSMF is an independent and internationally

recognised forum for IT service management professionals with more than 70,000 individuals in 6000 member companies spread over more than 40 international chapters. Members include IT companies, software developers, service companies and organisations across industry in the public and private sectors. As well as running seminars, conferences and regional meetings where members can meet to exchange ideas and experience; itSMF supports best practice in a practical way as a major intellectual contributor to the standards regime for IT Service Management through its role in the

But the course for itSMF continues to be one of increasing professional development under Keith Aldis

Words: John Hancock

14


Words: John Hancock

development of both ISO/IEC 20000 and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). And while members do not need qualifi cations in order to join itSMF, there are qualifi cations that the forum supports and endorses that individuals can achieve. The Forum has also established a professional body in the Institute of IT Service Management.

itSMF aims to be the premier community for leadership in IT Service Management, providing members with a forum within which they can exchange views, share experiences and participate in the development and promotion of best practice and standards.

The intent of the forum is to maintain total independence from any infl uence in order to represent its members’ and the profession’s interests fi rst and foremost.

One of the most significant recent developments for itSMF has been the May 1 2007 appointment of Keith Aldis as CEO for itSMF UK. Keith was until recently Chief Executive of the British Institute of Cleaning Science following on from a career in the engineering construction, energy and oil & gas sectors. Good governance, excellent business delivery and total commitment and people development has been the backbone

of Keith’s career to date. His employment, personnel and industrial relationship skills were honed with the Joint Industry Board for the Electrical Contracting Industry and he went on to assist the industry in setting up and running its own non statutory training operation.

Following an appointment as the Director of Training and Education at the Construction Confederation, he moved into the public sector as Customer Relationship Director & Deputy Chief Executive for the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board. Well versed in the government’s Skills for Business agenda, Keith is

15


a founding ‘Investors in People’ Ambassador and a regular national judge for the National Business Awards scheme.

This experience plus his service as a director of a number of industry based companies and trusts, and running his own consultancy makes Keith a real asset to itSMF and someone who is able to blend experience of operating in a busy commercial environment with the subtler attributes needed to lead a fast growing professional body in a fast changing sector. You may wonder how such a busy man (he is also a Freeman of the City of London, a serving Liveryman and a married father of two) organises his time: pretty well it seems, in particular he found time to talk with VitAL magazine about his new appointment and where he sees itSMF going in the future. We asked the questions, Keith had the answers.

Vital: How would you defi ne ITSM; what it does, for whom it does it and how it fi ts with other business processes?Keith Aldis: Service Management is the same as any other business process; it’s all about leadership, people, change etc.; but in Service Management, IT is used as the tool to deliver leadership and carry through change. Guiding people through a constantly changing landscape is made easier with the knowledge that IT makes available.

V: What elements of your past experience do you expect to be most useful in you role as CEO of itSMF?KA: Service Management is all about the management of people and I have always been involved in the management and motivation of people; also, as I’ve said before, it’s about managing change and I have had to handle change in many of my previous roles; so there will really be little difference from my past experience to this new challenge.

V: These days there seem to be several strings to the itSMF bow – it’s a professional body, a trade body, a supporter of qualifi cations and a signifi cant contributor to standards setting. Do you envisage any incompatibility between these different commitments in the future and, if so, how might any incompatibility be resolved?KA: [For all that the point is true] let’s be clear; itSMF’s prime role is to provide an environment for individuals in Service Management to share and formulate ideas;

16


that is what the forum means. And we must be careful not to stray away from that role or divert our energies into areas that will not impact on that role; we would not, for instance, get involved in wages discussions. All of the other activities that we undertake are to enhance the forum and our business and here there might well be scope for developments in the future. So we might become involved in, say, creating career pathways for future youngsters entering the profession – things that enhance our business.

V: How do you see these main strings developing in the future?KA: It might be appropriate for us to move into other areas where we can provide benefits for members [and enhance the value of the career], perhaps and involvement with pensions, health care might be another area of benefit that would be appropriate, and we’d certainly be interested in the development of occupational competence: but none of that would be appropriate just now and will probably never be things we would undertake on our own. We would much more likely work with others who have experience of delivering these sorts of benefi ts in the event that we did consider developing lines similar to this.

V: With ITSM growing as fast as it has and as you have predicted it will, how will it be possible to ensure that no ‘rogue elements’ creep into the sector in the future – I’m thinking of less robust, perhaps more commercially partisan qualifications and suchlike?KA: People are not stupid and will understand what is good and what is not. There are some commercially driven and partial qualifi cations out there but one sided qualifications tend to be a small group and of poor quality. We [the itSMF] are neutral and, unlike some of the less robust providers of qualifications, we have been tagged as a ‘not for profit’ organisation although that should really be ‘not for dividend’ as we have to be commercially minded and have to generate surpluses [if we are to be taken seriously as business leaders] but need to plough those profits back into the member services [enhancing the value of membership].

17


V: Do you hold among your objectives the achievement of full and recognised chartered professional status?KA: While the long term objective may be to achieve Chartered status, we’re not as sophisticated as that yet and cannot legislate for Service Managers. The industry is pretty well self regulated and focused on behaving professionally. Our job today may be to point out unprofessional behaviour and conduct but not to act on it.

V: With your past closeness to and understanding of the government’s Skills for Business agenda, and your teaching background, do you envisage itSMF perhaps taking on the kind of educational role that say the IFS [Institute of Financial Services] has assumed in the fi nancial services sector with inputs to school teaching packs, university courses and an all round mission to raise awareness of fi nancial services as a strong career option at a time when youngsters are considering their career future?KA: I definitely see that as a role for us. The eSkills Sector Skills Council deals with everything around IT except Service Management. There is a considerable potential to develop career pathways [and to bring those pathways before youngsters during their time at school and beyond]; our profession should be an occupational option to school leavers with the appropriate government funded nationally recognised qualifi cations to support it – I’m talking about NVQ and similar programmes.

V: Thank you for giving us your time and so fully answering our questions; but is there anything else that you would like to add to your previous comments, perhaps anything on which you’d like to raise awareness?KA: itSMF has grown through a lot of good will and a great deal of hard work by a few people. I need to make it into a tool for more people. My job is expansion and to deliver more. We must focus on what it is we wish to achieve then plan and work towards achievement. Perhaps it is that rather than be successful in spite of ourselves we should be successful because of ourselves.

Service Management has the considerable responsibility of being the management discipline that holds an organisation together; its importance in the structure of business will only grow as business operations increasingly move onto IT based platforms. With that in mind, it is good to know that a body like itSMF and a leader like Keith Aldis are prepared to take the tiller and drive standards forward to match that growing responsibility.

In the beginning

ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service

management in the world, providing a cohesive set of best practice processes, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools, which has been comprehensively updated with the release of version 3 at the end of May 2007.

It was the UK Government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) now the Offi ce of Government Commerce (OGC) that first developed ITIL® during the late 1980s when the UK government’s reliance on IT was increasing. A working party set out to document a common sense approach to managing IT services that would improve reliability while maintaining costs effi ciency. The result was a published collection of best practice and common sense and the fi rst IT Infrastructure Library was created.

ITIL was last updated in 2000. The overwhelming driver for this refresh is to keep the guidance up to date such that ITIL continues to be ‘fi t for purpose’ as the most

widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.

The project team wanted to improve the usefulness and applicability of ITIL by addressing the changing needs of users as the technology base and business requirements continue to evolve, to make ITIL easier to apply and improve its applicability to small organisations. OGC’s ITIL publications are only part of the story; this refresh also aimed to embrace the close integration between the core guides and the ITIL qualifi cations, and other interfaces in the IT service management arena.

During late 1999 ITIL® version 2 was introduced and the library then consisted of seven central books which dealt with the processes widely accepted as the best practice framework for IT Service Management (ITSM).

Although this wasn’t perfect, the core we teach from for certification purposes concentrates mainly on two of those books, ‘Service Support’ and ‘Service Delivery’ and we’ve all been quite happy with that, but cracks had started to appear. Therefore in 2005, the ITIL® Version 3 (v3) refresh project began,

with Sharon Taylor appointed Chief Architect.Sharon led a very robust benchmarking

and consultation exercise within the industry asking what was liked about the existing system, and what wasn’t.? It also asked the customers about it – these are the people who implement it and use it on a day to day basis. The outcome of the consultation was that v3 is to differ from v2, changing from being process driven to lifecycle driven.

The work to develop the new set of publications was split into four tranches. The fi rst tranche comprises largely web based products that will support authors of the main books. This tranche includes process maps and core ITIL defi nitions.

The second tranche is the new set of core books, following a lifecycle model from design to retirement through fi ve books. The fi ve book titles are:

Service Strategy;Service Design;Service Introduction;Service Transition;Continuous Service Improvement.Third and fourth tranches address specifi c

support for the qualification scheme by

ITIL® v3 has built upon its successful genesis to become the global IT Service Management standard of today

18


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introducing study aids for the Foundation and other examinations, and fi nally, there will be a new strategic introduction book for managers and a brochure for company executives.

Scoping of each book was derived from a mapping of existing ITIL content, plus new material to address new requirements. Core volumes will be supported by complementary publications. The core consists of the real core concepts and generic good practices, which don’t change rapidly. One key fi nding was that the existing guidance wasn’t broken so we haven’t thrown much existing content away, just remapping to a new, more business oriented framework. Complementary publications will address application of the generic core guidance in particular market or technological contexts.

As well as the paper publications and the qualifications, OGC intends to work with partners to provide a unified package of web based support offerings for ITIL users, both existing and aspiring. Examples of web material includes the process models and ITIL defi nitions, but might also include other support material like discussion papers, role defi nitions, case studies as well as examples of ITIL forms and meeting agendas.

The books for v3 were published at the end of May 2007 and some of it will be familiar: The processes we all know are, by and large,

still there, but there are new processes, new functions and new roles.

From a training provider point of view, it means we now have a whole new certifi cation scheme, requiring us to devise new training courses to reflect the new syllabuses and exam structures. So an awful lot of work was required to meet the publication deadline.

Since November 2006, I have been one of 15 members of a global panel designing the new certifi cation scheme. It has been our job to make sense of the fi ve books and construct a new syllabus and new exam structures. In addition, we needed to provide an upgrade path for those who require it and training so that our trainers are equipped with suffi cient information to lead the new courses and prepare the students for the new exams.

The introduction of v3 has caused some customers to wonder how things might change.

With regards to the new version, there is no need to worry or panic. I understand that people have been worried that it’s really different. Just because we’re moving from v2 to v3 doesn’t mean the older version isn’t relevant anymore. The new version provides transition models whereas previously it didn’t – you couldn’t easily make the transition from design to operation. Version 3 improves the way we implement things and it improves

how we measure value, which was one of the biggest concerns.

Because Service Management is about people and culture and the way we work, how do you demonstrate that you’re actually providing value? Version 3 helps to improve the way we measure that.

We’re emphasising much more the integration of IT and the business, previously we used to use the word alignment. We now need to talk about integration. And we shouldn’t really be talking about IT Service Management anymore, it is just Service Management and how IT fi ts in with the way the business itself wants to develop.”

For customers currently working on a v2 project or putting staff through a v2 certifi cation programme, there is provision within the new scheme for transition and upgrades to v3. If they don’t want to do another course, but want to understand what v3 is all about there will be plenty of material available.

The fi ve books are the ‘core’ but around the core there will be a lot of other information and complementary material available and much of it is web based. Life is going to be much easier and much more readily updated. And, as the transition from ITIL® v2 to v3 looks set to improve IT service management around the world, experts are on hand to make the process as seamless as possible.

20


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ICCM’s in-house consultancy and training skills ensure each application installation is aligned with ITIL best practice. All new customers have the option to combine their technology investment with V2 or V3 training courses. A turn key approach to delivering service desk software to the market place ensuring superior return on investment and rapid speed of deployment.

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22

WITH ONLINE opportunities growing at a rapid pace, the UK small business

community needs to do more to harness the power of IT and online strategies.

A recent Federation of Small Business (FSB) report found that only 18 per cent of fi rms are selling online[i] and, with the online retail market set to increase by 165 per cent by 2010[ii], small business owners and mangers will need to use the benefi ts of technology available to them.

The growth of new technologies within the business environment has been much talked about given the recent explosion of ‘Web 2.0’. Small businesses need to keep up to speed, and realise the business benefits behind adopting new technologies, or risk losing out to competitors.

Yet while companies should consider the benefi ts of technology, they should also be

aware about the pitfalls of rushing in: 75 per cent of IT projects fail[iii], due to lateness of delivery or going over budget, and UK fi rms are spending an estimated £5.81bn[iv] per year on technology that does not meet the business needs.

To help owners and managers avoid the pitfalls and get a solid IT infrastructure in place, try suggesting the following top tips:

IT BUDGET – technology plays an important and growing part in many businesses, so allocate funds accordingly. Include IT as a separate cost in yearly budgets to ensure you are covered for any IT upgrades or new software that may be required.

DEVELOP AN ONLINE STRATEGY – the fi rst key step to developing an online strategy is to decide what you want to achieve. Essentially

It’s not rocket science, but…Small businesses must embrace the online revolution.

Words: David Robertson

an e-strategy encompasses anything a company does via the internet from website development to SEO, sponsorship and pay per click marketing.

SAFETY FIRST – investing in decent IT security is an absolute must. Anti-virus screening and the installation of firewalls is considered standard practice and essential to protect valuable customer and fi nancial data from hackers and viruses.

INVESTIGATE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS – many cost effective software packages are available on the market, and could save you money in the long run. For example, inexpensive accountancy software can complete complex calculations, simplify invoicing, give a professional appearance to paperwork, and save you valuable time.

GET LICENSES – businesses risk prosecution and heavy fines if they operate software without the correct licenses. Make sure all software is original and registered, and ban staff from installing unauthorised software on computers.

ALWAYS ONLINE – having access to emails away from the offi ce through smart phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) can be advantageous as they allow you to instantly respond to new business enquiries or customer queries, regardless of location or time.

MAXIMISE ONLINE PRESENCE – having a website is a great way to promote your products and services. Websites can be a simple, relatively cheap and effective way to increase exposure for your business to a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day. Maintain your site and keep it up to date with fresh and interesting content for users.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) – SEO is crucial to promoting your site through the major search engines. Few people go beyond the first couple of pages of results and if your company isn’t listed you could lose out to competitors. Speak to your web developers to set up responses to key words pertinent to your business, and always keep the site live with fresh content to help with search engine rankings.

