VitAL Magazine - September 2007 by 31 Media

Inspiration for the modern business Volume 1 : Issue 1 : September / October 2007

itSMF Interview

professional service management

Service â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what customers want what successful businesses offer

ITIL version 3

keeping ITSM true

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youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll learn a lot

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leader

LEADER WELCOME TO A NEW SOURCE OF IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT INFORMATION

John Hancock

IT Service Management is what has made possible the revival of relationship based business practices in recent years.

T’S A new magazine and there is form to follow. First of all I’m going to welcome you to the new publication then I’m going to tell you a little about what value we hope to add for you and tell you something about this issue. Then I’ll cover a couple of generalities, ﬁnally concluding by ‘opening the door’ into our new magazine. There is always a process to take us from the beginning to the end because without a process we would simply wander around doing whatever we saw or was most immediately pressing, probably to the long term detriment of our larger aims. But why am I telling you this when you, dear reader, know as much about process as anybody; it is, after all, the basis of what you do. It’s just to show that we try to think as you think because this magazine is for you. Welcome to VitAL magazine, the fresh new publication for IT Service Management. We’re not here to tell you how to do your job but we are here to bring you the kind of information that will be useful to you. Of course, we have our own ideas of what will be useful and there will be matters of overriding importance out in the market that will, by sheer force of their relevance and importance, have to be included. ITIL v3 is an obvious example of such a topic today and this issue has a number of articles looking at this from different angles or reviewing its value in different applications. But it won’t be all about ITIL v3. We’ll be looking at security, communications, the value of feedback, the importance of SMEs not avoiding technology but rather participating in the opportunities it can create. We will look at the damage poor service can do and the value that good service can create and we will look at change, the one constant in modern management challenges. We also interview Keith Aldis, the new CEO at itSMF (the IT Service Management Forum) about where the profession stands today and the directions it might take in the future. There are very few people in work today whose life has not been affected by the growth of IT capabilities. Not only am I dictating this article to my computer through Dragon software but I also often write notes, including interview notes, using a Logitech digital pen, to avoid the need to retype my words. In truth I couldn’t operate in the way I do without technology

and software which don’t simply perform the old tasks more quickly but actually shape the way my business is structured. And so it is with businesses of all sizes. IT Service Management now sits at the heart of the modern business infrastructure, a front line management discipline subject to the same constraints challenges and opportunities that fill the working day of every other manager in the business. In many ways IT Service Management is what has made possible the revival of relationship based business practices in recent years. In the past most businesses traded on relationships; knowing their customer knowing what that customer liked. Early and less sophisticated applications of IT degraded that relationship basis for business and replaced it with a process or functional basis. This, putting the needs of the business before the needs of the client, gave commerce a very poor name. It also meant that businesses focused far more on value acquisition than on value retention with the result that the public increasingly saw companies as more concerned with selling them something new than with providing them with any kind of service after that first sale – or, at least, until the next sale. It took some time to the penny to drop that the clients you have today are of the greatest value, if only because winning new clients is so expensive. It is the capabilities that IT Service Management brings to the business that have made possible the restoration of relationships at the heart of the business. VitAL will celebrate the profession as a management discipline and not simply in terms of the technology on whose management it is based. We look forward to serving you well in the years ahead and to establishing a relationship with you: a relationship in which we hope that you will tell us what you would like to see covered in the magazine and will even contact me with your ideas for future articles that you could write. Let me not take any more of your time but without further ado invite you to enjoy this, your first issue of VitAL magazine. John Hancock

September / October 2007 : VitAL

Service Has Turned Strategic As global competition intensifies, the service delivered after the initial sale of a product is becoming increasingly strategic to revenue, profitability and customer loyalty. This is driving companies like yours to explore creative ways to transform global service operations and dramatically improve revenue and profitability while efficiently delivering on the service commitments you made to your customers. Leading companies increasingly understand that this can only be achieved through a Strategic Service Management Solution â&#x20AC;&#x201D; one that enables the optimisation, integration and efficient management of their core service business processes which include: management, scheduling and planning of service parts, service technicians and the related pricing of such resources. At Servigistics, we understand the strategic importance of after-sale service and have a proven track record helping Fortune Global 500 companies achieve their service business objectives. If service is strategic to your business, call +44 1454 419191 or visit www.servigistics.com to learn how Servigistics Strategic Service Management Solutions can help you transform your service business.

contents

Contents Inspiration for the modern business

10 NEWS This issue’s news highlights a very novel application of IT, the latest version of a much loved capability and news from the Spam front – they’re back, and this time it’s serious, as if it wasn’t before

