lesson-16-technology-considerations.pdf

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Lesson 16 Study Guide d

The ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management

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Welcome to the sixteenth chapter of your Study Guide. This document is supplementary to the information available to you online, and should be used in conjunction with the videos, quizzes and exercises.

After your subscription to the course has finished online, you will still have the Study Guide to help you prepare for your exam - if youve not taken the exam by the time your subscription expires.

Youll download a Study Guide at the end of most Lessons as you progress through the course.

This Chapter contains the Study Guide information for Lesson 16 Technology Considerations.

Use this Study Guide in conjunction with your own notes that you make as you progress through the course. You may prefer to print the Study Guides out, or use them on-screen.

After each Lesson, you can consolidate what you have learnt whilst watching the videos and taking the quizzes by reading through the chapter of the Study Guide.

If you progress on to the formal exam, your Study Guide will provide you with vital revision information.

Remember, your Study Guide is yours to keep, even after your subscription to the course has finished.

Technology Considerations





Study Guide Icons 3

Lesson Contents 4

Automation 5

Planning for Automation 7

Service Analytics and Instrumentation 8

Table of Contents





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.

Definition key concept or term that you need to understand and remember.

Role a job title or responsibility associated with a process or function.

Exercise Solution suggested solution to one of the exercises you will complete throughout the course.

Goal or Objective for a particular process or core volume.

Study Guide Icons





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.

Lesson Contents





Automation can significantly improve the performance of service assets such as management, organization, people, process, knowledge and information.

Applications are automated themselves, but their performance can also be improved when they are shared between people and process assets.

Advances in areas such as artificial intelligence have increased the capabilities of software based service agents to manage tasks and interactions without human intervention.

Automation can improve the utility and warranty of services you can see some examples of improvements below:

Automated resources can have their capacity adjusted easily Automated resources dont need human intervention so can be available across time

zones or service hours Automated systems can be measured and improved Computers can optimize services and processes in ways that humans could not Automation can capture knowledge about a process, and share it more easily

Used carefully, automation of service processes will deliver these benefits:

Improved service quality Reduced costs Reduced risks Reduced complexity and uncertainty

These service management areas will all benefit from automation:

Design and modeling service Catalogue Pattern recognition and analysis Classification, prioritization and routing Detection and monitoring Optimization

Automation





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.

Service Strategy fig. 7.2 Degrading effect of variation in service processes Crown copyright 2011. Reproduced under license from OGC

Individual performance can vary due to knowledge, skills, experience, workload and motivation. Automation removes variation, leading to more consistent level of service quality.





Automation should not be applied without careful planning. There are 4 steps to be considered when preparing for automation.

Simplify Processes Before Automation

Simplification on its own can reduce variation, and should not adversely affect the process outcome.

However, removal of necessary information or tasks will make the process less useful.

As a general rule, simplify as far as possible without negative effect, and then automate from this point.

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.

Reduce Contact with Underlying Systems and Processes

In selfservice situations, try and reduce the amount of contact users have with underlying systems and processes.

We need to try and present our customers with simple options, so that they can easily present demand and extract utility.

Dont Automate Complex or Non-Routine Tasks

Organizations should never rush to automate tasks and interactions if they are complex or not routine.

Automation is of benefit to high volume, low complexity processes. Some of our processes are too complex, or not mature enough to be automated.

Planning for Automation





Service Analytics

A technique used in the assessment of the business impact of incidents. Service analytics models the dependencies between configuration items, and the dependencies of IT services on configuration items

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:

How does this incident affect the service? How is the business affected? How do we respond?

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.

Service Analytics and Instrumentation





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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