LEGAL OBLIGATIONS – there are a number of legal obligations that must be adhered to when operating online. See the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations, and the E-commerce Regulations 2002 for full explanations of responsibilities at www.oft.gov.uk .

With the amount of ‘must have’ technologies on offer, it is no surprise that owners and managers can feel bewildered and scared when it comes to developing an e-strategy. However, fi nding one that suits their business model needn’t be as daunting as they think, and can soon pay dividends in terms of simplifying theirr business and increasing profi tability.”

Footnotes[i] FSB report, 2006, ‘Lifting the barriers to growth in UK Small Businesses’.[ii] Offi ce of Fair Trading statistics, 2006.[iii] Pricewaterhouse Coopers, March 2007.[iv] Based on UK 2006 IT spend of £38bn (Forrester, HYPERLINK “http://www.itjungle.com/” \o “blocked::http://www.itjungle.com/” www.itjungle.com).

EMC® Smarts® manages your IT infrastructure from a business perspective. It’s the only management solution that pinpoints the rootcause of problems affecting services; correlates application, storage, and network availability; and helps you maximize the delivery ofbusiness services. Our solutions for ITIL process automation and CMDB strategy enable you to roll out your ITIL initiatives with minimumrisk and automatically populate your CMDB with realtime information on network, server, and application resources. Automate incidentmanagement using patented auto-discovery and root-cause analysis. And automatically feed application-to-infrastructure dependencymapping to populate CMDBs. No wonder business is looking up.

To learn more, visit http://uk.emc.com/smarts/itil or contact us at [email protected].

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When information comes together, business looks up.

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24

Organisational and cultural change

EDUCATING AND empowering IT staff and customers across an organisation, to act

upon a declared vision of transformation to a service based culture, can be the most challenging element of an IT Service Management implementation.

The past ten years has seen the gradual adoption of ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) as the de facto Best Practice guidance for IT Service Management, with accelerated growth in the past fi ve years. This is especially true of large, complex, global organisations, which have been driven by a number of factors, not least regulatory and legislative initiatives, coupled with the need to adopt a more formal, quality driven approach to the management of IT Services. All of which combine to represent a fundamental shift in historical IT practices

from technology driven silos to service driven process based environments.

ITIL® in itself is not a formal methodology but a set of best practice guidelines which are intended to be used as a framework to be adapted and adopted to the specifi c and unique needs of individual organisations. Although the guidelines, in isolation, are applicable to organisations of all sizes and industry sectors, the political, economic and cultural climates of each company and the relationship of each with its employees are unique, and require close management. The decision to implement ITIL triggers the move from a system to a service based culture, and is one which has caused many a project to stall or fail in the light of resistance to change, issues with morale, or complete project failure

Change shouldn’t just happen, good managers will manage it and the people involved

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25


due to a lack of direction.Although organisations genuinely want

to improve the service to their customers (reducing costs almost comes as a bi product) there is still overwhelming resistance, on the part of IT staff, to the change required to adopt ITIL®. While in a recent Forrester survey for the itSMF, 60% stated that their main ‘challenge’ when implementing Service Management was their staff’s lack of knowledge and experience of process based methodologies. ITIL should not be viewed as a technology change, but as an organisational transformation.

Problems arise when companies literally try to implement ITIL from the books.

The recent launch of ITIL® v3 has seen a move towards an end to end lifecycle approach to the management of IT, rather than a process

by process approach. This is progress. It is not uncommon for companies to implement a fragmented process approach, whereby they metaphorically tear out the individual chapters from the Service Support and Delivery books and hand each to a new process owner to go away and implement in isolation.

What they need to be implementing for success is a philosophy, and that philosophy is one of IT Service Management. It puts the customer of IT, not technology, at the forefront. The IT service provider must understand the aspects of the IT systems and infrastructure that relate to business processes and services, and they must also understand the Service Levels that are required by the business. Without this level of understanding it is extremely diffi cult to align IT with the business, and equally diffi cult

to know whether IT services are addressing the business imperatives.

ITIL® brings the guidance required to implement process. It does not provide the leadership and skills required to transform the working practices of an organisation or the culture which exists within it. And that’s what Implementing IT Service Management is about, transformational change. The implementation of process will enable cross functional operations within the IT organisation where there once were silos. It may also require large amounts of organisation change, perhaps to the actual structure of the organisation or the reporting lines within it. Depending upon the organisational model adopted, there may be a requirement for people to be managed under a matrix approach or for employees

NEW STANDARDS FORCATALOGUE & SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Words: David Percy

This is not just about transformation

at organisational level,

but in the minds of the people being

asked to deliver the change

Whatever stage an organisation is at in the adoption and use of ITIL® version 3 is certain to have an impact on its use of service management best practices. Two areas in particular set to benefi t from the change are

Catalogue Management and Knowledge Management.

Catalogue Management moves centre stageMentioned only briefly in ITIL® v2, the Service Catalogue now comes under Catalogue Management - clear recognition that this topic merits an entire process to itself. Up until now organisations would consider purchasing two tools - one for the Service Catalogue and another for the rest of ITSM with customised integration then required between the two. The role of the Service Catalogue as the main interface for ITSM is now indisputable – underlining the importance of fi nding a single tool to provide both the inherently different functionality required for services as well as for regular confi guration items.

Integrated Knowledge Management The Service Management Knowledge System has also come to the fore in ITIL® v3.

A key aspect of Knowledge Management is taking advantage of call data already captured; for example the ability to publish known errors and workarounds. Once again, to maximise the effi ciency of knowledge publication and retrieval, Knowledge Management must form an integral part of the ITSM tool.

A best practice standard already exists for Knowledge Management solutions - KCS Verifi ed (KCS stands for Knowledge Centred Support). This is the ‘gold standard’ that organisations should look out for when implementing ITIL- compliant Knowledge Management.

Evolution not revolutionITIL® v3 is likely to be a case of evolution not revolution with most changes occurring at the process rather than technology level. Signifi cantly, the refresh has brought the key areas of Service Catalogue and Knowledge Management into the spotlight; testament to the importance of viewing these processes as very much part of fully integrated ITIL Service Management Solution.


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27


to adopt new or additional roles, which have implications from a legal and HR perspective, as well as the effort required to engage employees, so that they are supportive and embrace the changes.

This is not just about transformation at organisational level, but in the minds of the people being asked to deliver the change. From an inside out perspective of IT to one that puts the customer and service ahead of technology developments. It requires a shift in mindset and also and exercise in Education and re skilling the workforce. Karen Price, Chief Executive of e-Skills UK, was recently quoted in Computing Magazine (19/07/07) as saying, “Transformation requires a sophisticated set of skills and understanding – one that encompass business, communication, team working and project management skills, and in-depth and up to date technical knowledge.”

So once a company has determined that adopting a quality best practice approach is required, it is key to understand the nature of an ITIL transformation, the logical steps for implementing Service Management, and the business value it will deliver. The guidelines of ITIL® can be applied incrementally in a phased approach, but that approach must be guided by an overall strategy and plan that defi nes the delivery of IT Services enterprise wide.

ITIL® itself supports this view as is demonstrated in Figure 1 above.

These changes all require executive support, long term funding and an overall business plan. ITIL Programmes that do not have a clear strategy at the start, are the most likely to show little or no business value, as their organisations will resist the necessary changes.

Vision & Mission

Where are we now? Analysis

Where do we want to be? Goals And Objectives

How do we get there? Process Improvement Plans & Implementation

Are we improving? Did we get to where we wanted to be? Measurements & Tracking

Source: ITIL – The Business Perspective

Figure 1

SERVICE MANAGEMENT – THEN AND NOW

Words: Jack Robertson-Worsfold

In ten years we have seen a monumental shift in the way that IT permeates our business and personal lives. How to manage this progression has been a constant challenge and the evolution of Service Management has been a key factor. The ideas of service support and delivery were compounded in the fi rst iteration of

ITIL® - virtually unrecognisable to any practitioner today. In 1997 real knowledge was still the preserve of the few and Service Management still had not captured the collective imagination of the IT world. It was soon recognised that ITIL® needed to evolve if it was to keep up with the pace of change in IT. Essentially this time could be seen as being the real starting point for Service Management as an IT discipline.

Slowly the idea of services instead of systems began to dominate. Organisations began to realise it was no longer feasible to talk about the business and IT in separate terms. The dichotomy this set up was that to develop and evolve, IT had to become simpler to understand, whilst constantly becoming ever more complex. At this time ITIL® itself paused with little being released as new content. But in 2001 version 2 was released. Over the following few years it has become, by far, the most widely used IT service management best practice approach in the world.

The arrival of version 3 has seen more of a lifecycle approach to service management, with greater emphasis on IT business integration. Over the next 10 years this refined framework needs to be fully utilised to ensure its benefits come to fruition. ITIL is now so complex that only learned experience will ensure it’s implemented effectively. Consequently it requires organisations to look to outside help in order to maintain the status quo whilst building towards a brighter future.



28

There are studies around organisational and cultural change, and extensive studies and supporting texts around management styles, techniques and managing and delivering projects. What is harder to find is good information on how to effectively engage the minds of those people who will in effect deliver the transformation for the organisation. How do you successfully engage employees and consequently get their buy in for the planned transformation?

John P. Kotter, a professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School in Boston, wrote an article in 1995, for the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Leading change: Why

Transformation efforts fail’ (HBR March-April 1995). He based this article upon extensive research that describes why many projects fail and what the eight most important major steps are for successfully realising a transformation.1 Establish A Sense of Urgency;2 Form A Powerful Guiding Coalition;3 Create a Vision;4 Communicate the Vision;5 Empower Others To Act Upon The Vision;6 Planning For And Creating Short Term

Wins;7 Consolidating Improvements;8 Institutionalising the Changes.

ISO/IEC20000 GETS STRUCTURAL SUPPORTWords: Shirley Lacy

How ITIL supports ISO/IEC 20000 The Office of Government Commerce, (OGC), the owner of ITIL, has always been committed to maintaining an alignment between ITIL® and the IT Service Management standard. Some of the key

success factors for ITIL® version 3 were to build on the ITIL® v2 and support easier integration of ITIL with ISO/IEC 20000.

Figure 1: How ITIL supports ISO/IEC 20000

How ITIL v3 supports the Management System and Continual Improvement To achieve ISO/IEC 20000, an organization needs to demonstrate that it uses management systems and practices in order to be compliant to the standard and to deliver managed services of an acceptable quality for its customers. An organization must understand and measure how it provides value to their customers. ITIL® v3 provides concepts, models and guidance on integrating all aspects of IT service provision to deliver value to the business by linking improvement efforts to the outcomes. The ITIL service lifecycle approach provides a closed loop feedback system, based on the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle specifi ed in ISO/IEC 20000.

The v V3 guidance is useful for: • Establishing the integration of business strategy with IT service

strategy;• Establishing the service management systems, policies,

guidelines and processes across the ITIL service lifecycle;• Ensuring that the organization can handle the costs and risks

associated with their service portfolios;

• Developing a knowledge capability for decision and management of services.

How ITIL® v3 supports the Service Management ProcessesISO/IEC 20000 specifi es a number of closely related service management processes, as shown in Figure 2. The standard recognises that the relationships between the processes depend on the application within an organization and that these are complex to model. ITIL® v3 provides guidance on all these processes and on managing the complexity related to integrating the service management processes.

Figure 2: ISO/IEC 20000 Service Management processes

How ITIL® v3 supports planning and implementing new and changed servicesThe requirements in ISO/IEC 20000 are challenging for organizations that have a dynamic, high risk, rapidly changing business environment. To provide true value to the business, IT services must be developed with the business objectives in mind and ITIL V3 fully supports this. The ITIL® v3 Service Design lifecycle stage turns Service Strategy into the blueprint for delivering the business objectives. Service Transition provides guidance for the development and improvement of capabilities for transitioning new and changed services into live service operation. It provides guidance on how the requirements of Service Strategy encoded in Service Design are effectively realized in Service Operation while controlling the risks of failure and disruption.

What is harder to fi nd is good

information on how to effectively engage the minds of those people who will in effect deliver the

transformation for the organisation


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30

The first four stages are particularly relevant here as Kotter identifi ed that 50% of transformations fail in the fi rst phase.

Establishing a Sense of Urgency involves identifying and discussing crises, potential crises, or major opportunities and ensuring that at least 75% of a company’s management are convinced of the need for the project. Without good leadership and motivation, people will be reluctant to help and effort is sporadic and wasted. Do not underestimate the diffi culty of driving people out of comfort zones.

In order to successfully realise a transformation it is imperative to Form a powerful Guiding Coalition. This should be a group with enough power and enthusiasm to lead the change effort, and to prevent opposition from stopping the change initiative. These people should be the ones to encourage groups to work together as teams to achieve a common goal.

Creating A Vision is important as it provides an agreed, clear and understood future for all interested parties to relate to. It also provides the necessary direction to ensure the project stays on the planned path and is meaningful to those trying to deliver that vision. It is true however, that a Vision is only useful if it is communicated effectively. The Guiding Coalition should lead by example and demonstrate and teach expected new behaviours. Communication is essential and provides the platform to engage all stakeholders.

Issues around cultural change and engagement are compounded by problems surrounding retention, loyalty and skills

amongst today’s workforce. Quoted in HR Magazine – (August 2007 Issue) – Rebecca Clake – Resourcing Adviser from CIPD said that currently ‘seven in 10 organisations were experiencing retention diffi culties and eight in 10 had problems with recruitment’

The impact of this in an industry where a large number of personnel are freelance contractors, only serves to compound the challenges transformation brings. How do you engage the support of people who may not have any loyalty to the organisation, who do not have the requisite skills, or in the worst case scenarios have to re apply for their own jobs as a result of the impending changes?

It is necessary to strike a balance between a set of strategic goals and the need to address issues here and now. It helps to use a very simple model in order to achieve a successful Service Management implementation. This model concentrates vital effort to establish a clear Vision of the desired future state. Then a subsequent assessment of the current position

enables a plan to be devised that plots the appropriate Service Management Road Map.

Establishing a Vision for any project is a major contributor to the successful implementation of IT Service Management. It provides a clear focus for the implementation and gives all participants a sense of direction. The Vision also provides a ‘fl ag’ for all staff involved in the project to rally around and it also helps to bring all stakeholders together around a common objective. Stakeholders are those with a vested interest in the outcome of the project and will come from all areas of the business, from within IT as well as the other business units.