24 ORGANISATIONAL & CULTURAL CHANGE CAROLINE WYATT

14 A NEW HAND ON THE TILLER JOHN HANCOCK

Editor John Hancock john.hancock@31media.net Advertising Sales Grant Farrell grant.farrell@31media.net Production & Design Dean Cook dean.cook@31media.net Editorial & Advertising Enquiries 31 Media Limited, Media House, 16 Rippolson Road, London, SE18 1NS Tel: +44 (0) 208 316 7433 Fax: +44 (0) 208 316 5233 email: info@31media.net web: www.vital-mag.net Subscribing to VitAL Magazine VitAL Magazine is published six times per year for directors, department heads, and managers who are looking to improve the impact that IT implementation has on their customers and business. Subscription Rates: UK £30.00 per year Rest of the World £60.00 per year Please direct all subscription enquiries to: subscriptions@31media.net Printed by Pensord, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood. NP12 2YA © 2007 31 Media Limited. All rights reserved. VitAL Magazine is edited, designed, and published by 31 Media Limited. No part of VitAL Magazine may be reproduced, transmitted, stored electronically, distributed, or copied, in whole or part without the prior written consent of the publisher. A reprint service is available. Opinions expressed in this journal do not necessarily reflect those of the editor or VitAL Magazine or its publisher, 31 Media Limited. ISSN 1755-6465

While ITIL® v3 may provide a great set of tools, to get the best from its implementation will require good management processes and vision says Caroline Keith Aldis has only recently taken on the role of CEO at itSMF. How does he ﬁnd the organisation and where does he see it going in the future?

16 IN THE BEGINNING

ROSEMARY GURNEY IT Service Management created a whole new raft of management challenges; ITIL has made it possible to tackle those challenges within a set of universal standards. Rosemary explains how it all came about.

22 IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE, BUT…

DAVID ROBERTSON Too often experts try to explain the beneﬁts of IT to a layperson, through the features; whereas, as David shows, compelling arguments focus on the business

25 NEW STANDARDS FOR CATALOGUE & SERVICE MANAGEMENT

DAVID PERCY The recent launch of ITIL® v3 heralds a change in emphasis, according to David

27 SERVICE MANAGEMENT – THEN AND NOW

JACK ROBERTSON-WORSFOLD ITIL® and Service management have evolved to meet changing needs, as Jack explains

28 ISO/IEC 20000 GETS STRUCTURAL SUPPORT

SHIRLEY LACY Shirley explains one of the practical applications for ITIL® v3

All Images © iStockPhoto.com 2007

SUBSCRIBING TO VITAL MAGAZINE VitAL Magazine is published six times per year for directors, department heads, and managers who are looking to improve the impact that IT implementation has on their customers and business. Subscription Rates: UK £30.00 per year, Rest of the World £60.00 per year Please direct all subscription enquiries to: subscriptions@31media.net

September / October 2007 : VitAL

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contents

Contents 32 THE RICHES OF RELEVANCE YOLANDA NOBLE

44 BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?

STEVE WHITE ITIL® is now commonly quoted in IT Service Management but knowing what it is only useful to a point; knowing also what it does (and how to use it) is what Steve tells us

54 WHO’S CONNECTED? LUKE BROWN

48 IS SERVICE LETTING YOU DOWN? GAVIN HARTLAND

Luke examines how enterprises can apply four techniques to assure network performance, reduce the introduction of new security risks and ensure compliance with industry regulations

Properly targeted campaigns were once the reserve of the large and wealthy corporation but, as Yolanda explains, all that has changed with technology in printing

36 EASY PAYMENTS ARE SMART PAYMENTS

DR GARRY HOMER The boundaries between academia and the world of commerce grow ever more blurred: in fact when they collaborate, great things can happen, as Garry demonstrates

Will customers stay long enough to learn that you don’t care what happens after the sale or, asks Gavin, will dazzling service cement a mutually advantageous relationship?

