Reusable Software Framework on ITIL

Satyajeet D. Pangu, Wipro Technologies, Plot No. 72, Keonics Electronics City, Hosur Main Road, Bangalore 560 100, India 00-91-80- 51381748 satyajeet.pangu@wipro.com Abstract- This white paper provides brief overview about ITIL standards and framework which is becoming a popular standard for high quality IT services. It highlights importance of ITIL for organizations and IT service providers. It highlights existing Wipro practice and keeping futuristic view in mind proposes a reusable software framework to enhance the practice for the benefit of Wipro as IT service provider and the organizations implementing these standards. 1. Introduction Organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This leads to an increased requirement for high quality IT services. ITIL provides the foundation for quality IT Service Management. The widespread adoption of the ITIL guidance has encouraged organizations worldwide, to develop supporting products and re-think on processes to bring them in line with 'ITIL Philosophy'. ITIL standards are of importance to IT directors, business staff, both managers and dayto-day customers, or end users involved in building good relationships with their IT service providers. Software developers, maintainers and testers also need to be aware of IT service management requirements, so that they can understand their relationship with IT service managers, and ensure that requirements are incorporated into new and revised products and services from the outset. The guidance is useful to any size of organization, in both the public and private sectors. 2. about ITIL What is ITIL? ITIL is the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT Service Management. Used by many hundreds of organizations around the world, a whole ITIL philosophy has grown up around the guidance contained within the ITIL books. Conceived in the 1980's, it was originally developed to improve IT service management within the UK Government, however it has become relevant to all organizations in Public or Private sector.

What is ITSM? Normally, in any company, the internal IT department provides all the IT services and the supporting infrastructure. The term 'IT Infrastructure' is used to describe the hardware, software, computer related communications, procedures, documents and skills used to support the IT services. All this has to be managed, hence the term 'IT Infrastructure Management'. The management of the IT Infrastructure is referred to as IT Service Management. Commonly the term IT service delivery and IT system management are also used to describe the same. ITIL standards in brief ITIL, which is documented in a set of books, demonstrates an integrated process based best practice framework for managing IT Services. These books are comprehensive and consist of guidance on the provision of quality IT services, and on the accommodation and environmental facilities needed to support IT. ITIL has been developed in recognition of organizations' growing dependency on IT, and embodies best practices for IT Service Management. These eight books are: 1 Service Support 2 Service Delivery 3 Planning to Implement Service Management 4 ICT Infrastructure Management 5 Security Management 6 Application Management 7 The Business Perspective 8 Software Asset Management Service Support and Service Delivery describe key processes IT organizations must have in place to provide quality IT services for its customers. Service Support reviews a function and the operational processes. Service Delivery reviews the tactical processes.
Service Support:

It deals with identifying and recording components that can provide stability and flexibility for IT services e.g. IT configuration items, incidents, problems and changes. It covers the following function and processes: Service Desk (Function) - The Service Desk's objective is to provide a single point contact between users and the IT service organization. ITIL provides guidance about creating and operating a Service Desk to provide an efficient channel of communication between the user community and the IT provider. Incident Management - The Incident Management process aims to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations. This ensures that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.

Problem Management - The process of Problem Management diagnoses the underlying cause of the incidents identified by the Service Desk. It arranges for correcting errors in the IT infrastructure and performs proactive problem prevention. Change Management - The Change Management process ensures that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, to minimize the impact of change related incidents on service quality. Consequently, change management aims to improve the day-today operation of the organization. Release Management - Good resource planning and management are essential to package and distribute a release successfully to the customer. Release Management takes a holistic view of an IT service change to ensure that all aspects of a release, technical and non-technical are considered together. Configuration Management - Configuration Management provides a logical model of the infrastructure or a service by identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the Configuration Items in existence.
Service Delivery:

This covers the processes necessary to deliver quality cost effective IT services. Following are the function and processes: Availability Management Its Goal is to optimize IT infrastructure capability, its services and the supporting organization. This results in a cost effective, sustained level of service availability that enables the business to meet its objectives. Capacity Management - Enables an organization to manage resources in times of crisis and predict the need for additional capacity in advance. It describes the procedures necessary for planning, implementing and running this process. IT Service Continuity Management - Describes managing an organizations ability to continue providing a pre-determined level of IT service, following an interruption to the business. This may range from an application or system failure, to a complete loss of the business premises. Service Level Management's Its goal is to maintain and improve IT service quality through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting IT service achievements. Service Level Management instigates actions to eradicate poor service and allow a stronger relationship to develop between IT and its customers. Financial Management for IT Services - Is the sound stewardship of the organizations monetary resources and supports the enterprise in planning and executing its business objectives. Within an IT organization this process is visible in three main areas: Budgeting, IT accounting and charging. Security Management - This covers security from the service provider standpoint and identifies how security management relates to the IT Security Officer. Software Asset Management- Software is one of the most critical elements of information and communications technologies and most organizations have huge investments in software, whether internally developed or externally procured. However organizations often do not invest commensurate effort into managing these software assets. This guide has been developed to assist with understanding what Software Asset Management (SAM) is and to explain what is required to perform it effectively and efficiently as identified in industry 'best practice'.