Constructing a Vision is highly desirable, however it should be noted that the breadth of involvement across the organisation can be extensive. All potential stakeholders need to be involved so as they can take ownership of the Vision and understand what the Service Management implementation is to achieve and why it needs to be done. Stakeholders involved will include representatives from the business as well as the IT department. It may also include third party suppliers particularly where large parts of the IT service provision have been outsourced.

A Vision will provide a common sense of direction and purpose against an agreed set of values for a shared future. Engaging all interested parties in establishing the vision from the start helps people to understand the reasons why change is required, and how their personal contribution will affect the change. As an exercise, inclusion encourages ownership and responsibility for personal contribution and shared success.

IS020000 Alignment

Assessment PlanningProcess

Implementation Control

Initial Wins

Where arewe now?

How will weget there?

How dowe get our

Vision?

How do weknow we’vesucceeded?

IT Service Management Communication Plan

All potential stakeholders need to be involved so as they can take ownership of the Vision and

understand what the Service Management implementation is

to achieve

Figure 2


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BUSINESS START up rates have fallen during the past decade in spite of government

attempts to stimulate UK enterprise, reveals a report from the University of Sheffi eld that also claimed that Government’s policies aimed at stimulating entrepreneurial activity have been unsuccessful. According to this study, business start up rates have decreased since 1997, while self employment fi gures have remained steady. Ten years ago, 3.2 people in every 1000 were setting up a new business in the UK. By 2004, this statistic had dropped to 3 per 1000.

The report pinpointed the Government’s ‘any new business will do’ approach as a root

cause of the phenomenon, citing specifi cally the closure of the Training and Enterprise Council infrastructure, originally established in the 1990s by the previous government, and an over dependence on public sector employment which has allegedly diverted people from taking the risk of setting up their own business. The study also claimed that to close the enterprise gap with countries such as the United States, government must take a new view of enterprise policy through commitments to lower taxation, reduced bureaucracy, and improved support for existing and emerging entrepreneurs. It is the contention of this article that one of the

Technology has made big company marketing and customer management available to businesses of all sizes. Words: Yolanda Noble

The riches of relevance

32

33


greatest needs for SMEs is to improve their use of targeted marketing, and that new print and database marketing developments are placing the technique more easily within their grasp.

Targeted marketing communications used to be something of a pipe dream for SMEs. Database analysis could establish an all round view of each customer, but the processes of translating this intelligence into targeted, personalised communications was either unwieldy or unaffordable. However, three things have come to pass over the last two years. Personalised colour printing has become affordable for all sizes of company, rather than just the large ones. The ability to create a tailored set of contents for each customer’s envelope has become very sophisticated and in addition to this, forward thinking SMEs have established the initial proof that personalised content on the website improves customer retention, satisfaction, cross ales, and ultimately profi tability.

New ColourRecent developments in variable colour printing – where content and text can be altered for each document printed – are revolutionising the extent to which communications with existing and potential customers can be personalised. Another recently published piece of research has confi rmed the close correlation between the personalisation and relevance of customer communications and the levels of customer satisfaction achieved. So personalised communications and reporting tangibly help to cement and develop customer relationships (and therefore the amount of business done with each customer). Digital print means that there is now no need for minimum quantities. And because the technology can now operate at high speed, then the economies of production scale are available to commercial printers to pass on more affordable pricing to SME customers.

Personalised marketing and customer communications used to be very much a service only for the highest value customer segments. This is no longer the case. The economics offered by high speed variable colour printing mean that even the low value customers can receive such a service. This is a critical point for the whole theory of database marketing. Here, the job is not just to identify who the lower and higher value customers are, but also spot the segments with the greatest value growth potential and create strategies to migrate them from a lower value to higher value group. If we cannot afford to communicate in a personalised fashion with the lower value groups, how can they ever be persuaded to upgrade?

Finally, the new capabilities and economics of variable colour printing are also being harnessed by a handful of SMEs for combining various communications into a single document. Here the process can become very interesting – we know of at least one fi rm that is using personalised colour to collate each customer’s portfolio of reports into a single quarterly publication, which then encourages the customer to visit a personalised version of the fi rm’s website, where they can access all their detail online. Throughout this process, targeted additional product advertising is served up to the customer with the aim of increasing their value via product offers they are likely to be interested in.

Measuring OutcomesSo much for the new capabilities of communicating in personalised colour. How should the outcomes of this targeted activity be measured? The second part of this article examines the key underlying business measurement which should result from effi cient and effective database marketing.

As a result of the Internet, available markets for SMEs have expanded enormously. The tiniest fi rm can now access global markets. Yet at the same time, the transparency – especially in terms of price – which the Web has allowed has also meant that competition has increased enormously at the same time as national boundaries and local anomalies have disappeared. Consequently, product differential has diminished and the customer relationship will become virtually the be all and end all of a successful ongoing commercial relationship.

This has made SMEs focused on two things: fi rstly, to ensure that they provide such a good proposition for customers that they stay, increase their spend (if possible) and become more profitable; secondly, to understand

better the cost of winning, keeping and growing customers, so that value is returned to shareholders.

The ability to retain and grow customers at as low a cost as possible is increasingly exercising the minds of investors who may be funding start ups and SMEs: the effi ciency with which companies produce their profi ts is absolutely critical to sustainable shareholder value. Revenues and profi ts may be built in the short term through scale growth, either organically or by acquisition. But if, with each year that passes, profi t per customer is dwindling then the future will be bleak – offering the prospect of either the cost of winning and servicing customers becoming unaffordable, or even running out of customers in niche markets.

The database marketing industry has produced extremely affordable customer relationship management tools for SMEs with which to analyse and target the right people with the right offers. But unless one understands profi tability trends at the individual customer level, then companies will not know who to target, why, and with what.

Profi t per customer helps to measure the value of different customer groups and the effi ciency with which that value is produced. It reveals whether fi rms have to recruit twice as many customers to achieve the same profi t growth – and therefore whether or not current growth rates are sustainable. By extension, profit per customer is the final output of earnings minus costs of obtaining, keeping and growing the customer. Also by association, the quality of the value proposition being put to customers is being measured – i.e. more compelling proposition, greater effi ciency, higher profi t per customer.

Managing M&AFinally, we should look at the theme of mergers and acquisitions. Small and medium sized enterprises often fi nd that to reach the next stage of growth, they have to raise the fi nance to buy out a competitor or to gain foothold in a new product line. In this situation, the new capabilities in variable digital print and online marketing are of little value unless they are based on good customer data. Typically, following a merger or acquisition, databases are not merged quickly, and customers are subject to irrelevant or inappropriate offers – sometimes even for products they already hold. This can seriously undermine the value of the acquired organisation. After all, the advantage of any acquisition must lie in being able to extract greater value from the acquired company than the price paid, whether through share of customer wallet (product diversifi cation) or share of market

Finally, the new capabilities

and economics of variable

colour printing are

also being harnessed

by a handful of SMEs

for combining various

communications into a

single document


34

(product consolidation). Following a merger or acquisition, the fi rst

step is to understand what has been bought. That means a top level analysis at a customer level. This in itself may not be a simple process – in that a wide variety of different datasets may need to be combined – product holdings, transactions, credit status, lifestyle profi le, customer service record, and a host of other third party attributes. Luckily, the data may be complex, but there are now software products available that rapidly merge disparate datasets without the need for expensive hard coding. Larger companies would consider doing this process in house. Smaller fi rms can turn to data processing bureaux that license such software and then use it to provide SME services on a ‘number of records’ basis. Once high revenue, multi product customers have been identifi ed, they can then be profi led using one of the major geodemographic or

lifestyle consumer profi ling systems available across Europe. This helps identify customers with a profi le similar to high revenue, multi product customers, but who are not yet generating these levels of income or product holdings. From a consolidatory point of view, it helps identify patterns of retention, loyalty and potential future usage of core product.

ConclusionIn summary then, new print and web technology capabilities mean that SMEs can now affordably generate personalised, high quality marketing and customer communications. However, none of this is any use unless a sound, accurate database drives such communications and campaigns. So long as this is achieved, however, variable digital colour is now putting marketing sophistication into the hands of SMEs, which was previously only available to large companies.

SMEs can now affordably

generate personalised,

high quality marketing and

customer communications.

However, none of this is

any use unless a sound,

accurate database drives

such communications

and campaigns


36

THE IT Futures Centre is the consultancy arm of the School of Computing at

Wolverhampton University. It was setup some four years or so ago, partially funded by the local Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands (AWM) , with the stated aim of providing IT impartial, cost effective development and support for Small Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) in the West Midland Region.

Currently, the IT Futures Centre has some twenty plus staff, administrative and technical, lead by a Business Director and myself as technical Director, responsible for delivering IT assistance via some fi ve or so individual funded projects to well over 300 SME ‘benefi ciaries’

(Development Agency terminology!)This article discuss a typical ‘case study’ as

an illustration of this approach to improving the technical capability of small businesses who make (or wish to make) extensive use of IT and associated technologies to grow their business.

A case study in introducing new technology to an existing software product

Wolverhampton based KPR Midlink Ltd was formed in 1973 as management consultancy, Midlink Management Services Limited. Midlink specialised in the improvement of productivity for industry and the public sector, assisting many blue chip companies. KPR Midlink changed focus over the years and during the

late 1980’s moved its core business into the provision of specialised computer system solutions.

In 2000, KPR recognised that their local government and housing association cash receipting product needed to have a software rewrite. The decision was made to automate the cashier function and provide additional information services available on a 24/7 basis. This concept was thought to be complementary to the emerging local authority concept of ‘one stop shops’.

Although kiosk technology existed alongside payment machines there was not a product on the market that met all of the requirements. KPR specifi ed the product and

Easy payments are smart paymentsA Case Study in IT-Product Development Words: Dr Garry Homer

37


found a manufacturer, Thomas Automatics, who specialise in the provision of cash vending equipment. The birth of the RPKiosk (Remittance Payment Kiosk) occurred in 2001 and the arduous task of persuading a very conservative marketplace that the future of cash receipting required the implementation of unattended payment kiosk technology, began.

The business case for using unattended payment kiosks to accept payments from the public centred around:• Increased security;• Increased opening hours and accessibility;• Reduced cost of accepting and processing

payments (reduced cashier costs).2002 saw the fi rst two RPKiosks going into two very different sites. Ellesmere Port & Neston Borough Council had experienced a robbery at one of its payment offi ces and felt that automation would provide the security element it required. Blaby District Council

wanted to offer increased payment hours and opted to place the RPKiosk in a community centre with extended opening hours.

In 2003/04, most local authorities started to offer Internet and telephony payments, the need for cash counters started to diminish and the cost benefi ts of introducing the RPKiosk became more obvious.

However, this awakening of the interest and awareness of a traditionally conservative sector (Local Authorities) in newer and better ways of accepting payments from the public bought with it the need for the company, KPR, to constantly revise and refine their kiosk product. They were faced with constantly improving the software systems to meet ever more stringent audit and fi nancial controls, and, more worrying for the company with a finite and modest number of software development staff, to integrate new payment devices and methods into their product.

The fi rst challenge came some two years or

The birth of the RPKiosk

(Remittance Payment

Kiosk) occurred in 2001

and the arduous task

of persuading a very

conservative marketplace

that the future of cash

receipting required

the implementation of

unattended payment

kiosk technology, began


38

so ago with the need to provide the payment kiosk with the capability to accept Chip and PIN credit card payments.

Prior to this, the kiosk had been equipped with a conventional magnetic stripe card reader device, capable of accepting card payments this way. However, the introduction of Chip and PIN rendered this payment method obsolete. If KPR Midlink Ltd were to maintain their lead position as major supplier of payment kiosk technology to Local Authorities, they had to move quickly and decisively. They recognised that they were unlikely to have either the capacity or the expertise in house in order to develop a Chip and PIN solution for the kiosk.

Due in some part to their geographical nearness to University of Wolverhampton, KPR were already aware of the existence of the IT Futures Centre. In Late 2005, KPR enlisted the help of the IT Futures Centre team. The team worked with KPR to introduce chip and PIN technology for card payments, the IT Futures team conducting an in depth evaluation of the available Chip and PIN solution providers in order to be able to make detailed recommendations to KPR.

The IT Futures Centre team not only identifi ed and recommended the most appropriate Chip and PIN technical solution, but also designed and built the software interface between the card reader and the host kiosk software. This process of identifying the preferred third party supplier of Chip and PIN technology was demanding since, at the time,

factual information regarding the regulatory requirements of the banks and acquirers was both contradictory and diffi cult to obtain. (It is worth noting that some signifi cant high street businesses intentionally delayed their implementation of Chip and PIN until clarifi cation was available)

Similarly, the technical implementation of the software interface was rendered more complex than it need to have been by virtue of the fact that most third party suppliers were still dynamically developing their Chip

and PIN product in parallel with us attempting to integrate this into the kiosk product. The chosen solution has been in successful operation since mid 2005, well in advance of the ‘deadline’ of February 2006.

KPR now approached IT Futures seeking further assistance in developing their payment kiosk product via another project.

This time, rather than responding to a non negotiable requirement (i.e. the introduction of Chip and PIN technology), KPR needed to place themselves in the forefront of technological advances in payment kiosk technologies. In particular, they wished to explore how best to introduce both biometric and smart card technologies.

When making a payment via an unattended kiosk, the customer is often advised, via the screen, of the remaining balance owed, for example, on their Council Tax Account. In order to minimise the opportunity for fraud, and in order to comply with data protection concerns, the customer is required to enter their unique account PIN number via the touch screen before they are able to access their account details.

However, there is a potential problem. Many Local Authority customers wishing to make payments via the kiosk may have difficulty in remembering ‘yet another’ PIN number. In particular, the elderly may particularly be compromised in this way, resorting to ‘writing down’ their PIN so that they might not forget it, or, possibly changing their PIN to something memorable, e.g.

Dr Garry HomerInitially training as a Metallurgist, Garry joined the Computer Profession as a Systems Analyst in 1970. After a lengthy period working in both small and large companies, Garry joined the lecturing staff of University of Wolverhampton where as Head of Technology Transfer within the School of Computing (his role previous to the current position) he lead many multi thousand pound, industry based R&D projects. He has presented numerous papers at both National and International conferences in diverse topics ranging from Computer-Learning to eBusiness and the Internet.

Previous research activity has been focused in the dual domains of Statistical Process Control in the Cold Rolling Industry and in e-Business and ICT within the Automotive Supply Chain. More recently, he has been instrumental in assisting a market leader company in document management to develop an Internet based distributed document management system that is currently used by many ‘blue chip’ fi nancial organisations. A further important project has been the design of a payments kiosk system for a Wolverhampton company. These kiosk systems allow unattended cash and card payments to be made for Council Tax etc, and embraces recent developments in Chip and PIN technologies, fi nger print technologies etc.