50 EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION? MARKOS SYMEONIDES

56 MAKING SERVICES PAY

PHILIP SANSOM The traditional break/ﬁx IT services model has had its day but what will replace it? Philip offers a very up to date technology solution for a technology challenge

58 WEB SELF SERVICE

IAN JONES It may be on the web but a retail environment, even a virtual one, as Ian says, still has to set out a stall if visitors are to become customers today and in the future

40 FROM LISTENING COMES WISDOM JAMES HEAVEY

60 A NEW WAY OF WALKING There was nothing wrong with the principles that underpin ITIL but as Mark explains, it needed bringing up to speed with today’s IT Service management environment

52 OFF AND RUNNING Feedback is free management information with the advantage that it reﬂects the customer’s feelings which, as James explains, is what you really need to know

ROBERT STROUD ITIL® version 3 is not just about how to manage the latest kit and software, its about running a business with IT at its heart (an increasingly common situation) as Robert explains

MARK SYKES & RALPH GRAY ITIL® v3 allows more sensitive and ﬂexible service management tools but will vendors be up to the responsibilities or users to the possibilities? Mark and Ralph weigh up the facts

62 IT TRANSFORMED BY ‘Y2K’ HYSTERIA

RICHARD ALTHORP Richard looks at the development of business processes throughout IT and the systems being used to enhance service delivery

September / October 2007 : VitAL

contrbutors

THIS ISSUE’S CONTRIBUTORS Rosemary Gurney

Title Director Company Wardown Consulting Ltd Nature of Business IT Service Management training and consultancy Contact Telephoneephone 01582 488242 Email rosemary.gurney@wardownconsulting.co.uk Website www.wardownconsulting.co.uk

David Robertson

Title Chief Executive Company Bibby Financial Services Nature of Business Business cashflow solutions to SMEs Contact Telephone 0800 91 95 92 Email marketing@bibbyfinancialservices.com Web www.bibbyfinancialservices.com

Caroline Wyatt

Title Services & Marketing Manager Company Pink Elephant Nature of Business ITSM Consulting & Education Contact Telephone 01189 036 822 Email c.wyatt@pinkelephant.com Web www.pinkelephant.com

VitAL : September / October 2007

David Percy

Title Director of Service and Delivery Company Infra Corporation Nature of Business Developer of software Web www.infra.co.uk

Jack RobertsonWorsfold

Title Senior Service Management Consultant Company iCore Ltd Nature of Business Specialist IT management consultancy Contact Telephone 0207 464 8414 Email info@icore-ltd.com Web www.icore-ltd.com

Shirley Lacy

Title Director Company ConnectSphere Nature of Business ITSM consulting and training Contact Telephone 0845 838 2345 Email shirley.lacy@connectsphere.com Web www.connectsphere.com

Yolanda Noble

Title CEO Company dsicmm Limited Nature of Business End to end customer communications Contact Telephone 020 7531 8000 Email JoanneLambertSmith@dsicmmgroup.com Web www.cmm.co.uk / www.dsigroup.com

Dr Garry Homer

Title Director of Technology Company University of Wolverhampton – IT Futures Centre Nature of Business IT Consultancy, Advice, Support, Application-Research Contact Telephone 01902 323396 Email g.homer@wlv.ac.uk Web www.it-futures.com

James Heavey

Title Vice President for CDC Respond Company CDC Software Nature of Business Enterprise feedback management software Contact Telephone 0870 735 8338 Email cdcrespond@cdcsoftware.com Web www.cdcrespond.com

contributors

Steve White

Title KT Resolve Application Manager Company Kepner-Tregoe Inc. Nature of Business Global Consulting and Training Company Contact Telephone 01753 856716 Email swhite@kepner-tregoe.com Web www.kepner-tregoe.com

Gavin Hartland

Title Director of marketing and alliances EMEA Company Servigistics Nature of Business Strategic Service Management software Contact Telephone 01454 419191 Email contactsales@servigistics.com Web www.servigistics.com

Markos Symeonides

Title VP of Business Development Company Axios Systems Nature of Business ITIL based ITSM provider Contact Telephone 0131 220 4748 Email assyst@axiossystems.com Web www.axiossystems.com

Rob Stroud

Title IT service management evangelist Company CA Nature of Business IT management software Contact Telephone 01753 577733 Email Tina.horne@ca.com Web http://ca.com/gb/

Luke Brown

Title VP, Europe, Middle East & Africa Company Lumeta Nature of Business Network Assurance Contact Telephone 020 7194 8040 Email lbrown@lumeta.com Web www.lumeta.com

Phil Sansom

Title Senior Vice President Company Kaseya UK Nature of Business Managed Service Automation Software Provider Contact Telephone 0870 0422360 Email phil.sansom@kaseya.com Web www.kaseya.com

Ian Jones

Title Head of Strategic Solutions Company eGain Communications Ltd Nature of Business Customer Service and Contact Centre Software Contact Telephone 01753 464646 Email ukinfo@egain.com Web www.egain.com

