ITIL Service Operation - Tips For Managing Your Service Operation

Achieving balance in Service Operation

Managing an effective Service Operation is tricky in nature. Service Operation is orientated around tasks that  monitor and manage the various functions within an IT Services Organization, and in these challenging financial times - this is not an easy feat.

As various functions are formed and built primarily to work for different purposes and processes within the company, it is now the Service Operation primary goal to efficiently work out a scheme that helps in successfully delivering their goals without nagitvely impacting the quality of IT Service delivered to the business.

ITIL Service Operation provides us with core guidance in how to set about the planning, coordination and management of complex, multi-regional and diverse systems and services. ITIL Version 3 Design Guidelines are available to help. What's paramount is achieving a healthy balance across cost, time, effort and results achieved.

IT View V’s External Business View

It has been a struggle over time, on which view to choose when it comes to weighing up the importance of the business’ IT infrastructure. It’s always been a battle between what the customers require and what the business owners think is really necessary.

The conflict between the external and the internal view of IT has long been a struggle throughout the evolution of IT Service Organisations.

As customers point out the importance of IT as a set of services (external view) and the business owners scrutinize the importance of IT and their components (internal view), the intelligent IT Service Provider must find rapid and effective ways of understanding the gaps and closing them.

Most companies try to choose one mode of view, while ideally; there should be a semblance of balance within the two to assure a thriving relationship between customers and service owners.

 
Here’s a quick look at the different modes of the two views:

 
 Primry Focus

 
-         extreme internal focus

 The primary focus of a business with an extreme internal focus on their IT technology has little regard to the quality of their services; however they are very thorough with their IT components and internal processes.

-         extreme external focus

The primary focus of a business with an extreme external focus on their IT technology usually has a great service performance but it doesn’t really care on how they’ll achieve such feat.

Metrics

-         extreme internal focus

The metrics usually used with this kind of view focuses heavily on the internal processes of the organization with little regard on how it applies on their service performance.

 
-         extreme external focus

 
The metrics usually used with this kind of view focuses heavily on the external processes of the organization without providing any tips on how to improve such faults.

 
The IT staff usually gathers their own mode of measurement for their internal processes.

 
Customer/user experience

 
-         extreme internal focus

 
The customer experiences a high consistency of deliveries; however the services delivered are less of what is expected from the company.

 
This view uses a push approach, in terms of service delivery.

 
-         extreme external focus

 
The customer experiences a poor consistency of deliveries, and because of their chosen reactive mode of service delivery only a few services are delivered to its users.

 
Operations Strategy

 
-         extreme internal focus

This view uses a standard operation across the board and all of the services should be able to fit the present architecture.

 
-         extreme external focus

This view uses multiple delivery and processes.

Procedures and manuals

 

-         extreme internal focus

 

The procedures and manuals for this kind of view usually focuses on how to manage the IT infrastructure, however without the correlation of the technology to service deliveries.

 

-         extreme external focus

 

The procedures and manuals for this kind of view usually focuses on what should be done, however failing to describe how it should come into realization.

 

Cost strategy

 

-         extreme internal focus

 

The cost reduction for this view is usually done through consolidation of technology and optimization of operational procedures.

 

The business impact of such cost reduction would only be realized later.

 

-         extreme external focus

 

Budget is usually reserved for those business units that are most in need, and those who fail to address their needs are left with little or no financial aid.

 

 

Training

 

-         extreme internal focus

 

In this view, training is done as apprentices, where they are shown how things should be done without imparting with them the reason why.

 

-         extreme external focus

 

In this view, training is done per project, as technology is viewed as ever changing.

 

Operations Staff

 
-         extreme internal focus

 
In this view, the staff is trained on various skill set and they are led to believe that good technical achievement is similar to good customer service.

 

-         extreme external focus

 

In this view, the organization is filled with generalized staff that is organized based on their technical capability and they often encounter problems as they suffer from poor management of internal processes.