Currently, Garry is Technical Director of the University’s ‘IT Futures Centre’, an initiative funded by Advantage West Midlands(AWM) and ERDF that aims to provide SMEs with assistance in introducing technological solutions and innovation to support their business and commercial activities. He is also Technical Director of the ‘e-Innovation Centre’, a small ‘Science and Innovation Park’ based at the Telford Campus, providing incubation space and support for new and established companies operating in the high value, technology rich market place, and is in charge of the ‘West Midland Regional RFID (Radio Frequency Identifi cation) Centre’

the technical

implementation of

the software interface

was rendered more

complex than it need

to have been by virtue

of the fact that most

third party suppliers

were still dynamically

developing their Chip

and PIN product

39


‘1111’, but at the same time, vulnerable.In an attempt to alleviate this scenario, the

IT Futures team designed and implemented a prototype biometric fi nger print PIN device for use with the kiosk. In this way, a customer can elect to record their fi nger print through the kiosk so that when they make future payments into their account, they are offered the opportunity of presenting their fi nger to the device instead of entering their PIN in order to authenticate themselves and thus, access their account. To overcome the reluctance some people may have to recording their fi nger print (overtones of ‘surveillance’), the fi nger print solution is completely optional, the customer can still elect to use PIN if that is their preference.

This either/or approach also accommodates situations where the customer may not be able to use their fi nger for identifi cation, through injury or perhaps the presence of gloves.

KPR wished to introduce smart card capability into the kiosk. Smart cards are increasingly being used for the purchase of low value items or travel etc. Probably the best known application of such cards is the ‘Oyster Card’ used on the London Underground system. The kiosk thus allows the customer to ‘charge up’ a smart card ‘purse’ via the kiosk by making cash or card payments. The customer can then than use that smart card to make cashless purchases, for example, in the Local Authority or Company coffee bar. Similarly, the customer

can offer the smart card to make payments or purchases via the kiosk, for example, for low value items such as green plastic garden sacks. Again, IT Futures Centre was able to design and implement a smart card capability into the kiosk product.

Payments technologies are constantly evolving. For example, there has recently been a successful trial by Royal Bank of Scotland of the use of contact less cards for low value payments and purchases as an alternative to cash. Further current developments involve the use of mobile phone technologies, again for low value’ purchases. IT Futures Centre will continue to work with KPR in order to assess the potential of these new payment methods for their kiosk product.

In particular, the elderly may particularly be

compromised in this way, resorting to ‘

writing down’ their PIN so that they might not

forget it, or, possibly changing their PIN to

something memorable, e.g. ‘1111’


40

From listening comes wisdom

FEEDBACK CAN be initiated by the customer or by the organisation. Either way it is a

free source of vital management information that should be properly harnessed as part of an enterprise feedback management strategy in order to drive valuable business improvement.

The letters E, F and M are the latest to join the alphabet soup of business acronyms. Together they make EFM, or Enterprise Feedback Management, a comprehensive set of related software applications deployed across an organisation to support those processes designed to ensure enterprises fully engage with their customers. EFM encompasses both organisation initiated and customer initiated forms of feedback and is deployed across all channels of customer communication and at all customer touchpoints. Put another way EFM is a new and evolving approach to encouraging, capturing and analysing customer sentiment

to drive business improvement, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage.

Improving customer satisfaction is a high

priority for most businesses but many fail in this endeavor due to poor processes and technologies, or simply because they underestimate how diffi cult it is. Even the most customer focused organisations can

struggle to know what a satisfi ed customer actually looks like. Others simply fail to recognise the real value of the feedback their customers give them in the form of complaints, comments and compliments, focusing instead on efficiency based metrics like how long it takes to resolve the complaint or how quickly a letter is replied to. But by focusing on effi ciency gains as a means of driving improvements in customer satisfaction, businesses can simply find themselves doing the wrong things faster.

Understanding feedbackIt is not possible to understand EFM without first understanding what is meant by ‘feedback’, although even this is easier said than done. The most obvious form of feedback is complaints, which are relatively straightforward to deal with. When a customer makes a complaint it is understood that it is in everybody’s interest

You may know what you want to hear but you should listen to what customers want to say

Even the most customer focused organisations can struggle to know

what a satisfi ed customer actually looks like. Others simply fail to recognise the real value

of the feedback

Words: James Heavey


42

to respond to it promptly and appropriately: the customer will appreciate the efforts that have been made and will be better disposed to come back for more business; the company on the receiving end of the complaint will benefit not only directly from satisfying its customers’ needs but also indirectly both from word of mouth recommendations and lessons learned that should prevent similar grievances in the future.

Partly as a result of this but also, in some cases, to comply with best practice and regulations designed to protect the rights of the customer, complaint management strategies and software solutions are being widely adopted. But companies with a defi ned strategy for handling complaints fi nd it less clear how and why they should be reacting to more general comments: customer feedback that does not have the specifi c negativity of a complaint or clear processes for redress.

Whereas complaints tend to be structured, typically focused on a particular detail that can be addressed to lead to a specific resolution, other forms of feedback tend to be more general and unstructured. It can be customer initiated interactions with an organisation in the form of compliments, comments or requests for information, or feedback can be organisation initiated interactions in the form of surveys or market research. It might be positive, ‘My replacement credit card arrived the very next day – it was a real life-saver’, neutral, ‘Couldn’t we have our bins collected on Tuesdays?’ or of course negative, complaints. It could be a targeted comment about a specific individual or a general impression about a whole product or department. Either way feedback is seen as messy, difficult to collect and hard to manage. Small wonder, then, so few companies adopt a feedback management strategy.

But you can’t avoid receiving feedback: it is freely given and businesses will receive it whether they want to or not. It therefore makes sense to have a strategy in place to deal with it and those companies that do decide to capture and analyse feedback soon fi nd themselves reaping the benefi ts. The top level business arguments are relatively easily made – the customer is, after all, always right – but the perception remains that feedback is by its nature diffi cult to collect and analyse and therefore resistant to any sort of automation and a drain on resources. This need not, however, be the case.

CRM and EFMA common mistake is the assumption that feedback management is just a part of CRM and that a CRM system will automatically cover a business’s feedback management requirements. While EFM does certainly extend CRM, they are better dealt with as

separate, albeit complementary, disciplines. CRM applications typically focus on the

acquisition phase of the customer lifecycle. That is, marketing and sales force automation, contact and opportunity management. A CRM system provides tools that help to segment a mass market, plan and execute campaigns to selected targets that generate interest, leads and prospects and ultimately ends in successful sales to individual customers. Most CRM applications run out of capability in the post sale, customer service area as the organisation migrates into the customer retention phase.

Customer service is the crossover point from most CRM applications and the starting point for customer initiated complaints and feedback management applications. Applications need to ensure prompt and proper evaluation and resolution of issues while ensuring compliance with any regulatory framework. After the fact, individual cases should be aggregated, reported and analysis performed to determine, prioritise and fi x any underlying issues with products, services, personnel or other systemic failures. These actions will typically involve change projects or programmes, part of whose justifi cation will be the evidence produced as

a result of analysing and interpreting trends and emerging issues within complaints, compliments and other types of feedback.

CRM is focused primarily on ‘talking’ to the market and customers, while EFM focuses on ‘listening’ to customers. Combining the data from CRM and EFM applications leads to a powerful, holistic understanding of customer sentiment and intentions. The output of this is actionable insights and organisational learning.

Feedback value chainFeedback is an inevitable consequence of the kind of customer focused service most successful modern companies are committed to, the natural extension of which is true customer collaboration. You can only collaborate with your customers if you listen to what they have to say. But of course the real goal is to turn the feedback into an asset: knowing what your customers are saying is not the same as paying attention to it.

Those companies who do listen, who refi ne and structure the feedback they receive until it becomes the useful asset it always promised to be, soon realise its potential as a driver of change, an early warning system of trouble

you can’t avoid receiving feedback: it is freely given and businesses will receive it whether they want to or not. It therefore makes sense

to have a strategy in place to deal with it

43


ahead and – crucially – a demonstration to new customers that their opinions will make a difference. Those who don’t soon fi nd that unless they want to annoy their customers by ignoring them completely they have to devote unbudgeted resources in disparate departments to responding to the feedback they inevitably receive. The perception may be that it is expensive to manage feedback, but in fact doing nothing turns out to be the costly option.

Key to the effective management of feedback is planning. The best way of addressing the inherently unstructured nature of feedback is to do what you can to force some structure upon it. Successful feedback management strategies begin with fundamental decisions about what information will help most, where that information will come from and what is the most appropriate way of getting it. All customer touchpoints will need to be brought into the concept in order to capture the information and in many cases a culture change within the organisation will be needed to deliver on the strategy. Everyone within the organisation has a role to play in the effective management of feedback and as the most revealing and useful information is often only

delivered via an anecdote, so it is important customers are given the freedom to tell their story when and how they want to. There is an important balance to be struck between knowing what questions you want answered and preventing your customers telling you what they really think. Without effective processes in place the feedback you receive will incur costs but be of no benefi t.

Tactical and strategic benefi tsThe information gathered during an individual feedback case - be that compliment, complaint or survey result - can be useful in many different ways. The value that it brings to the organisation can be multiplied if it is exploited fully, with the ultimate aim of increasing customer loyalty and driving service recovery and customer advocacy through the elimination of the causes of dissatisfaction.

Initially, the data is used by front line and dedicated feedback handling staff to effect a ‘transaction’ between customer and organisation. The key objectives at this level are operational effi ciency and effectiveness, and members of staff need appropriate tools to help them manage individual workloads and ensure a consistently good experience for

the customer. Once the individual transaction is completed the emphasis switches to the aggregation and analysis of the data. For example, a single complaint about credit card charges needs to be properly resolved but is not, in itself, signifi cant for the organisation overall. However, several similar complaints should prompt action to investigate the root cause of the dissatisfaction and correct the problem at source.

EFM provides the necessary tools to proactively manage feedback in any form, across all functional departments and multiple end to end processes. The result is the ability to provide enterprise wide analyses of customer concerns, issues and behaviour; deliver actionable insights arising from root cause analysis that lead to business change projects and improvements in performance; and promote organisational learning.

In short, feedback is valuable at both a tactical and a strategic level. Granted it can be messy and is more often emotional than rational, but thanks to powerful feedback management applications now available, these are factors that need no longer deter businesses from leveraging feedback as a powerful instrument for change.


WHEN I ask people whether they use the Information Technology Infrastructure

Library (ITIL®) there seems to be polarized views – some love it, think it’s saved them from unnecessary pain, and support it; others run a mile, telling tales of fear, uncertainty and misery. How can a collection of things that seem to be such a good idea polarize users to that extent? I think it’s all about the implementation.

ITIL® claims to be the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management in the world, and has risen above other standards like ASPL and COBIT because of it’s non proprietary, comprehensive and process driven approach. The fi nancial industry was an early adopter; it started in Europe and is now conquering the world.

ITIL® focuses on four main objectives:• An increase in the customer focus of IT

organisations;• An increase in the quality of the IT services;• Reduction in overall IT Service Costs;• Improvement in process thinking in the IT

organisation.It does this through the defi nition of a common service management language and standardized processes. Here’s the rub: ITIL® doesn’t say ‘how’ to implement ITIL, and I think that’s the root cause of the differing opinions.

ITIL® divides the support organization into two big sections – Service Support and Service Delivery, and a bunch of sub functions and an irreverent summary of them could be:• Service Support - typically the management

functions to keep day to day operations running smoothly – has within it:

• Incident Management – think of them as the paramedics – they get the patient on the stretcher, stand clear <thump> — all working again, service restored, hurrah, chuck the patient to the Problem Managers

But what does it do?What does ITIL® mean to different people in the organisation? Words: Steve White

44

45


and be done with it. With a focus of service recovery they are not bogged down by the need to fi nd root cause. Mostly likely to be heard saying ‘Just reboot it’.

• Problem Management – the forensic department whose goal is to find out what went wrong, make it all better and stop it from happening again. Problem Management can get to dislike Incident Management as Incident Management can trample all over and contaminate the scene of crime. Likely to say ‘We could tell what happened if they hadn’t rebooted it’.

• Change Management – the troublemakers. Without change managers changing things we know most of the problems the Incident Managers have to recover and the Problem Managers have to investigate would not have happened. Everyone dislikes the Change Managers unless they are Very Good. Likely to say ‘Calm down dear… It’ll be OK, I had it tested’.

• Release Management – if the Change Managers are disliked, the Release Managers are several times worse – they get to change lots of things at the same time in large bundles. Need to replace every laptop in your organization to run Vista? Bring in the Release Managers. ‘Trust me, I’m a Release Manager’.

• Configuration Management – every organization needs train spotters and these are they – happy when everything has an asset tag, and never happier than when tending their Configuration Items in their Configuration Management Database. A piece of software has a new security bug? You can ask the CMDB for a list of everywhere that it’s running that piece of software, and then pass the list to the Change Managers to fix.

• Service Desk – the acceptable face of the IT department – people you phone and mail when it’s all gone horribly wrong. Their job is to ignore and frustrate you unless you are Very Persuasive. Buying them chocolate can often help.

On the other hand, sitting with dark shades on at shiny desks in a darkened room are the Service Delivery staff:• Service Level Management – the lawyers of

the IT department – if you want a agreed recovery time for your service you speak to them – they’ll draft Service Level Agreements and Operational Level Agreements, negotiate underpinning contracts with suppliers and

maintain and improve IT business service quality. Or they’ll make a pig fat by weighing it. ‘You want how much uptime!’

• Financial Management – You want another server, another building, to write off deprecated equipment, a calculation of Net Book Value, and an understanding of absorbed and unabsorbed costs – they are your pals in integer mathematics. ‘How many beans would you like to make fi ve?’

• Availability Management – your friends in fl oating point mathematics – statistics, graphs, charts, Service Outage Analysis, Fault Tree analysis, Component Failure Impact Analysis, they are there to spot trends to save you from sleepwalking into unavailability through predictable failures. ‘I’m telling you, that thing needs replacing, now…’

• Capacity Management – crystal ball specialists to save you from sleepwalking into unavailability through bad sizing. How

much is your data/network/processing growing each month – when will it all come crumbling around you? Someone in IT needs to know the company business strategy and plan accordingly. ‘You want it to do what?’

