Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Technology Considerations
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Table of Contents
Lesson Contents
Automation
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Watch out for these icons as you use your Study Guide. Each icon highlights an important
piece of information.
Tip this will remind you of something you need to take note of, or give
you some exam guidance.
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Lesson Contents
This Lesson looked at some of the high level technology considerations for
service management. Automation can makes processes much more efficient,
and remove the possibility of human error.
Text in "italics and quotation marks" is drawn from the ITIL core volumes
Quoted ITIL text is from Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation
and Continual Service Improvement
Crown copyright 2011 Reproduced under license from OGC.
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Automation
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Customer interactions with an automated Service Catalogue are a good example of automation
in action. The customers can easily order the services they need, and demand can be reported.
For this to be effective, customers need to be presented with simple options, not complex
views of the service assets that meet their needs. Customers need to be able to choose the
services they want in a flexible way.
Routine service requests can also be automated. These will be identified, classified and routed
to automated units or self-service options, such as a web page to request access to software.
Again, this cannot be offered without an understanding of customer requirements and the
patterns of business activity.
The graph below shows that variation in performance can cause degradation in service quality.
Individual performance can vary due to knowledge, skills, experience, workload and motivation.
Automation removes variation, leading to more consistent level of service quality.
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Clarify Processes
Clarification of the process should also be carried out before automation, including process
activities, tasks and interaction and inputs.
Automate, clarify, test, modify and then automate again, being sure to involve all process
agents and stakeholders.
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Service
Analytics
Organizations collect data and information. This needs to be placed into a context of patterns
and implications to become knowledge. These patterns can give a level of reliability and
predictability about how data will change over time.
Service Analytics involves both analysis to produce knowledge and synthesis to provide
understanding. By carrying out analysis and synthesis, we can answer questions such as:
To understand anything, we must put it into context. Service analytics involves analysis to
produce knowledge and synthesis to produce understanding.
This is fitted into the Data Information Knowledge Wisdom we studied during Service
Transition.
Data does not answer questions, but it is a vital resource and input. Most organizations have
data capabilities in the form of instrumentation. Instrumentation describes the technologies
and techniques for measuring infrastructure elements.
Instrumentation - such as a monitoring tool - reports actual or potential problems and provides
feedback after adjustments or corrective action.
Most organizations already have monitoring tools or an instrumentation base in place, carrying
out monitoring.
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Data from measuring components is vital, but is not enough to monitor services. A services
behavior is based on the combined behavior of all of its supporting elements. Context is
needed to bring all the raw data about service components together.
Information answers Who, What, When and Where questions supporting Event, Fault and
Performance Management.
The Event Management function based in Service Operation refines data to identify what needs
further investigation or intervention. The goal of both instrumentation and Event Management
is to create usable and actionable information.
Faults
A fault is an abnormal condition requiring action or repair, while an error is a single event.
A fault is often indicated by excessive errors. Faults can results from threshold violations such
as Capacity increases, or a state change.
Performance is a measure of how well something is working. Operations groups often start
with fault management. Over time, as they mature and become more proactive, the focus
changes to performance management.
Fault management systems often show topology maps with colored indicators green to red
for a fault, for example. Further context is needed to transform this from information to
knowledge for complex systems.
Service Analytics is useful to model infrastructure and support services to business services.
The model is built on dependencies, not topology. This Component to System to Process link
is called a Service Model, and allows a clear understanding of the business impact of an event.
With effective service analytics, operations groups can identify and correct problems more
effectively, as well as predicting the impact of changes to the infrastructure environment.
This model can also be used to show demand for IT services, providing a high leverage point
when building a dynamic provisioning or on demand environment.
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