Ralph Gray & Mark Sykes

Title Principal Service Management Consultants Company Fox IT Nature of Business The Authority in Service Management Contact Telephone 01483 221200 Email ralph.gray@foxit.net / mark.sykes@foxit.net Web www.foxit.net

Richard Althorp

Title Managing Director Company e-Warehouse Ltd Nature of Business Independent Vendor of Service Desk Software Email Richard@e-warehouse.com Web www.e-warehouse.com

September / October 2007 : VitAL

news

Bloodstock, paper and spam Winning technology applied to the sport of kings. IT’s not all work

ORSE TRAINERS who have traditionally relied on experience and intuition to gauge the performance of horses will soon be able to apply some of the same methods that sports scientists use to train elite athletes. Gmax Ltd, a new spin out company from technology and product development consultancy Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) was launched in July 2007. It has developed a novel GPS product that will send essential physical, physiological and environmental information about a training workout from horse to trainer, via the internet. Having immediate access to information detailing the work the horse is doing,

its gait, temperature, breathing and the environmental conditions means that trainers and vets will be able to optimise training regimes while at the same time ensuring the horse’s welfare. The monitoring electronics to achieve this are built in to a sleeve that slides over the girth. Real time information is transmitted wirelessly to a trainer’s mobile, PDA or laptop anywhere in the world. Information to help control the workout can also be sent to the jockey via a specially designed wristwatch. Commenting, Mike Cane a director of CDP who has led the development of Gmax said: “Often the difference between ﬁrst and second in a race is fractions of a second, just as it is

in human athletics. Gmax has an important role to play in bringing the principles of sports medicine to thoroughbred racing to maximise a horse’s chances of winning.” “Using detailed information provided by the Gmax system, trainers will be able to implement training schedules that bring a horse progressively to the peak of ﬁtness.” “Current training methods rely heavily on visual assessments coupled with years of experience. While Gmax will never replace good horsemanship, it will provide trainers with objective measurements of training workload and response; replacing guesswork with scientiﬁc evidence and making elite training methods accessible to all.”

SPAM VOLUME REACHES ALL-TIME HIGH AFTER STORM SURGE Spam Storms and botnets; the nuisance gets worse

10th August 2007: After a recent surge in email distributing the Storm Trojan, spam has reached an all time high. According to the Spam Volume Index (SVI) of email and Internet content security provider Marshal, spam has increased by 12 per cent over the past four weeks and now exceeds any previously recorded level. Marshal’s SVI is a representative measure of all the spam monitored and analysed by Marshal’s TRACE Team. Bradley Anstis, Marshal’s Director of Product Management commented, “The overall increase in spam follows an intense period of malicious spam activity, notably the widespread and prolonged distribution of fake greeting cards which contain links to the Storm Trojan, which in turn seeks to establish spambots on compromised hosts. After seeing the huge volume of malicious spam being distributed over the last two months, we were fully expecting spam volumes to increase.” “The increase also coincides with a return of stock spam. Stock spam had dwindled to less than two per cent last week, but this week has jumped back to represent between 15 to 20 per cent of all spam. While stock spam with PDF attachments is on the rise, Marshal’s TRACE team has also identified a return of plain text stock spam. The stock spammers seem to be back in business after a brief vacation,” said Anstis. On August 3, 2007, Marshal reported a surge in ‘attachment spam’ - spam messages containing a PDF, Excel or Zip file attachment. “After an increase from three per cent to 20 per cent of all spam in the first week of August 2007, attachment spam fell away again to almost nothing by the end of the week. However, during this second week of August, it has surged back to represent almost 25 per cent of all spam. The widespread distribution of the Storm Trojan and the significant fluctuations in spam confirms our belief that relatively few spammers, operating vast botnets, are responsible for the bulk of spam sent,” commented Anstis. Botnets are large networks of compromised personal computers that spammers and malicious users can command from a central, controlling server. With the Storm Trojan consisting of an estimated 1.5 million bots, spammers are able to send significantly more spam than ever before “After successfully establishing their botnets, spammers can rapidly and dramatically change the volume, type and composition of spam they send. The degree of control that the spammers have over their botnets is impressive. They can simultaneously command different spam campaigns, such as stock spam in PDF attachments, or Viagra advertised in plain text. Those behind the Storm Trojan control a massive number of computers; therefore can significantly affect the spam landscape overnight. This is one of the main reasons for such significant and rapid changes in spam today,” concluded Anstis.