• Continuity Management – wizards and warlocks - when badness occurs how do you get your production up and running again? They have cunning plans and clever tricks, and regular tests to maximize the chances of your business continuing even if a Very Bad thing has affected your IT department. ‘We’re testing our business continuity, please report for work at this bunker tomorrow…’Implementing ITIL

The way to eat an elephant is, of course, one mouthful at a time (apparently, I have not personally eaten an elephant, but you know what I mean). There is no one way to implement ITIL – it just says ‘you should have this function’, now you, using your vast experience of the IT industry have to


46

go and do it.There are broadly three ways to

implement ITIL®:• One process at a time (could be a job for life

followed by the presentation of a carriage clock and retirement to a little cottage in the country);

• Clustered implementation of inter related processes (for instance Service Desk, Incident Management and Problem Management fi rst, with other management structures following later seems to be a popular strategy);

• All at the same time (a recipe for overwhelming a support organization, or causing elephant induced indigestion and the aforementioned disgruntlement).

IT Service Management of course needs to consider the people aspect of the inner workings of the IT organization – in the long term no one changes their behaviour unless there are considerations for the performance system (this is not the ‘management performance system’, that lovely thing that tips numbers into our bank accounts periodically, defines vacation policies and if we’re lucky showers us with employee

discounts) I’m talking about the performance system that we work inside, whether we acknowledge it’s existence or not – it’s the thing that, if it’s not implemented properly, drives us to do wrong things even if we know it’s the wrong thing to do.

During the implementation the ‘how’ also needs to be worked out. This is both a strength and a weakness – a strength in that you can implement ITIL® to suit your own environment, and a weakness in that two ITIL compliant organizations may not easily be able to talk to each other if they’ve implemented ITIL defi ned functions completely differently.

If there are Problem and Incident Management functions they both need an effective Situation Appraisal and Root Cause Problem Analysis method defined and implemented. ITIL® doesn’t say how to do these functions; it just says that you should. ITIL® helps intercommunication by defi ning terms; ‘incident’, ‘service request’ and ‘escalation’. By extending ITIL’s defi ning terms and selecting the same method of

Problem Analysis as many other ITIL compliant organizations you can create advantages for yourself and your customers that are bigger than the sum of the parts.

ITIL® – How it supports the IT Service industry.Given that ITIL® was originally forged when British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them was not suffi cient, and has been developed over a number of iterations, the thinking is proven and refi ned.

By ITIL® keeping vendor neutral, it has given organizations the flexibility to implement ITIL where they see the best benefit for themselves, which in turn starts with a clear set of improvement objectives.

By providing a comprehensive set of best practices and consistent defi nitions of key IT terminology and processes across the industry, it is being taken up by an increasing number of large support organizations – and the probability of it becoming a global standard increases every day.

Register online at www.egain.com/benchmark.aspor email [email protected]

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As a result of this in-depth assessment you will receive an external view of what can be achieved in a particular division of your business including the quick wins, high level implementation estimates and an outline business case.

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Is service lettingyou down?

WHEN I recently bought a laptop, I didn’t anticipate the process taking long. I

generally buy computing equipment online, as I know what I’m looking for and how much I want to pay. Yet when I logged on, that particular specification was not available, so I called the helpline. The call centre operator not only filled in the information gap but processed my order there and then, at the same price as the online offer, and even provided me with an approximate time of delivery.

While I was delighted by the service I received, I fear that my experience was an exception to the rule. Don’t we all just love to complain about bad service? The time spent

waiting for the gas man, the sofa delivery that never comes, the washing machine spare parts that never arrive… there’s always something. And the more people we tell, the more impact our advice has on the business of the company in question.

The image of a company is directly infl uenced by the perception of the level of service provided to its customers. The 2:11 principle – that a customer receiving good service will share their experience with two people and a customer receiving poor service will go on to tell eleven people – rings true across all sectors and industries. But how do we measure the loss in revenue resulting from poor service, or

the failure to provide good after sales service? And how does this impact the bottom line?

Geography no longer separates consumers from the best deal. They have the means and know how to fi nd the products they want, whether through internet research or by quizzing friends and family. They no longer passively rely on advertising to establish what’s on offer. With so many purchasing channels, consumers are increasingly aware of what they can expect from their purchases and are demanding more for their money. Walking out of the store with a new laptop isn’t where the consumer supplier relationship ends anymore. Consumers want goods delivered

Or worse still, is poor service sullying your company’s name and driving away repeat business Words: Gavin Hartland

48

49


at a convenient time, with a guarantee that any repairs will be carried out effi ciently and promptly. We all expect the right part at the right place, at the right time, delivered by a person with the right skills to make the repairs. Reasonable, right? Yet this rarely happens.

According to Forrester research: “The importance of after sales service will increase as the major source of manufacturers’ revenue shifts from product based sales to service based sales over the next decade. Many leading companies are shifting their focus from improving product delivery to improving sales.” So why is this side of the business often not given the same focus or level of investment? After all, staff can only provide good levels of service if they are equipped with the right tools to do so. So why does service management still often fail to climb the boardroom agenda?

Service: Old fearsFor many enterprises, service is an area of inescapable complexity and unrewarding costs. After sales service has been considered a necessary evil rather than a business opportunity; research concludes that service offers exciting opportunities for those willing to address the issue. As differentiating on product is increasingly tough, companies must use innovative service strategies to gain competitive advantage. AberdeenGroup1 suggests that best in class Strategic Service Management (SSM) companies derive 75 per cent higher revenue and 111 per cent higher profi ts from their service operations than other companies. They are also three times as likely to report customer retention rates greater than 90 per cent and twice as likely to achieve SLA compliance rates greater than 90 per cent, as other companies.

However, Aberdeen has also established that only 20 per cent of companies are abiding by best in class principles, with 50 per cent falling in the average category and 30 per cent classed as laggards. Companies can still be part of this service revolution: but they can ill afford to stall any longer, as the research also concluded that companies who ignore SSM core principles in the next 5-7 years will forfeit signifi cant growth, with many more becoming increasingly irrelevant in the marketplace.

Aberdeen Group had previously established2 that the level of investment in technology for post sales service financial management

does not live up to its perceived importance, with spreadsheets and accounting systems dominating the technologies that companies rely on to evaluate their service performance. The study concludes that these are cumbersome and ineffi cient tools for data analytics and urges businesses to consider business intelligence and service parts management solutions.

The good news is that there are products on the market that can help businesses take a more strategic approach to managing their service business – and early adopters are already seeing the benefi ts.

Turning challenges into competitive advantagesNever before have there been so many tangible results to be gained from investment in service. Transformation of traditional after sales business into Strategic Service Management will go a long way to improving your customer satisfaction levels.

Meeting these levels of service will make you stand out from the competition and presents an opportunity to reap the fi nancial benefi ts on offer. Quality after sales service can be used as a competitive weapon to increase profi ts and drive customer loyalty. The rewards that good after sales service can offer have been repeatedly confi rmed by the analyst community: an Aberdeen-Industry Week3 study found that profit margins for after sales service and parts ranged from 25 per cent to 1,000 per cent higher than margins for initial product sales. The study further revealed that after sales service accounted for 20 to 30 per cent of revenues and about 50 per cent of profi ts for most companies; quite a staggering proposition.

Servicing the old goes a long way to driving sales of the new. Investment in service is an enthralling proposition – and one that becomes downright compelling when it can deliver cost savings at the same time. Offering such exciting opportunities to drive your business’ reputation and increase profi tability. Whereas companies used to rely on simple Enterprise Resource Planning systems or shared apathy towards their service business, key players are starting to take note of the opportunities this brings. Management consultants are coming on board at major organisations to improve after sales effi ciencies. These consultants are even recruiting service management specialists, signalling that they’re in it for the long haul. Previously just a thought or note for the future is becoming reality.

Companies renewing their servicing processes and systems are actually reducing cost of service whilst improving customer service and profitability of the service organisation. When the management of service goes strategic, the benefits to the customer and to the business bottom line are tangible and long term.

So, is service letting your business down? It’s time for a revolution.

The 2:11 principle – that

a customer receiving

good service will share

their experience with two

people and a customer

receiving poor service will

go on to tell eleven people

– rings true across all

sectors and industries.

best in class Strategic

Service Management

(SSM) companies derive

75 per cent higher revenue

and 111 per cent higher

profi ts from their service

operations than other

companies.


Evolution or revolution?

ITIL® IS the world’s most widely applied framework for Best Practices in the

delivery of high quality IT services. Over the past two years, ITIL v2 has been reviewed and transformed to refl ect the maturity of IT Service Management Best Practice. Now renamed the ‘ITIL Service Management Practices’, the ITIL® v3 framework consists of a mature set of Best Practice guidelines that refl ect the broader scope of IT Service Management, instead of simply focusing on operational processes. ITIL now provides guidelines for the management of IT services across the full lifecycle of a service – from planning and implementation, day to day operation, service improvement, through to the retirement of the service.

This new context provides a more logical fi t for realising the objectives of the business. Indeed, the refresh has applied a more mature business oriented focus from day one, including strategy for identifying, measuring and communicating the value of ITIL® to the business. Now relevant to even the very top

echelons of an organisation, ITIL has become more holistic, business focused and easy to apply. ITIL® has evolved.

Service lifecycle approachMoving from a process based framework into a Service Lifecycle framework, ITIL® v3 provides guidance on how IT services should be managed from inception to retirement. To refl ect this, the library has been restructured according to the main components of the lifecycle. Previously, the IT Infrastructure Library consisted of ten books, each covering a specifi c practice and the related processes (Service Support, Service Delivery, Application Management, Software Asset Management, ICT Infrastructure Management, Security Management, Planning to Implement Service Management, The Business Perspective I & II and Small Scale Implementation). These practices have not been made obsolete by ITIL® v3, rather the lifecycle approach can be used to further mature these existing processes to encompass a more service orientated

approach to IT Service Management. Now, the ITIL® Service Management Practices comprises of five slimmer core volumes, revolving around the new ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

Five core volumesThe fi ve core volumes form a cohesive suite of generic IT Service Management Best Practices – the established foundations of the ITIL framework which remain constant. These Best Practice guidelines have been, over the past twenty years, proven to cut costs and improve quality for many hundreds of organisations across the globe. The core guidelines include Best Practices for the ten Service Management processes and the Service Desk function, which have been positioned in the new Service Lifecycle framework according to their relevancy at particular stages of the Service Lifecycle. Some fi t within a single Service Lifecycle stage, others appear in multiple phases.

Change is not replacement; it’s about making what is good better and more in tune with current challenges

50

Words: Markos Symeonides

51


Service StrategyService Strategy forms the hub of the Service Lifecycle ‘wheel’, with the Service Design, Service Transition and Service Operation phases responsible for the design, implementation and operation of the required services. Continual Service Improvement surrounds the lifecycle wheel, applying quality management and progressive improvement to all phases of the lifecycle.

The Service Strategy volume provides a business level view of the ITIL® framework and illustrates Best Practices for symbiosis between IT and the customer. Acting as a hub for the IT Service Lifecycle, it ensures that at each stage in the life of a service, the focus is on supporting the needs of the business. For this reason, the needs of the customer must be clearly understood. The business requirements dictate the policy and objectives of the Service Strategy phase. Services required by the business are identifi ed and the provision of these services is planned and justifi ed as being of strategic value to the organisation. Roles and responsibilities are defi ned, risks are assessed, and critical success factors for the provision of each service are identifi ed. Service Strategy outlines what should be documented and how, so that it can be communicated to the subsequent lifecycle phases. Where ITIL® v2 focused on aligning IT with the business, ITIL® v3 positions IT services even closer to business processes. Service Strategy provides the interface between business and IT, identifying the customer’s requirements and proposing service solutions in business language, not technical jargon. It is irrefutable that IT services now comprise of indispensable components in the provision of business services and as such should not simply be aligned, but fully integrated. Under ITIL® V3, the business and IT have become a single entity.

Service DesignService Design is responsible for the translation of strategic plans into a service portfolio, specifying the technologies, architectures, models and processes needed to deliver the portfolio. The result is a comprehensive blueprint of everything that is required to support, measure, manage and maintain the service - throughout its entire lifecycle. When designing new services, consideration must be made for existing services which may share the

common technologies and architectures. New services may be dependent on the support of existing services, which themselves may require redesign effort to ensure consistency of provision. For this reason, the Capacity Management, Availability Management and IT Service Continuity Management processes are included within the Service Design volume.

Service TransitionThe Service Design phase outputs a Service Design Package (SDP) which is produced at the introduction, alteration or retirement of a service. This includes everything from the business requirements of the service to a Service Lifecycle plan and forms the major input of the Service Transition phase. It is the role of the transition processes to manage the implementation and change activities involved in turning a pipeline service into a live service in production. These activities are specifi ed in the Service Transition Plan which forms part of the SDP, and may include the introduction of new technologies or architectures to support a new service, or the removal of hardware supporting a service which is being retired. Resources must be carefully managed throughout to ensure that transitioning complies with predicted cost, quality and time constraints. As service transitioning is primarily concerned with the management of changes to services and the supporting IT infrastructure, the Service Transition volume incorporates the Best Practice guidelines for Change, Release and Confi guration Management processes.

Service OperationWhen a service has been transitioned into production it is assessed against Service Acceptance Criteria included in the SDP and passes into the realm of Service Operation. Service Operation focuses on the managed, day to day operation of IT services, encompassing Best Practices for the identification and reporting of interruptions in the delivery of services, as well as handling service requests. In addition to Incident Management, Service Operation handles Event Management, Request Fulfi lment and Access Management. Event Management is a process internal to IT, focusing on proactive identification of problems before they result in service outages. Events coming from system monitoring tools and other sources are fi ltered and categorised

for analysis to assess the potentiality to cause disruption to services. Incident Management and Request Fulfi lment are customer facing processes for logging incidents and handling service requests. Standard services and frequently occurring changes can be dealt with by the Service Desk without invoking full scale Change Management processes. Access Management defines policies for granting access to services based on Security and Availability Management constraints and the policies dictated by Service Strategy.

Continual Service ImprovementThe Continual Service Improvement (CSI) volume refl ects the ITIL principle of ongoing optimisation of quality and cost effi ciency. It is concerned with improving the health of all aspects of IT Service Management, with drivers coming from both the business and IT. Service performance is measured and analysed and recommendations for improvement are justifi ed and implemented. These improvements in process efficiency lead directly to improvements in service quality and value for money. Continual Service Improvement is the engine which drives Best Practices to continually evolve and improve.

