Learning Log 6

ITIL

Honestly, I am not that familiar with this framework, thus I am grateful since in MIS, one of our subjects is Service Management Processes, and fortunately we had our professor who had a wide experience in this field. In addition to my wrong impression on this subject which, I thought it’s limited only to business process outsourcing, I noted that though the framework is a straightforward set of guidelines, it can be tailored and successfully implemented even in the most complex environments.

The key to this success is stripping out the complexity of the environment by prioritizing a small but critical number of focus areas or termed as core areas of the business, establishing a clear and consistent technology across the environment, and ensuring the right performance information is available from the outset. This is to ensure that the stakeholders have the right and timely information in every decision. Moreover, by recognizing and addressing the problems of service management in the real world, every organization can use ITIL to make a real difference.

Learning Log 5

How IT service delivery and availability related to disaster recovery?

Nowadays, every organization is heavily reliant to the use of Information Technology (IT). However, it is inevitable that bad things could happen to good information systems. That is how life is; everything is moving along swimmingly and then, nothing is moving at all. It is impossible to prevent all bad things from happening; all that can be done is to devise ways to rebound when they do occur. Some organizations are content to wait until something goes wrong before figuring out what to do. This may be fine for small businesses with little information, long lead times for their transactions and extensive insurance policies. Any organization with a lot of data in use all of the time and that must be available shortly following a disruption must plan for recovery in advance of the aforementioned bad things.

I just remember one of the topics in Organizational Management, wherein fortunately, I was given the opportunity to discussed business continuity, made me realized that without business continuity management, organizations especially those who are heavily reliant to IT will definitely have issues on providing efficient and effective service.

If it were only clear which bad things were going to happen, this would all be much easier. But it is in the nature of bad things not to let on; that is one of the things that make them bad. This necessitates planning for many more bad things than actually will occur and probably in a greater degree of detail than will be necessary at the time. But to quote former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The plan is nothing. Planning is everything.”1 In information systems terms, Eisenhower’s dictum means that consideration of needs and acquisition of necessary resources are more important by far than a neatly printed emergency manual. Organizations must devise emergency response plans for the immediate period following an incident, with the emphasis on preserving human life and safety and only secondarily on information resources. A crisis management plan guides management in making and executing decisions to minimize the effect on an organization until operations return to normal. A business continuity plan prepares organizations to carry on vital (and ultimately all) operations under adverse circumstances.

Learning Log 4

The Importance of Information Technology Service Delivery

Admittedly, in our organization in terms of realizing the real value on the use information technology to serve effectively is still in process. However, efforts and actions are currently    on-going to on how to be at par with the current trends and use of information technology to have a more efficient and effective service delivery.

Ideally, every organization especially government agencies should primarily seek to serve its customers or the right term would be the public. And how this could possible? One way is with the proper use of information technology.

To its users in the operations of any business, IT is a tool to perform day-to-day business processes, such as moving funds, receiving goods, selling goods and collecting money, or recruiting an employee. IT pervades all spheres of business activity, enabling communication through e-mail and instant messaging, enhancing teamwork through collaboration tools, facilitating better decision making by delivering a variety of information through many delivery mechanisms, and offering opportunities for newer business models leading to competitive advantage and value creation.

Since information systems are critical to business today, it is essential for IT to be not only secure, but also made available as a service that is responsive to the needs of users. Neither IT nor business is static; changes in either one alter the interface between the two and require a response and resolution. The final delivery of an application to the user involves the correct functioning of a large number of components. The complexities in businesses and the complex nature of many IT environments result in many issues with users’ IT systems that need to be addressed speedily and systematically. As applications attempt to cater to every possible function and business process, the simplicity of usage is often lost, notwithstanding the graphical user interfaces, colors and helps messages.

The complexity also introduces malfunctions and bugs that produce errors or an inability to accomplish objectives. These needs must be addressed if IT is to be an effective tool for the business to achieve its goals. Therefore, IT service delivery is an important aspect of information technology for the business.

 

Learning Log 3

Change Management - Is it for good or for worse?

Change if taken literally, would mean a lot but on a lighter perspective, it is one of the day to day operation service supports in ITIL Service Management Processes. Actually, my first impression with the subject was its more on business process outsourcing wherein their core processes is on the service delivery management. However, I realized that how our agency and the financial institutions we supervised find the ITIL framework very useful. They were to improve their services at the same time able to formulate long-term plans to improve more, which I think could really be part of the change management process of every organization.