VitAL : September / October 2007

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news

New request submission designer Sophisticated online forms made simple with

EW FROM ITIL Service Management software developer Infra Corporation is Request Submission Designer, the latest advance in automated online Workﬂow Management. Request Submission Designer makes it easy to create customised submission forms for requests raised through the Customer Portal - the Infra Graphical User Interface means that no programming skills are required. The tool simpliﬁes the process of moving everyday paper based forms (such as New Starter/ Leaver requests) online. The online forms use infraEnterprise

Workﬂow engine to collect and use form data in the automated processing of requests. According to Infra Director David Percy, “The Request Submission Designer makes it easier for the IT department to support efﬁcient working practices throughout the organisation. It might be the HR department trying to organise the laptop, phone and email address for a new member of staff; or the Reprographics department providing 24X7 access to its myriad of services via a Customer Portal. In every case, creating the required request form and linking it to the

Workflow is extremely quick and simple for administrators using this new Infra tool.” With Request Submission Designer, forms are created as part of a Workflow template. The intuitive graphical user interface allows users to import a complete set of fields, or add individual items such as drop down lists, check boxes, radio buttons and images at the click of a mouse. A single submission form can be used with multiple Workflow templates with no limit on the number of fields per form. Infra’s online Workflows enable

customers to initiate service requests more easily. Once created, workﬂows are completely automated, ensuring adherence to best practice processes and that a complete audit trail is maintained for verification and compliance purposes. The ability to assign work automatically improves efficiency and reduces costs by removing the time consuming need for manual monitoring and detailed management of each Workﬂow. Infra also provides out of the box templates to accelerate key processes such as Change and Release Management.

A DOSE OF REALITY Research shows IT management truths

RECENT RESEARCH ﬁndings from a survey, ‘IT Service Management

– is it Worth the Money?’ conducted for Partners in IT (PIIT) illustrate some significant insights into how UK businesses manage their IT systems. The findings highlight that there are some real issues affecting UK businesses that generate a multitude of problems – not least the annual cost to the business as a direct result of poor IT management. The key findings are: • 80% of companies admit that they have a problem with downtime of their IT systems and 38% say that this problem is serious. Breaking out the figures for the large organisations we find that 51% of IT managers believe that downtime is a serious problem in their business. • The average amount of a business manager’s time spent fire fighting equates to 31 full working days per year. • 55% of mid sized businesses feel that their IT set up does not give good value for money. • 77% of business managers in mid sized companies think that some of their company’s investment is wasted due to poor maintenance. • Only 3% of the companies surveyed have successfully adopted ITIL and 75% have never even heard of it. • Breaking out the figures for the large organisations we find that 53% of IT managers have not heard of ITIL and 93% of the organisations have not adopted ITIL. • Only 18% of mid sized companies have a formal IT plan approved by the Board, and only 16% plan their IT investment on a 3-5

VitAL : September / October 2007

year timeline, inline with current business plans. • In mid sized companies, 28% of managers admit there is no IT strategy, 29% work to an informal loose plan and 34% buy IT systems as they are needed. This all adds up to an ad hoc IT infrastructure that is difficult to manage, does not give value for money, steals time from business people due to downtime or fire fighting and creates a negative impression of IT within the business. • Only 34% of mid sized companies have access to the best IT people that they can afford. • 79% of IT managers in large companies believe that even free software can be expensive to manage and maintain. The main conclusions from this survey can be grouped into four key areas: 1. IT systems and services are not well managed within both large and mid sized companies. This creates a serious issue – the wasting of business managers’ valuable time; 2. There is a huge lack of awareness and understanding of ITIL and the benefits and efficiencies that can be generated by adoption of its principles and processes; 3. Technology is still not being seen as a strategic tool and is being used in an ad hoc way to support businesses. This has a knock on effect when companies are buying technology and IT personnel; 4. IT managers believe that even free software is expensive to manage and maintain.

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SERVICE MANAGEMENT

A new hand on the tiller But the course for itSMF continues to be one of increasing professional development under Keith Aldis

Words: John Hancock Words: John Hancock

O 14

NE OF the things that we know for certain about the world today is that things donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stay the same for very long. That truth, applicable as it is to any management discipline is especially apposite when discussing the application of IT to the business. Change in technology sectors seems not only to be more rapid than in other fields but often also has far more fundamental impacts not only on how an automated job can be faster but even how the objective might be achieved by a wholly different process made available by the power of IT.