Putting service fi rstThe fi ve core texts outlined above form the foundations of ITIL® v3. In addition, there is a Complimentary Guidance Portfolio - a living library of continual improvement. Whilst the core texts remain non prescriptive and will only be updated at the next library refresh, the Complimentary Guidance Portfolio will be continually amended and updated to provide an up to the minute, prescriptive element to the framework. These dynamic publications are aimed at specifi c target audiences and will be sourced from industry experts, the user community and research and academic institutions.

The benefi ts of adopting the ITIL Best Practice framework are indisputable. Costs are reduced, service quality is improved and customers are more satisfi ed with the way that IT supports their business. ITIL® v3 offers organisations with existing and relatively mature processes from ITIL® v2 to evolve into a more service centric organisation and enables IT directors to increase the transparency and effi ciency of their IT operations.

THE CAPACITY and capability of IT have continued to evolve over the years until

today it is at the heart of business processes and performance. But also, as it has grown more business critical, so the governance of IT has had to evolve to match its growing responsibilities. This has meant that the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has also had to evolve; expanding from its initial, narrow focus on the management of IT operations to address the broader issues associated with the development and delivery of end to end business services.

The newest edition of the ITIL best practices framework arrived on May 30. A total of fi ve books (Service Strategies, Service

Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement) will replace the current books. These new books emphasise not only the operational aspects of IT but additionally, IT service strategies, design, transition and continuous service improvement. They focus on the positioning of the ITIL processes at appropriate and multiple points in the lifecycle of IT services – as well as providing updated guidance for currently implemented ITIL processes.

ITIL version 3 (V3) draws upon lessons learned from earlier ITIL efforts. While ITIL version 1 featured over 40 books and ITIL version 2 was scaled down to a mere 10 core books and ITIL version 3, as already stated, consists of just five books; all reflect the changes in the delivery of IT services over the

past few decades.The objective is to educate IT

organizations on the implementation of individual ITIL processes (such as change, incident or problem management, etc.), the adoption of a business service centric approach in order to deliver transparency and manage the relationship between IT and the business.

From feedback gathered in the ITIL version 3 development workshops, it was clear that more prescriptive guidance was needed. ITIL version 3 delivers this in the form of detailed flow charts, process models, organization charts, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and feedback loops to speed implementations and lower costs. In addition to new processes that map to current ones, forward thinking and practical ITSM implementations such as knowledge management, service portfolio management and the service catalogue are now included.

Practitioners should keep in mind that the templates provided in these documents are merely guidelines for organizations to define their business and IT requirements. If those requirements are not appropriately defined, no template or version of ITIL will deliver much in the way of tangible business results.

ITIL has been called the ‘de facto standard’ for IT Service Management, but it is not a standard. ITIL is really a set of best practices that provides guidance on how to implement ITSM in your environment. There is no organizational certifi cation. ISO/IEC 20000 offers an ITSM standard and, as part of the development, the alignment with 20000 has been preserved.

ITIL version 3 will provide businesses with the ability to measure the value of ITIL process implementation and the business services delivered using those processes. This, in turn, will enable them to focus on business value, rather than the mechanics of IT and therefore enable IT staff to focus their efforts on actions and behaviours that drive value to the business.

Driven by a proliferation of support, education and tools from vendors, ITIL version 3 aims to ease implementations. This guidance helps people understand how to better apply process discipline to their environment, so they can ultimately deliver a higher quality of service at a lower cost to the business.

Because ultimately, that’s what IT is for; using technology to automate business processes and allowing people to innovate on top of those processes to deliver a higher quality service or product.

ITIL version 3 is a lot more than simply a catalogue of rules.

Off and running

While ITIL version 1

featured over 40 books

and ITIL version 2 was

scaled down to a mere

10 core books and ITIL

version 3, as already

stated, consists of

just fi ve books

52


Words Robert Stroud

Ensuring you Manage your IT Business Servicesand Infrastructure

• Faster

• More Reliably

• More Efficiently

• More Cost Effectively

• With The Evidence To Prove It

Would you like to improve the quality of your IT service, productivity and customersatisfaction; reduce costs and achieve operational excellence?

Then look no further than Marval - your ‘One-Stop-Shop’ for a new level and a new experiencein integrated ITSM software, consultancy and accredited ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 education

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Contact us now to discuss how you can improve your serviceT: +44 (0)1536 711999 E: [email protected] W: marval-group.com

MARVAL A4 VITAL AW 9/8/07 17:17 Page 1


54 AS A business grows and changes along with the times, the complexity

of its network, and in turn the level of security risk, also increases. Even a single vulnerability can disrupt a business, including the loss of data or the inability to actually conduct business. On top of this, unknown attacks are becoming far more likely due to the amount of connections to an

organisation’s network. It is no longer just insiders that have access to critical business assets, but outsiders, such as customers, partners, contractors, outsourcers and service providers, also require connections to an organisation’s network. Here lies the greatest risk to organisations with businesses not knowing to who or what their network is connected.

How are leading organisations overcoming these challenges?To succeed, organisations must deliver the agility necessary to drive growth – while assuring that constant change does not compromise network performance, introduce new security risk, or cause the organization to fall out of compliance with industry regulations. Based on conversations with enterprises, here

Who’s connected?And who might be trying to compromise your network’s (and your business’s) security Words: Luke Brown

55


are four techniques you can apply to your own organization:

1. Map your network. Repeat regularly. Information about the location and security of devices, hosts, and connections underpins IT strategies. Organisations must have confi dence that yesterday’s assumptions are adjusted to refl ect the current network. This is impossible without a complete, regularly updated understanding of the relationship between assets, as well as whether assets are in compliance with security policy.

To achieve this, IT organisations traditionally combined data from multiple, manually updated sources. Most

organisations now fi nd these approaches too cumbersome and costly, as assets evolve by the hour. Leading organisations remedy this by applying advances in ‘network assurance’ practices and technologies. Many of the advances stem from efforts to map the Internet itself.

Consider how a major regional bank tests whether its business continuity plans are sound. The bank uses assurance practices to scan disaster recovery infrastructure, determining if assets are appropriately secured and linked to internal resources and third parties. In a matter of hours, the bank’s senior IT executives can validate that the disaster recovery infrastructure is in compliance and not compromised by network change.

Using similar practices, one of the world’s largest drug makers enforces boundaries between its research and administrative networks. IT staff can regularly test connectivity and ensure intellectual property critical to growth is secure. When necessary, security efforts like patch deployment can be prioritized around related resources.

2. Look before you leap. Understand the implications of change.With enterprises increasingly dependent on IT to drive revenue, it is even more critical for organisations to manage projects to expected business outcomes. However, most IT organisations have no reliable way to predict the full impact of network change – the reason outages and compliance violations often accompany even basic modifi cations. This problem is compounded by change and intensive activities such as mergers, outsourcing and consolidation.

To manage the ‘ripple effect,’ IT organisations require an accurate understanding of impacted resources. Consider if two Fortune 50 enterprises were to merge. The goal from an IT perspective would be to provide connectivity between their organisations. First, the IT staff would need to identify all entry and exit points within each organization’s network. The IT staff would then be able to pinpoint the full security implications of connectivity before any changes were rolled out. Network assurance practices would be instrumental to accelerating these efforts.

3. Validate that assets are under management and in compliance. When managing the security implications of network change, many IT organisations rely on the word of administrators. Others check a sampling of resources, applying algorithms to make assumptions about the remainder. Neither method inspires

confidence in the face of an audit.To better manage change, leading

organisations should combine network assurance technology and practices to validate that compliance policies are reality across headquarter, divisional, partner, and remote networks. This minimizes human input, shifting compliance check ups from reliance on administrator ‘best guesses’ to auditable, automated processes.

4. Keep score – globally.Is your network growing more or less secure over time? The organisations I talk with address this question not by focusing on the risk associated with specifi c devices or hosts, but rather by examining the network as a whole. First, their IT staff evaluates the network’s assets and connections, numerically scoring the aggregate level of risk. Members of staff then repeat these steps periodically and compare the results against the baseline score, determining whether risk is increasing or decreasing.

With a single number in hand, organisations have an objective way to quantify overall risk or the security impact of specifi c projects. A score is determined by a mix of elements, including topology, address space, externally exposed devices, the risk profi le associated with individual devices, and whether or not devices are in compliance with policy.

Effective network assurance practices and technologies typically complete a network evaluation and scoring in days, without impacting service performance. An alternative is to compile existing data from audit and asset management tools. The benefi t is that these tools may already be in place; the challenge is that the results may be out of date or incomplete – a function of uneven data quality across toolsets and the time the process takes to execute.

No matter how you proceed, the end result should pinpoint your network risk score’s significant contributing factors. This flags problematic network changes or resources, so that they can be managed to improvement before a security breach or non-compliance occurs.

In conclusion, organisations can increase their focus on top line business objectives when they have a regularly updated understanding of their network assets. Numerous blue chip organisations have proven this can be achieved without increases to administrative overhead or disruption to operations. Driving growth without this understanding is like a doctor operating without X-rays or an MRI. It can be done, but far less safely and effectively.


Making services pay

IN AN increasingly competitive environment, managed service providers simply cannot

deliver the depth, breadth or quality of service required using the traditional on site, engineer based approach. This highly reactive business model fails to deliver the quality of service that customers require in today’s 24x7 environment. As a result, too many providers are experiencing untenable levels of customer attrition – even as high as 30% a year. The only way managed services providers can grow the business, stabilise the revenue stream and improve customer retention is to embrace a business model based upon highly integrated remote monitoring and automation.

Outdated, unworkableThe managed services market may be growing fast but, in the UK at least, few organisations are maximising profitability. With an over reliance on customer site visits to carry out

both routine and emergency tasks, too many IT services companies are struggling to create a sustainable growth path.

Using the traditional, resource heavy model, each new customer win prompts a fl urry of technical staff recruitment simply to keep pace with demand. Yet these engineers are, at best, only productive 30% of the time. The rest is spent either travelling to and from customer sites or on emergency stand by. What business, irrespective of industry, can afford to have a highly skilled, high cost work force unproductive for the majority of the working day?

Using technology to improve the management of technology services

Words: Philip Samson

The only way managed services providers can

grow the business, stabilise the revenue stream and improve customer retention is to embrace a business

model based upon highly integrated

remote monitoring and automation.

56

57


Furthermore, frequent on site engineer visits may appease a customer, but their presence is hardly indicative of a well managed, effi cient contract. In the majority of cases, it is simply too expensive or time consuming for managed services providers to complete the key routine tasks required to keep customer equipment in good condition. From regular patch updates to disk defragmentation, these core service roles are too often overlooked as organisations struggle to react to the day to day outages affecting customers.

Blue chip service, SME priceYet these day to day outages can be signifi cantly reduced if the routine tasks are carried out effectively. This can, however, never be achieved using a manual on site team – the costs are unsustainable. As blue chip organisations have discovered over the past few years, it is only by combining remote monitoring with automation that core activities can be delivered cost effectively.

There is now a very real opportunity for managed services providers to leverage this automated, remote business model to deliver high quality customer services at a fraction of the costs experienced by blue chips. The economies of scale of the managed service model offer SME organisations for the fi rst time access to the robust, highly available IT systems required to be competitive in today’s marketplace.

Some providers have dabbled with point solutions that deliver remote monitoring or audit. However, without a completely integrated solution, they have been unable to achieve the high levels of automation required – such as link from email to ticketing system – to truly transform productivity and profi tability.

Using an integrated, automated solution, providers can ensure patch and security updates are always carried out; that anti spyware is up to date; anti virus software

correctly confi gured; and temporary Internet files deleted. Furthermore, alerts raised by monitoring software can be acted upon – not by an engineer on standby but by an automated solution that can repair and reboot machines remotely.

By creating the right policies and services, via an automated framework, providers can ensure all machines under management are always running at peak effi ciency.

Managing by policy in this way to improve the quality and timeliness of core service tasks, will signifi cantly improve service levels.

Not only will this minimise the expensive and time consuming engineer call outs but, critically, customers receive the quality of service and uptime traditionally experience only by blue chip companies that have made a signifi cant investment in technology.

New Model, Sustainable GrowthThe implications for the managed service provider’s business model are signifi cant.

Taking this approach, engineer productivity rises to over 80%, since engineers can manage

the majority of customer issues remotely, removing the need for time consuming travel. Furthermore, any engineer that is required on site can feel confi dent that the routine tasks

have been completed and confi guration is consistent.

Engineers can work in teams remotely to support multiple customers simultaneously. This ensures new customers can be added without requiring an immediate increase in engineering resource. Suddenly the business becomes scalable, thus creating profi table, sustainable growth.

And the billing method changes. Rather than enduring the peaks and troughs of the break/fi x model, with its annual end of contract fl urry of activity in a bid to entice the customer to re sign, organisations can offer a monthly subscription service. In addition to stabilising the cash fl ow, this approach enables customers to pick and choose service levels to refl ect specifi c business needs – mixing high and medium system availability for different systems.

It also enables providers to introduce new services, such as back up and disaster recovery, to the portfolio, leveraging the lower cost of delivery to expand the business and get quantifi able competitive differentiation.

Customer EvolutionOf course, not all customers will be ready and willing to shift over to a subscription approach. Indeed, providers face a serious challenge of education to ensure customers understand that fewer on site visits does not mean lower service. However, even if customers remain on an annual contract, the provider will immediately gain from the lower cost of service delivery achieved via the proactive, off site model.

Regular information updates combined with proactive visits from engineers taking on an account management role will be key to enable the customer transformation. Using the information collected by the remote monitoring tools, providers can track trends in system performance and predict possible failures ahead of time. Taking this approach both customer and provider can plan and budget for replacements and upgrades, rather than enduring an unpleasant surprise, hefty bill and costly downtime after a failure.

Experience in the US demonstrates that customers rapidly acclimatise to the shift in service delivery model, enjoying the far higher service quality and proactive approach. For the provider keen to achieve business expansion and improve productivity and profi tability, consigning the resource heavy break/fi x model to history is essential. It is only by embracing a remote model with high levels of automation that providers can achieve a scalable, profi table business model that delivers the increase in service quality required by an increasingly demanding customer base.