Planning to implement Service Management- This answers the question Where do I start

with ITIL? It explains the steps necessary to identify how an organization might expect to benefit from ITIL and how to set about reaping those benefits. It will help organizations in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to develop the former and overcome the latter. ICT Infrastructure Management- ICT Infrastructure Management is concerned with the processes, organization and tools needed to provide a stable IT and communications infrastructure, and is the foundation for ITIL service management processes. The book covers Design and Planning, Deployment, Operations, and Technical Support. Application Management- Application Management provides an outline of the Application Management lifecycle and is a guide for business users, developers and service managers of how applications can be managed from a service management perspective. Application Management positions service management at the heart of the provision of information services to the business. Based on this perspective, applications should be managed throughout their lifecycle with the business objectives in mind. The Business Perspective- This book is concerned with helping business managers to understand IT service provision. Issues covered include Business Relationship Management, Partnerships and Outsourcing, Continuous improvement and exploitation of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) for business advantage. Importance of ITIL/ITSM Wipro Technologies and other Indian IT organizations are growing not only as a software developer, but also as an IT Infrastructure service provider/Service Delivery Centre. Lot of companies are remotely managing the infrastructure of various other companies across the globe as on today. ITIL standards help the company's IT department achieve three fundamental goals: Achieve customer satisfaction Exceed customer expectations and Manage customer perceptions.

Application of ITIL best practice in their day-to-day work will ensure the quality of service provided is high. It is important today that organizations should achieve successful business with low cost and high quality. Since in India the labor is pretty cheap compared to other countries, a lot of companies are setting up offices here to provide remote management services. But quality is the key factor, which decides the successful one among the huge number of companies, and applying ITIL best practices itself is an indication of seriousness of the business they are in. ITIL practice advantages are: It is inline to People, processes, and infrastructure A cookbook for IT service provision Modular implementation Best practices approach rather than reinventing the wheel Public ware ISO9002 certification for IT

Used by over 10,000 large industry-leading companies The organization will become more competitive, reducing the risk, cost and time to market new products and services, whilst improving value for money and service quality. Service providers will become more responsive, with services that are business lead rather than technology driven. The ability to manage suppliers more effectively. It will provide enablers to visibly support the business strategy, with opportunities to improve the efficiency of services in all areas, impacting on costs and service. An operational benefit is to clearly demonstrate service reliability and consistency, which in any environment is critical to business survival and potential growth.

3. Wipro practice: Globally Wipro Technologies is developing as global delivery centre. Integration of ITIL best practices in the day to day activities for service delivery indicates not only professionalism, but also have customer oriented approach, structured support mechanism in place, justifiable costs and adherence to Service level agreements. Wipro is rich in quality portfolio as follows: Quality portfolio of Wipro Technologies

ITIL is already adopted by Wipro Technologies as quality framework for Service Management and so the proposed software framework for ITIL can boost this practice. It will help and support to enhance consultancy in this area along with delivering a robust framework to achieve more business gains and win long term relationship with customer. 4. Recommended software framework for ITIL Philosophy behind the software framework: There are many tools that can play a role for individual processes and functions defended in ITIL standards or books. Many organizations are using lot of ad-hoc tools already to carry out underlined processes and functions e.g. call logging systems, configuration management systems, IVR based helpdesks etc., however often those tools are not based on models described in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices for achieving ITSM. The proposed software framework is loosely coupled open standards based framework and is designed based on ITIL documentations so can help organizations to quickly customize their process and align them to ITIL standards using existing tools. Another advantage of using this framework is it can link the interdependency of individual tools e.g. Change Management tools, Configuration Management tools and Release Management tools. To achieve this we have adopted following ITIL Philosophy while developing the framework. The processes break down into three distinct areas Strategic Strategic processes involve setting policies and procedures, and forming architectural controls and committees to help the organization achieve its long-term goals. Tactical Tactical processes are those involved in actual service delivery, including service level management, which is one of the keys to proper ITSM. Service level management requires that IT understand business requirements and negotiate for levels of IT service that match those requirements, using measurements including service availability, capacity and cost. Operational Together, the three describe how to manage the relationship between IT and its business users. The proposed software framework is designed keeping above philosophy in mind and is based on eight books in the series that guide through the Planning, Delivery and Management of quality IT services. All ITIL standards can be integrated in below indicated suites/modules:

Additionally Proposed framework also can provide following three suites to cater implementation of ITIL.
Vendor Management Suit

Vendor Management suit could help large size organizations to manage multi vendor service environment. Managing Multi vendor services is a tough task these days because of different SLAs and Varity of services provided. Vendor management suit will help to manage inconsistent SLAs. Along with that it will help organizations to monitor vendor service, vendor resources etc. It can help Organizations to create effective Team Structures to handle crises situations, high tension situations e.g. Web Cast to large audience or publishing an important announcement on web site where in you can expect maximum hits and increase in load on application.
Risk Management

To handle increased business impact of IT operations failures and the need to embed proactive risk management.
Service Administration

Service Administration along with vendor management could be a useful suite to facilitate Administration of ITIL implementation in organization. Through Service administration organizations can administrate vendors, assets, users and roles.
ITIL consultancy suit:

This suite is specially designed to facilitate IT consultancy and help IT service provider to implement ITIL standards. 1) Inventory of existing IT processes Structured questionnaires Recording interviews and discussions Search Navigator In-built database and repository of industry best practices of ITIL 2) Effective Reporting for continues monitoring and gap analysis.