VitAL : September / October 2007

It is also usually the truth that the greatest repository of knowledge in any profession will be the people practising in that profession. In order to keep up with change and to be able to exchange ideas and to tap into the knowledge of current professionals wherever they may be, members of any particular profession will often group together in a professional body to share ideas and experience as well as to develop standards and protocols. IT Service Management professionals are very well served in this respect through the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF). itSMF is an independent and internationally

recognised forum for IT service management professionals with more than 70,000 individuals in 6000 member companies spread over more than 40 international chapters. Members include IT companies, software developers, service companies and organisations across industry in the public and private sectors. As well as running seminars, conferences and regional meetings where members can meet to exchange ideas and experience; itSMF supports best practice in a practical way as a major intellectual contributor to the standards regime for IT Service Management through its role in the

development of both ISO/IEC 20000 and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). And while members do not need qualiﬁcations in order to join itSMF, there are qualiﬁcations that the forum supports and endorses that individuals can achieve. The Forum has also established a professional body in the Institute of IT Service Management. itSMF aims to be the premier community for leadership in IT Service Management, providing members with a forum within which they can exchange views, share experiences and participate in the development and promotion of best practice and standards.

The intent of the forum is to maintain total independence from any inﬂuence in order to represent its members’ and the profession’s interests ﬁrst and foremost. One of the most significant recent developments for itSMF has been the May 1 2007 appointment of Keith Aldis as CEO for itSMF UK. Keith was until recently Chief Executive of the British Institute of Cleaning Science following on from a career in the engineering construction, energy and oil & gas sectors. Good governance, excellent business delivery and total commitment and people development has been the backbone

of Keith’s career to date. His employment, personnel and industrial relationship skills were honed with the Joint Industry Board for the Electrical Contracting Industry and he went on to assist the industry in setting up and running its own non statutory training operation. Following an appointment as the Director of Training and Education at the Construction Confederation, he moved into the public sector as Customer Relationship Director & Deputy Chief Executive for the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board. Well versed in the government’s Skills for Business agenda, Keith is

September / October 2007 : VitAL

a founding ‘Investors in People’ Ambassador and a regular national judge for the National Business Awards scheme. This experience plus his service as a director of a number of industry based companies and trusts, and running his own consultancy makes Keith a real asset to itSMF and someone who is able to blend experience of operating in a busy commercial environment with the subtler attributes needed to lead a fast growing professional body in a fast changing sector. You may wonder how such a busy man (he is also a Freeman of the City of London, a serving Liveryman and a married father of two) organises his time: pretty well it seems, in particular he found time to talk with VitAL magazine about his new appointment and where he sees itSMF going in the future. We asked the questions, Keith had the answers. Vital: How would you deﬁne ITSM; what it does, for whom it does it and how it ﬁts with other business processes? Keith Aldis: Service Management is the same as any other business process; it’s all about leadership, people, change etc.; but in Service Management, IT is used as the tool to deliver leadership and carry through change. Guiding people through a constantly changing landscape is made easier with the knowledge that IT makes available. V: What elements of your past experience do you expect to be most useful in you role as CEO of itSMF? KA: Service Management is all about the management of people and I have always been involved in the management and motivation of people; also, as I’ve said before, it’s about managing change and I have had to handle change in many of my previous roles; so there will really be little difference from my past experience to this new challenge.

V: These days there seem to be several strings to the itSMF bow – it’s a professional body, a trade body, a supporter of qualiﬁcations and a signiﬁcant contributor to standards setting. Do you envisage any incompatibility between these different commitments in the future and, if so, how might any incompatibility be resolved? KA: [For all that the point is true] let’s be clear; itSMF’s prime role is to provide an environment for individuals in Service Management to share and formulate ideas;

VitAL : September / October 2007

that is what the forum means. And we must be careful not to stray away from that role or divert our energies into areas that will not impact on that role; we would not, for instance, get involved in wages discussions. All of the other activities that we undertake are to enhance the forum and our business and here there might well be scope for developments in the future. So we might become involved in, say, creating career pathways for future youngsters entering the profession – things that enhance our business. V: How do you see these main strings developing in the future? KA: It might be appropriate for us to move into other areas where we can provide benefits for members [and enhance the value of the career], perhaps and involvement with pensions, health care might be another area of benefit that would be appropriate, and we’d certainly be interested in the development of occupational competence: but none of that would be appropriate just now and will probably never be things we would undertake on our own. We would much more likely work with others who have experience of delivering these sorts of beneﬁts in the event that we did consider developing lines similar to this.