Why there is a need to change?  Probably it is part of the standard or routine changes or a proposed solution to address errors for the business to stabilize and continue. These requests for change would come from suppliers, activities in relation to projects and employees aiming to improve the provision of services. To properly address the changes considering the limited resources (e.g. time and people) every organization should be able to prioritize, categorize and assess the urgency and impact of the request to change. Thus, it boils down the every organization should have an appropriate and comprehensive change management. Since, changes if not properly handled and managed instead of achieving its purpose it may worsen the identified problem/issue.

 

Learning Log 2

Problem? … What a Big Word

In every single minute of our life we encounter problem/s. But as noted by elders, every problem has its own solution, but you just have to figure it out. Some problems can be solve quickly and others even took a lifetime, if your problem is your face. Kidding aside, in the business world, how and when the problems should be answered and solved should measurable and solution should be definite. And if we ask why, it’s because we are dealing with highly demanding customers, and just a minute if we will not be able to respond them it might be the end of our company. 

To address the aggressive demand of our customers (i.e. internal and external), every organization must be able to identify, manage and resolve problems especially those that would affect service quality and efficiency. It even requires an organization to research the problem and be able to have a definite solution. As defined during one of our discussion with Prof. Dela Rosa, problem describes an undesirable, indicating the unknown root cause of one of more existing or potential incidents. Thus, to be able to untangle the unknown at the same time preventing it to happen again, it requires the organization to have a structured and comprehensive process to ensure that problems are properly identified and symptoms are scrutinized deeper to be able to address not only the issue but the root cause of the problem. 

The main difference of problem management from incident management is the former deals more on the detection of the underlying causes of an incident and their subsequent resolution and prevention. Unlike, incident management where the aim is to restore the service to the customer as quickly as possible, often through what we call temporary fixes or work-around, rather than through the determination of a permanent solution. In this respect, therefore the speed with which a resolution is found is only of secondary importance.

The challenge of problem management is it usually involves a thorough investigation which requires ample time and oftentimes results to the delay of the restoration of service, causing downtime and complaints. However, the good side of it is its long-term benefit which is to prevent the problem from recurring again. 

To be able to reap the benefits of having problem management, every organization should have the following at the minimum:

1)       There should be a single problem management process, which is separate and distinct from the incident management process. All problems and their resolutions will be logged in a common problem management system which will be made available to Service Desk/Help Desk as commonly term and Incident Management staff.

2)       There should be clear linkages between Incident records, Problem records, Known Errors and Requests for Change leveraging existing data systems wherever feasible and practical. Additional interfaces will build upon and interface with existing data sources.

3)       There should be a definitive and maintained record of the "Known and trusted state" of the infrastructure

4)       The Problem Management process facilitates Root Cause Analysis on incidents (and incident trends or service failures referred to Problem Management by Service Managers, key technical resources and Client representatives). Analysis on the data collected in the Incident Management System database as well as other sources will undergo periodic trend analyses by Problem Management in close consultation with Incident Management staff.

5)       The Problem Management function is responsible for acting as the service provider for the Knowledge/Known error database and for providing information concerning problems and proposed solutions. Problem Management owns the quality of the knowledge database, and its usability (though they may not responsible for the integrity of the content).

6)       Incidents referred to Problem Management for Root Cause Analysis will have outcomes documented.

7)       The Problem Manager will determine appropriate Metrics to be collected to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the Problem Management process. Performance expectations will be described in Service Catalogue and/or Service Level Agreements.

Service Management - Learning Log 1

Learning Log 1

Incident Management – Every Organization Should Have In Place

I have been to different financial institutions under our (BSP) supervision and most of them have what they call incident management framework/processes and procedures, but only then, in one of our discussions in Service Management, made me truly understand the basic concepts of incident management. Having learned it, poses me challenges that I should be able evaluate the processes and procedures every organizations we visited and be able to recommend improvements in order to provide value to their organization.

For most organization in the Philippines, I noted that most of them are far behind how foreign companies especially BPO’s able to manage not only incidents but the total IT Service Delivery Management System (ITSMS). Not because, they are not aware of but probably on the type of structure they have. Per observation, most banks face different challenges in managing incidents because of diverse groups of employees, spread of branches in terms geographic location wherein online resolution is oftentimes not possible and problems in terms of integrating various legacy and third party vendor systems/applications. Also, most of the banks IT help desk lack knowledge base, they only logged reported incidents by issuing ticket number and assigned to appropriate IT unit.  Knowledge base will help ensure that the 1^st line of defense may have technical know-how to address the issue on the onset not waiting to the assigned IT unit to address, which oftentimes, would take a while.

Thus, management is challenged to implement to understand incident management to reduce or even eliminate and lessen the effects of actual or potential disturbance in IT services. This can only happen by implementing appropriate incident management process to ensure that timely resolution of incident may be achieved then accordingly it will improve productivity, meet targeted SLA and consequently the good impact will be reflected the organization’s bottom line.