As all the modules designed based on open standards it can be integrated with portal solutions to provide one single point of access for all. Portal framework for ITIL Following diagram demonstrates one such solution using Microsoft share point portal server 2003.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is a secure, scalable, enterprise portal server built upon Windows SharePoint Services that you can use to aggregate SharePoint sites, information, and applications in your organization into a single, easy-to-use portal. In addition to the features of Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes the following features: News and Topics

My Site, with personal and public views Information targeted to specific audiences Powerful indexing and searching across file shares, Web servers, secure Web servers, Exchange Public Folders, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint sites Alerts that notify you when changes are made to relevant information, documents, or applications Single sign-on for enterprise application integration Integration with other Microsoft products.

5. Business value addition of software framework on ITIL Benefits of software framework with ITIL:

Best practices

This framework is built on top of ITIL and so it leverages best practices described in ITIL framework to help organizations to manage operations.
Designing IT services

The proposed software framework can help organizations to design IT services "better" for operability, help them improve the manageability of the technologies involved, improve service delivery with less risks.
Fewer Overall Incidents

by thoroughly assessing the impact of a change to the infrastructure via Change Management and Configuration Management before taking action, support incidents driven by the change can be reduced.
More Efficient Business Operations

Fewer support incidents means users are more productive and the business is more profitable.
A More Effective IT Operation

thorough checks mean that the IT organization makes effective, well-considered decisions and doesn't spend its time undoing ill-informed decisions and/or mopping up unforeseen consequences. The resolution of more support incidents at the Service Desk puts higher-level IT resources on a proactive footing and gives them time to focus on strategic efforts.
Reduced Support Costs

fewer support incidents and the resolution of more incidents at the Service Desk radically reduce the support budget.
Satisfied Users

a reduced need for support and the availability of highly effective support when needed makes for a far more contented user base.
Better Understanding of User Needs

The Change Management process, using the Service Desk as a sourcing mechanism,

provides IT with real insight into the evolving needs of the user community it serves, and provides a means to act on these needs in a structured, logical manner.
Better Resolution Rates at the Service Desk

when knowledge transfer to the Service Desk happens as part of the Release Management process, the Service Desk receives the tools and knowledge it needs to resolve user requests for support.
Cater to any size of organization Very useful for multi vendor management

As suggested in software framework section Vendor Management module could help large size organization to manage multi vendor service environment along with managing SLAs, monitor vendor service, vendor resources etc.
Boost to consultancy practice and long-term benefit

This framework would boost Wipro Technologies ITIL consultancy practice and provide long-term benefit in two ways: a) Consultancy suite proposed in the framework could help to consolidate the data and come up with steps by step approach along with various reports like Gap analysis. Because of plug and play nature this suite with framework could be made independent of rest of the modules as an application and deploy on laptops as a handy tool for consultants. b) It would be a long term benefit to Wipro Technologies to sell implementation of this framework along with consultancy because it would possible to win long-term relationship with client. c) We can leverage this framework in Wipro projects to improve the manageability of the technologies involved, improve service delivery with fewer risks. 6. Conclusion ITIL standards are becoming increasingly popular among organizations to achieve excellence in IT services because of its comprehensive nature. Considering that there is a huge need of ITIL consultancy and framework to implement this. Wipro Technology is already running ITIL practice to cater huge need of consultancy. Introduction of reusable software framework on top of ITIL standards would help consultants to implement the strategy effectively. Not only this, reusable software framework can customize quickly existing ad-hoc applications to follow ITIL standards. Reusable framework also provides its own modules to cater ITIL standards. This would benefit organizations in all sectors to track IT services and manage multiple vendors. Implementation of ITIL software framework can win new relationships and improve existing client relationships. References [1] Paul Desmond, IT Service Management: It's About the Customer, ZDNet UK. July 8,2003 [2] Christopher Ciccolini & Michael McDermott, Leveraging the ITIL Service Support Framework Part I & II, ZDNet UK. May 14, 2004

[3] Rick Leopoldi, Leveraging ITSM in a Multi-Vendor Outsourced Enterprise, ZDNet UK. September 13, 2004 [4] Pankaja Acharya, frequently asked questions related to ITSM & ITIL , www.softwaredioxide.com. [5] Pankaja Acharya, frequently asked questions related to ITSM & ITIL found answered on softwaredioxide website, www.softwaredioxide.com. [6] Top 10 Benefits of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and other related material found on Microsoft website, www.microsoft.com.