V: With ITSM growing as fast as it has and as you have predicted it will, how will it be possible to ensure that no ‘rogue elements’ creep into the sector in the future – I’m thinking of less robust, perhaps more commercially partisan qualifications and suchlike? KA: People are not stupid and will understand what is good and what is not. There are some commercially driven and partial qualiﬁcations out there but one sided qualifications tend to be a small group and of poor quality. We [the itSMF] are neutral and, unlike some of the less robust providers of qualifications, we have been tagged as a ‘not for profit’ organisation although that should really be ‘not for dividend’ as we have to be commercially minded and have to generate surpluses [if we are to be taken seriously as business leaders] but need to plough those profits back into the member services [enhancing the value of membership].

V: Do you hold among your objectives the achievement of full and recognised chartered professional status? KA: While the long term objective may be to achieve Chartered status, we’re not as sophisticated as that yet and cannot legislate for Service Managers. The industry is pretty well self regulated and focused on behaving professionally. Our job today may be to point out unprofessional behaviour and conduct but not to act on it. V: With your past closeness to and understanding of the government’s Skills for Business agenda, and your teaching background, do you envisage itSMF perhaps taking on the kind of educational role that say the IFS [Institute of Financial Services] has assumed in the financial services sector with inputs to school teaching packs, university courses and an all round mission to raise awareness of financial services as a strong career option at a time when youngsters are considering their career future? KA: I definitely see that as a role for us. The eSkills Sector Skills Council deals with everything around IT except Service Management. There is a considerable potential to develop career pathways [and to bring those pathways before youngsters during their time at school and beyond]; our profession should be an occupational option to school leavers with the appropriate government funded nationally recognised qualifications to support it – I’m talking about NVQ and similar programmes. V: Thank you for giving us your time and so fully answering our questions; but is there anything else that you would like to add to your previous comments, perhaps anything on which you’d like to raise awareness? KA: itSMF has grown through a lot of good will and a great deal of hard work by a few people. I need to make it into a tool for more people. My job is expansion and to deliver more. We must focus on what it is we wish to achieve then plan and work towards achievement. Perhaps it is that rather than be successful in spite of ourselves we should be successful because of ourselves. Service Management has the considerable responsibility of being the management discipline that holds an organisation together; its importance in the structure of business will only grow as business operations increasingly move onto IT based platforms. With that in mind, it is good to know that a body like itSMF and a leader like Keith Aldis are prepared to take the tiller and drive standards forward to match that growing responsibility.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

In the beginning ITIL® v3 has built upon its successful genesis to become the global IT Service Management standard of today

Words: Rosemary Gurney

TIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world, providing a cohesive set of best practice processes, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools, which has been comprehensively updated with the release of version 3 at the end of May 2007. It was the UK Government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) now the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) that first developed ITIL® during the late 1980s when the UK government’s reliance on IT was increasing. A working party set out to document a common sense approach to managing IT services that would improve reliability while maintaining costs efficiency. The result was a published collection of best practice and common sense and the first IT Infrastructure Library was created. ITIL was last updated in 2000. The overwhelming driver for this refresh is to keep the guidance up to date such that ITIL continues to be ‘fit for purpose’ as the most

VitAL : September / October 2007

widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. The project team wanted to improve the usefulness and applicability of ITIL by addressing the changing needs of users as the technology base and business requirements continue to evolve, to make ITIL easier to apply and improve its applicability to small organisations. OGC’s ITIL publications are only part of the story; this refresh also aimed to embrace the close integration between the core guides and the ITIL qualiﬁcations, and other interfaces in the IT service management arena. During late 1999 ITIL® version 2 was introduced and the library then consisted of seven central books which dealt with the processes widely accepted as the best practice framework for IT Service Management (ITSM). Although this wasn’t perfect, the core we teach from for certification purposes concentrates mainly on two of those books, ‘Service Support’ and ‘Service Delivery’ and we’ve all been quite happy with that, but cracks had started to appear. Therefore in 2005, the ITIL® Version 3 (v3) refresh project began,

with Sharon Taylor appointed Chief Architect. Sharon led a very robust benchmarking and consultation exercise within the industry asking what was liked about the existing system, and what wasn’t.? It also asked the customers about it – these are the people who implement it and use it on a day to day basis. The outcome of the consultation was that v3 is to differ from v2, changing from being process driven to lifecycle driven. The work to develop the new set of publications was split into four tranches. The first tranche comprises largely web based products that will support authors of the main books. This tranche includes process maps and core ITIL definitions. The second tranche is the new set of core books, following a lifecycle model from design to retirement through five books. The five book titles are: Service Strategy; Service Design; Service Introduction; Service Transition; Continuous Service Improvement. Third and fourth tranches address specific support for the qualification scheme by