Comparing Traditional IT Support and Managed Services Models

Traditional ‘break-fi x’ IT Support Managed Services

Product Centric IT Operations Oriented

Technology Oriented Business Oriented

Time-Limited Projects Ongoing Management

Manual/People Intensive Automated/Software Enabled

Reactive/Time-Consuming Proactive/Effi cient

Onsite Service Required Remote Management Provided

Mitigates Downtime/Disruption Maximizes Availability Productivity

Commodity/Transaction Pricing Subscription/Long-Term Agreements

Variable Revenue Streams Predictable Revenue Streams

Source Kaseya

It also enables providers

to introduce new services,

such as back up and

disaster recovery, to the

portfolio, leveraging the

lower cost of delivery to

expand the business


Web self-service

A COMPANY’S customer service is often its only point of long term differentiation,

yet so many companies fail to deliver good customer service both online and off. A recent benchmark study into the state of web self-service in the UK found that 57 percent of UK companies offered little to no web self-service: this is an alarming statistic given that organisations are increasingly using the web to interact and do business with consumers and business customers.

There is no doubt that the number of people online is increasing at a phenomenal pace

with 56 percent of teenagers creating their own content online and online purchases, in the UK alone, expected to reach £39 billion by 2010. Both businesses and customers are increasingly utilising the web, focusing on the younger audience as the priority. However, online customer service is surprisingly lagging behind.

The research highlighted the fact that businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of their web presence to improve the service they provide to their customers, despite the clear benefits of increased sales, conversion rates,

Are companies providing customers with as good service via the web as they could getfrom their supermarket? Words: Ian Jones

58

businesses in the UK are

not taking advantage of

their web presence to

improve the service they

provide to their customers,

despite the clear benefi ts

59


reduced abandoned rates and reduced costs. It is clear that a majority of UK companies are still failing to realise their full potential for customer retention and revenue growth by falling short in customer self-service via the web.

In the past companies were able to get away with simply having a basic website with little or no customer service, but today’s consumers expect a lot more from companies online. Customers want convenience in access, the right answers - fi rst time and prompt and accurate responses - every time.

Customers are more likely to use the Internet when they want a quick answer and believe these can be easily found using the web. Often customers who choose to utilise online customer service are PC literate, high value customers who are simply trying to avoid the call centre.

In order to cater for these customers, companies need to ensure that they are providing the best web self-service available. However, many

companies are moving their customer service online before considering their broader corporate objectives such as, improving customer retention, increasing sales and growing revenue. This movement has led to many organisations offering inadequate web self-service to their current and potential customers.

In building effective web self-service solutions, companies need to do it well, or not do it at all. Customers find it more frustrating if they search for answers or pose a query and can not find the answer or get a slow or poor quality response, than if you had offered no facility to search or pose that query in the first place.

When building effective web self-service companies can learn a lot from the principles used when designing supermarkets. The goals of the supermarket are very similar to those of web self-service, with the overall objectives being to get customers to purchase products, to encourage them to buy more than they planned and to make the experience pleasant enough for it to become a regular habit. For web self-service the goal is not spending money, but consuming information.

Here are some insights that demonstrate the parallels between the supermarket and web self-service:• Appearance; layout matters: The entrance

to the store has to be attractive or customers won’t enter, so the entrance is usually a rich display of colour and attractive produce. Like the entrance to a store, the self-service on a web site must be clearly marked and easy to fi nd. It must be designed to appear approachable and attractive to potential users.

• The more time you spend the more you buy: Flowers and fruit are often located at the front of a supermarket. This is to slow people down from pavement speed to purchasing speed with the use of colours and smells. It is the same with web sites; companies need to make the start of the help page as interesting as possible to slow customers down to a reading pace. The goal of web self-service is for visitors to consume information and become repeat customers. If customers can be drawn into buying additional services or products whilst experiencing web self-

service, this is an added bonus.• Customers must be able to fi nd what they

are looking for: Whilst a supermarket wants to encourage people to buy additional items, customers will probably not become regular visitors if they can’t fi nd the things they went in for. The same is true for web self-service, so developers need to offer a variety of ways to fi nd information to suit different types of users, as well as making sure that content is up to date and relevant.

The limiting factor for supermarkets is that the physical layout has to meet the needs of all the different customer types. In web self-service, layout is not a limiting factor; the same information can be laid out in many different ways to meet the needs of individuals or groups. However, providing a web self-service solution to a wide variety of customers can be challenging because it is diffi cult to predict the information demands of each individual customer. There is much less inertia to be overcome in visiting a web site than in writing an email or phoning a call centre and because of this, customer queries can be much more wide ranging and varied.

The unpredictable nature means that web self-service solutions have to adapt on two levels if they wish to succeed:

Content: Like a supermarket the self-service web site has to constantly monitor its stock; out of date items have to be removed, items that are less than satisfactory have to be replaced by items which are. Finally, there has to be constant monitoring of requests for items that are not currently available and there needs to be a regular review as to whether they should be added.

Layout: When companies regularly receive calls and emails for information that is already on the web site, it suggests that the location or access method is inappropriate. Information may have to be relocated or made accessible from multiple points so it is certain that it can be found: different customer types will look for information in different ways.

Companies are recognising the importance of web self-service and if they can learn from some of the basic principles used by supermarkets, they will be able to provide their customers with effective online customer service. By using new technology available in the market place, companies will not only be able to cope with the changing information demands of customers, but will harness these changes to continuously drive modifi cation in content, layout and presentation, ensuring that they stay ahead of customer demand. And with fewer physical limitations than supermarkets, companies may soon see innovation in web self-service overtake innovation in the retail sector.

In web self service, layout is not a limiting factor; the same information can be laid out in many different ways to meet the needs of

individuals or groups

A new way of walking

PrécisAs with other parts of the business, IT Service Management needs to be fl exible to meet evolving demands and challenges. ITIL v3, with expanded scope and new processes, presents additional challenges to the vendors of traditional Service Management / Service Desk tools. Will the vendors and their customers be able to adapt to the change?

Introduction and BackgroundThe publication of ITIL®, version 3 (called ITIL v3 hereafter) in June this year means that many customers who have implemented their processes based on the previous version are wondering about the implications on their day to day operations. Likewise, the vendors of integrated service management tools will have to address their tool offerings to ensure future alignment with the new version of ITIL.

Lets take a practical look at the implications of ITIL v3 on service providers, and on the tools they use. What has changed in ITIL v3 that will impact service providers? The following sections look at some of these changes, and highlight some key issues.

Incident ManagementThe defi nition of Incident Management has

changed, effectively splitting the process into three separate processes:• Incident Management;• Event Management;• Request Fulfi lment.Most service desk tools already cater for the separation between incidents (an event has already occurred), alerts (warning – a threshold has been reached) and service requests (nothing’s broken, but we would like IT to do something). Therefore, service providers can quickly implement this aspect

of ITIL v3 by ensuring that incidents, events and requests are all classified correctly, albeit within an existing ‘incident’ record. In most circumstances, this will be a simple confi guration change. This will also support enhanced reporting capabilities so that when producing statistics, data on incidents, service requests and events (alerts) can be reported separately.

Tool vendors may wish to update their packages eventually, to align with the new terminology, but this should be seen as an evolving update, rather than something that needs to be done immediately (provided that incidents can be classified into incidents, events/alerts and service requests).

Confi guration ManagementConfi guration Management has changed

its name to Service Asset and Confi guration Management. Some service providers may

The Impact of ITIL® v3 on Service Management Tools and their Users – a new way of doing classic tasks

Words: Mark Sykes & Ralph Gray

60


fi nd this a little confusing, because the Asset Management component of this process is usually handled by the asset component of the organisation’s financial management system.

The challenge for tool vendors will depend on the two major circumstances:• Do I build full asset management functionality

into my service management tool, as some customers may require this; or

• Do I build an interface between my configuration management tool and the organisation’s asset management tool?

The greater recognition given in ITIL v3 to the link between Asset Management and Confi guration Management means that neither service providers nor tool vendors can ignore this relationship any longer.

Service Knowledge Management SystemITIL v3 introduced a new term call the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). What is this, and how can service providers and tool vendors meet the requirements? The SKMS is not a new concept, just a new name for an existing concept, but it also helps clarify the relationship between many of the other data repositories in ITIL®.

Essentially, the SKMS is a structured approach to managing all of your data, information and knowledge about your service management activities. Gone is the concept (usually from misinterpretation) that everything is in the Confi guration Management Data Base (CMDB). Tool vendors will be happy that the CMDB now has a clearer defi nition, more closely aligned to what they have generally implemented. The illustration shows one view of the SKMS.A real challenge for tool vendors of integrated service management tools will be to adopt this structure, and to assist service providers to manage all the data and information about their services, customers and underlying infrastructure. For many organisations, most of these items will currently be held in disparate databases, and a key aspect will continue to be how vendors can manage the integration of these items within their service management tools, including managing the alphabet soup of acronyms:AMIS Availability Management Information

SystemCDB formerly the Capacity Data Base, now

“retired”

CMDB Configuration Management Data BaseCMIS Capacity Management Information

System CMS Configuration Management System SKMS contains all service management

information

‘Software as a Service’ OptionWhilst traditional ‘legacy’ solutions may still be in use within most organisations, more and more companies are migrating to ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) solutions. SaaS solutions are web based software applications that are typically hosted by a third party provider and are used by the customer via the internet utilising their web browser.

One of the key features of these types of solutions is that customers are not paying for the software, but they pay for using it via the use of subscription licensing, and because the solution is web-based, no application has to be installed on the user’s computer. The solution developer retains control of the application, there is no need for internal administration, development, testing, etc. and the associated costs of running and maintaining the infrastructure to support the client server based application.

So these new solutions can more rapidly evolve to cater for the ever changing demands and challenges that IT, including ITIL v3, brings. For example, if we look at Service-now.com as an example of SaaS, the solution provider handles the monitoring, tuning, availability and updates to the application. As the customer

only accesses the tool via the internet, all of the management and infrastructure challenges are the responsibility of the vendor.

In this way, the vendor is able to rapidly make changes to their hosted solution, with ‘mass roll-out’ and the pain that goes along with that becomes a thing of the past for those organisations that have moved away from client server tools. So with ITIL v3 launching new processes and new terminology and with the ability to quickly make configuration changes, changes to templates, etc. the demands of the customer can be swiftly achieved.

SaaS solutions can eliminate the obvious disruption that a software upgrade can cause for users and administrators of the system and it also means that the system stays fresh and up to date, allowing the customer to determine when to implement the latest functionality or module.

SummaryNeither service providers, nor their tool vendors, should be overly concerned about the introduction of ITIL v3. It isn’t a radical change that will require organisations to go out and buy a brand new integrated service management suite of tools, as many aspects may just require re confi guration of existing toolsets. But where the opportunity does arise, then most definitely look at how vendors are meeting the new requirements of ITIL v3, and how you can maximise your investment and achieve the greatest business benefi t.


61

© Fox IT Ltd 2007


IT transformed by ‘Y2K’ hysteria

Introduction of business processes into ITIt all began in the lead up to the millennium, when mass hysteria and fear over what would happen to IT systems as the world entered the 21st Century predominated in the thoughts of business chiefs. Would all networks collapse? Would companies be able to cope and deliver their services? Extensive media hype led companies to invest heavily in hardware and software tools to address potential problems. IT departments had money thrown at them by the business and they bought accordingly.

However, organisations soon realised that this was an error. The lack of business processes used in IT at the time resulted in unnecessary expenditure on a massive scale and business responded by developing processes to make IT more accountable and

manageable. IT departments needed to know everything about their systems and integrate themselves fully with the wider organisation. They had to make wholesale changes and become a facilitator of the business; not only delivering a better service but also saving and making the company money.

IT geeks becoming business savvy?Before this shake up, the perception of the IT department was that it loitered in the background, occasionally surfacing to respond to problems with the system. IT dealt with user requests and system issues as they came in and this became the established approach to helpdesk delivery. Users within the business would call the IT department with a problem and technicians would endeavour to fi x it as quickly as possible, with responsibility being

How the emergence of the IT service desk changed the management of business processes Words: Richard Althorp

Extensive media hype

led companies to invest

heavily in hardware and

software tools to address

potential problems.

IT departments had

money thrown at them

by the business and they

bought accordingly.

62

63


passed from one person to another depending on the scale of the problem. This not only made it very diffi cult for the IT department to track the history of an incident but also to prioritise jobs effectively.

The IT department needed to change how it was being perceived and the only way they could do this was by introducing formal management processes.

The IT director and manager has necessarily become more business savvy and transformed from the ‘technical geek’ into the ‘strategic thinker’. Like any other division, IT departments needed to improve business processes. Previous less structured approaches to service had put the IT department under considerable pressure by making it impossible to set deliverable expectations and communicate them effectively to the organisation. They had to start communicating in a common business language that the whole organisation could understand.

As a result, service management has become critical in enabling IT departments to take a business driven approach to their management. IT directors and managers are increasingly looking to demonstrate the strategic business value generated by their department and deliver a higher quality service in line with the needs of the organisation it serves.

Emergence of the IT service deskThe key to the helpdesk maturing and evolving into the service desk was the emergence of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). The approach was initially developed by Government departments as a framework to address IT service support and delivery issues and has subsequently been adopted by the private sector. In both the public and private spaces, it provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision.

ITIL’s introduction has been vital for the development of business processes because it has established a set of guidelines and a common language for IT operations. This includes service delivery, problem resolution and solving customer enquiries, a language the

whole business could understand. Adopting this framework has helped IT departments manage their processes more efficiently and this in turn has reduced costs, improved productivity, use of skills and experience in the team and boosted customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery.

The formalisation of IT processes has spurred development in the systems designed to manage the helpdesk function. These service desk solutions are now playing a central role in facilitating, rather than dictating, business processes.

One of the key benefi ts of the service desk is that it has enabled the IT department to implement, monitor and manage service level agreements (SLAs) for its internal clients. SLAs can be allocated according to roles and responsibilities and can then be categorised under headings such as ‘critical’, ‘high’ or ‘medium’. These criteria can then be cross referenced with the applications/assets that these individuals need to perform their core functions. For example, remote access for a fi eld engineer may be assigned ‘critical’ ranking because without it they can’t perform their job. In practical terms this means the IT department is now better placed to ensure its services are aligned with the requirements of the organisation.

It’s the implementation of these systems that can help IT managers record and evaluate the number of incidents their users are experiencing. Before IT departments improved the management of their processes, they ticketed isolated incidents and a problem couldn’t be identifi ed because the incidents had no linkage or life cycle. The introduction of the service desk has expedited this process, logging issues in a knowledgebase which is automatically searched when calls are logged, to identify trends and previous resolutions. This ensures that time spent on more complex queries is maximised.

All of these best practice processes make call handling as straightforward and effective as possible, both for the service desk and for the customer. By maintaining a detailed audit trail of call actions it ensures that anyone can

rapidly familiarise themselves with the history of a particular query and pick up where the previous technician left off.

Future stepsWith ITIL® now an established framework, working towards standards such as ISO20000 is likely to become a major priority for IT departments. ISO20000 comprises two distinct documents: a specifi cation for a service management system and a code of practice. Together, these form a top down framework to defi ne the features of service management processes that are essential for the delivery of high quality services. As time goes on, more service providers and vendors are likely to adopt this as a means of demonstrating their expertise.

IT fi ghts backThe millennium bug looked like it was going to crash head on with IT and destroy everything in its path. Instead, it provided the ‘IT geek’ with an opportunity to fi ght back and emerge as a ‘strategic thinker’. By taking a business driven approach and becoming defi nable, repeatable and measurable, the IT department has come round in full circle from being a perceived drain on budgets to a true facilitator of the business.

The millennium bug

looked like it was going

to crash head on with IT

and destroy everything

in its path. Instead, it

provided the ‘IT geek’

with an opportunity to

fi ght back and emerge as

a ‘strategic thinker’


64

directory

Customer Service & Contact Centre Software

258 Bath Road, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4DX

T: +44 (0) 1753 464646 F: +44 (0) 1753 464647 W: www.egain.com E: [email protected]

eGain is a leading provider of customer service and contact centre software.

Over 800 enterprise customers worldwide have relied on eGain to transform their traditional call centres, help desks and web customer service operations into multichannel customer interaction hubs.

EGAIN COMMUNICATIONS

IT Service Management Systems

Tower, Great West Road, Brentford, TW8 9AN, UK T: +44 (0)208 758 6750 F: +44 (0)208 758 6751 W: http://uk.emc.com/smarts/itil C: Suhela Dighe, Marketing Director E: [email protected] part of EMC’s Resource Management solutions, EMC Smarts for ITIL process automation and CMDB strategy empower customers to roll out their ITIL initiatives with minimum risk, automatically populate their CMDB with real-time information on Network, Server and Application resources.

EMC

100 Longwater Avenue, GreenPark, Reading, RG2 6GP T: +44 (0)870 401 7300 F: +44 (0)870 401 7301 W: www.frontrange.co.uk C: Kirsty Waller E: [email protected] over 8500 customers worldwide, FrontRange are the leading provider of consolidated IT Service solutions, including:• HEAT Service & Support – Award-winning

Incident Management & Helpdesk Automation

• FrontRange ITSM – Fully integrated, scalable, ITIL aligned IT Service & Infrastructure Management.

FRONTRANGE SOLUTIONS

Helpdesk Internal/External

Ares, Odyssey Business Park, West End Road, Ruislip, HA4 6QD T: 020 8582 8282 F: 020 8582 8288 W: www.hornbill.com C: Sales E: [email protected] Supportworks’ Enterprise Support Platform (ESP) provides a fully integrated platform for automating and managing Service Management related processes. Supportworks ESP is the foundation of Hornbill’s ITIL, Helpdesk, Customer, HR and Industry Support solutions. Supportworks ITSM is certifi ed Pink Verify Enhanced.

HORNBILL SYSTEMS

Venture House, Arlington Square,

Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 1WA

T: 01344 742835

F: 01344 742935

W: www.ibertek.com

C: Nigel Todd

E: [email protected]

IBERTEK specialises in delivering

successful ITIL compatible Service

Management and complimentary

Solutions to organisations of all sizes in

all ranges of vertical markets.

IBERTEK

Unit 4 Charlton Business Park, Crudwell Road, Malmesbury, Wiltshire, SN16 9RU T: + 44 (0) 1666 828 600 F: + 44 (0) 1666 826103 W: www.iccm.co.uk C: Jessica Yeung E: [email protected] ICCM supply Service software solutions & ITIL V2 & V3 training and consultancy to over 400 global clients in both the private and public sector. e-Service Desk is PinkVerify™ Service Support Enhanced, proving compatibility and pedigree for organisations seeking to align their business with industry best practice.

ICCM SOLUTIONS

IT Service Management Consultants

60 Lombard Street, London. EC3V 9EA T: +44 (0) 207 464 8414 F: +44 (0) 207 464 8888 W: www.icore-ltd.com C: Jane Tweddle – iCore Sales & Marketing Director E: [email protected] The UK’s largest independent service management consultancy, this year iCore celebrates ten years in operation. Our services include maturity assessment, process design and development, service improvement and more. iCore has consultants who are fully qualifi ed in ITIL, COBIT, ISO20000 and PRINCE2.

ICORE

Connaught House, Portsmouth Road, Send, Surrey GU23 7JY T: +44 (0) 148 321 3200 F: +44 (0) 148 321 3201 W: www.infra.co.uk C: Lindsay Potter E: [email protected] is the international developer of 100% web-based ITSM solution infraEnterprise - including Incident, Problem, Change, Confi guration, Release, Availability and Service Level Management. infraEnterprise supports industry best practice methodology such as ITIL and KCS, delivering best value for comparative depth of functionality.

INFRA CORPORATION

Industry body

150 Wharfedale Road, Winnersh Triangle, Wokingham, Berkshire. RG41 5RG T: 0118 918 6503 F: 0118 969 9749 W: www.itsmf.co.uk C: Ben Clacy E: [email protected] The itSMF is the only internationally recognised and independent organisation whose sole focus is on the on-going development and promotion of IT Service Management ’best practice‘, standards and qualifi cations. The forum has 14,000 UK members and offi cial itSMF chapters in 44 countries.

IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT FORUM

™

65


directory

IT Service Management Consulting Training

Business and Technology Centre, Bessemer Drive, Stevenage, Hertfordshire SG1 2DX T: +44 (0)845 838 2345 F: +44 (0) 845 838 2346 W: www.connectsphere.com C: Shirley Lacy E: [email protected] has a great track record in delivering in successful service improvement programmes that deliver value. Let ConnectSphere help you to plan and apply ISO 20000 and ITIL service management practices using our assessment, consultancy, implementation and training services.

CONNECTSPHERE

IT Support Training

Lewes Enterprise Centre, 112 Malling St, Lewes, E Sussex, BN7 2RJ

T: 01273 890922 F: 01273 890513 W: www.sti-ltd.co.uk C: John Fahey E: [email protected]

STI has been presenting Helpdesk courses since 1989. They are the longest established in the UK and probably Europe. We present at 7 UK public venues and frequently on-site. We are also an Authorised Training Partner for Help Desk Institute.

STI

Prudence Place, Proctor Way, Luton, Bedfordshire. LU2 9PE

T: 01582 488242 F: 01582 488343 W: www.wardownconsulting.co.uk C: Rosemary Gurney E: [email protected]

Wardown Consulting was established to help businesses capitalise from the substantial benefi ts that IT Service Management can deliver. Our consultants boast a wealth of industry experience and are accredited to deliver ITIL v2 and v3 training.

WARDOWN CONSULTING

Qualifi cations and accreditations

Station House, Stamford New Road, Altrincham, Cheshire, WA14 1EP T: 0161 942 2121 F: 0161 941 4873 W: www.aimacademy.com C: Paul Flanagan E: paul.fl [email protected] Academy specialises in accredited training in: Prince2, ITIL, APMP, MSP.

We are committed to offering the highest quality end to end service with courses delivered by experienced practitioners. Whatever your needs we can make your learning enjoyable and successful.

AIM ACADEMY

To advertise here contact

Grant Farrell on +44 (0) 208 316 8002


vital-mag.net

Atlantic House, Imperial Way, Reading. RG2 0TD

T: + 44 (0) 118 903 6824 F: + 44 (0) 118 903 6282 W: www.pinkelephant.com C: Frances Fenn E: [email protected]

Acknowledged worldwide as niche, independent, IT Service Management Education and Consulting providers. Having trained more people than any other company in ITIL related subjects since 1987, we have contributed to all 3 versions of the ITIL books.

PINK ELEPHANT

British Computer Society (ISEB)...26

Dell ..........................................19

eGain ....................................... 47

EMC ........................................23

Frontrange Solutions ..............13

Ibertek .....................................29

ICCM ........................................21

iCore ........................................41

Infra .........................................09

itSMF .......................................66

Marval Software .....................53

Pink Elephant ..........................68

PTS Consulting ........................35

Servigistics ..............................04

Subscription Ad ......................06

Verint Systems ........................02

Wardown Consulting ............. 31

Advertiser index

Block D, North Star House, North Star Avenue, Swindon. SN2 1FA T: +44 (0) 1793 417530 F: +44 (0) 1793 417570 W: www.iseb-exams.com C: Stephen Daniels E: [email protected]

ISEB is a worldwide IT exam body. ISEB have provided 165,000 exams in the last 3 years to IT Professionals worldwide, covering eight major subject areas including ITIL, Software Testing, Business Analysis, Project Management, Systems Development and IT Law.

ISEB


66


ItSMF Conference/Exhibition 2007

IN ITS 16th year the itSMF annual conference in Brighton is celebrating a revolution in the

IT Infrastructure Library. Version 3 of ITIL® was released in May documenting the major steps forward in best practice in Service Management, and the itSMF conference will refl ect the popularity of ITIL, and showcase the achievements of its members.

Keith Aldis, itSMF Chief Executive said: “ITIL has grown enormously in popularity over the last ten years since the previous version of the ITIL was released. If you think about the huge changes in technology and the way Service Management best practise has been adopted across the IT industry you can see how important it was for ITIL to be brought up to date. The most signifi cant aspect is that the fi ve core books have for the fi rst time been linked together around a business life cycle approach. With a past focus on technology this was something that was clearly missing before.”

Talking about the conference and exhibition Keith said, “This is a major opportunity for

people to hear about real examples of how ITIL is being used in Service Management, and to speak with other people who have implemented it. Alongside the conference we also have the exhibition which allows our visitors to meet with technology and service providers of exceptional products and services in this arena.”

The conference programme includes over 60 presentations and the streams focused on this year are:

War StoriesThe ‘real life’ adventures of itSMF members trying to implement ITIL® based processes into their organisation.

People and CultureGood practice tells us to consider Process, Partners, Product and People as part of our implementation – learn how to overcome cultural issues like resistance to change and more.

Public SectorAdapting and adopting ITIL® in the unique culture of public funded bodies provides is own special challenges – hear from central and local government, emergency services, health, education, government agency and the military.

Standards and GovernanceISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 27001, CMMI, CobIT, Sarbanes/Oxley – learn how organisations are using the myriad of international standards, rules and guidelines to drive businesses and their IT departments.

ITIL® V3This stream will cover the theory, adoption and qualification elements of the ITIL® v3. We intend to invite people to speak in this stream and repeat the content during the conference.

SolutionsMore interactive sessions offer a chance for our vendor members (or users who are brave enough) to showcase proven ‘solutions’. Not just the ‘war story’ but a more comprehensive account of combining process, people, tools and partners to deliver quantifi able benefi ts to an organisation.

2007 Exhibition Alongside the conference there will be the UK’s only IT Service Management exhibition. Always very popular with technology and service providers, the 2007 exhibition presents the largest number of IT Service Management under one roof – over 80 – that will cover all the most innovative and exciting products and services targeting this industry sector. All the well known names in IT Service Management will be attending including; a&o systems + services, AlarmPoint, Axios, Computacenter, Fox IT, Hornbill, IBM, Marval Group, Partners in IT, Quest Software SKS Solutions and Touchpaper as well as up and coming suppliers to the market.

The itSMF Awards will take place at the gala dinner on Tuesday 13th November.

To download a PDF of the 2007 Conference Programme visit - www.itsmf.com/conference/index.asp” itSMF Conference

For visitors attending please register at: www.itsmf.com/conference/index.asp

An opportunity for Service Management professionals to meet and learn

Keith Aldis, itSMF Chief

Executive

Tel: +44 (0) 118 918 6500

Fax: +44 (0) 118 969 9749

Or visit our website

www.itsmf.co.uk

The only internationally recognised and independent organisation dedicated to IT Service Management. It is a non-profi t-making organisation wholly owned and principally operated by the members.

itSMF is global with chapters around the world, giving members access to a network of industry experts and peers all ready to exchange ideas and experiences to avoid duplicating mistakes and improve service management.

Regular regional meetings and an Annual Conference & Exhibition plus web-based facilities combine to provide a rich and rewarding learning experience. Plus there are huge savings to be made when purchasing best practice materials.

The itSMF benefi ts IT service professionals at all levels within an organisation. It provides the latest industry information, facilitates knowledge sharing and helps members during every phase of the IT

helping develop & promote best practice & standards in IT Service Management

743 - advert (vital).indd 1 13/8/07 15:50:41

If you’re looking to take advantage of the latest developments in ITIL® – especially with thelaunch of ITIL version 3 – you need to work with a provider with experience. One that’s at theforefront of ITIL’s evolution.

ITIL V3 Courses Launched - Book Now!Call +44 (0) 1189 036823/824Email [email protected] www.pinkelephant.com

Pink Elephant – Leading the way in IT Service Management Best Practices

© Pink Elephant Inc., 2007. The contents of this brochure are protected by copyright and cannot be reproduced in any manner. Pink Elephant and its logo, PinkVerify, PinkScan, ATLAS, PinkSelect, and PinkReady are eithertrademarks or registered trademarks of Pink Elephant Inc. ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

From ITIL’s inception, Pink Elephant has been involved,contributing substantially to the original and version 2 booksets, and authoring one of the five new core texts in version 3,Continual Service Improvement. So we know ITIL inside out.

And whether you’re new to ITIL, are taking your skills furtheror want to find out what’s new, we lead the way in offeringthe widest choice of courses – as we always have done. Wewere the very first in the UK to offer the original ITILFoundation course and Practitioner courses. And we co-wrote and delivered the very first IT Service Managerscourse with the Civil Service College.

We’re committed to the highest standards of training. Ourlecturers are of the highest calibre. Not only do they holdfull ITIL certification, they are all formally accredited by theexamination institutes and complete our rigorous internal‘Train the Trainer’ Programme to keep their skills sharp.

Talk to the experts.Whatever your ITIL requirements, Pink Elephant can help.Whether you want information or advice on ITIL version 3,guidance on implementing an IT service managementphilosophy, or to find out more about our existing and newcourses – including COBIT Foundations, SAM Essentials andISO/IEC 20000 Essentials – just get in touch.

We know ITIL inside-out

®

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VitAL Magazine - September 2007

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