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introducing study aids for the Foundation and other examinations, and finally, there will be a new strategic introduction book for managers and a brochure for company executives. Scoping of each book was derived from a mapping of existing ITIL content, plus new material to address new requirements. Core volumes will be supported by complementary publications. The core consists of the real core concepts and generic good practices, which don’t change rapidly. One key finding was that the existing guidance wasn’t broken so we haven’t thrown much existing content away, just remapping to a new, more business oriented framework. Complementary publications will address application of the generic core guidance in particular market or technological contexts. As well as the paper publications and the qualifications, OGC intends to work with partners to provide a unified package of web based support offerings for ITIL users, both existing and aspiring. Examples of web material includes the process models and ITIL definitions, but might also include other support material like discussion papers, role definitions, case studies as well as examples of ITIL forms and meeting agendas. The books for v3 were published at the end of May 2007 and some of it will be familiar: The processes we all know are, by and large,

VitAL : September / October 2007

still there, but there are new processes, new functions and new roles. From a training provider point of view, it means we now have a whole new certification scheme, requiring us to devise new training courses to reflect the new syllabuses and exam structures. So an awful lot of work was required to meet the publication deadline. Since November 2006, I have been one of 15 members of a global panel designing the new certification scheme. It has been our job to make sense of the five books and construct a new syllabus and new exam structures. In addition, we needed to provide an upgrade path for those who require it and training so that our trainers are equipped with sufficient information to lead the new courses and prepare the students for the new exams. The introduction of v3 has caused some customers to wonder how things might change. With regards to the new version, there is no need to worry or panic. I understand that people have been worried that it’s really different. Just because we’re moving from v2 to v3 doesn’t mean the older version isn’t relevant anymore. The new version provides transition models whereas previously it didn’t – you couldn’t easily make the transition from design to operation. Version 3 improves the way we implement things and it improves

how we measure value, which was one of the biggest concerns. Because Service Management is about people and culture and the way we work, how do you demonstrate that you’re actually providing value? Version 3 helps to improve the way we measure that. We’re emphasising much more the integration of IT and the business, previously we used to use the word alignment. We now need to talk about integration. And we shouldn’t really be talking about IT Service Management anymore, it is just Service Management and how IT fits in with the way the business itself wants to develop.” For customers currently working on a v2 project or putting staff through a v2 certification programme, there is provision within the new scheme for transition and upgrades to v3. If they don’t want to do another course, but want to understand what v3 is all about there will be plenty of material available. The five books are the ‘core’ but around the core there will be a lot of other information and complementary material available and much of it is web based. Life is going to be much easier and much more readily updated. And, as the transition from ITIL® v2 to v3 looks set to improve IT service management around the world, experts are on hand to make the process as seamless as possible.

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ITIAL Version 3

It’s not rocket science, but… Small businesses must embrace the online revolution.

Words: David Robertson VitAL : September / October 2007

ITH ONLINE opportunities growing at a rapid pace, the UK small business community needs to do more to harness the power of IT and online strategies. A recent Federation of Small Business (FSB) report found that only 18 per cent of firms are selling online[i] and, with the online retail market set to increase by 165 per cent by 2010[ii], small business owners and mangers will need to use the benefits of technology available to them. The growth of new technologies within the business environment has been much talked about given the recent explosion of ‘Web 2.0’. Small businesses need to keep up to speed, and realise the business benefits behind adopting new technologies, or risk losing out to competitors. Yet while companies should consider the benefits of technology, they should also be

aware about the pitfalls of rushing in: 75 per cent of IT projects fail[iii], due to lateness of delivery or going over budget, and UK ﬁrms are spending an estimated £5.81bn[iv] per year on technology that does not meet the business needs. To help owners and managers avoid the pitfalls and get a solid IT infrastructure in place, try suggesting the following top tips: IT BUDGET – technology plays an important and growing part in many businesses, so allocate funds accordingly. Include IT as a separate cost in yearly budgets to ensure you are covered for any IT upgrades or new software that may be required. DEVELOP AN ONLINE STRATEGY – the ﬁrst key step to developing an online strategy is to decide what you want to achieve. Essentially

an e-strategy encompasses anything a company does via the internet from website development to SEO, sponsorship and pay per click marketing. SAFETY FIRST – investing in decent IT security is an absolute must. Anti-virus screening and the installation of firewalls is considered standard practice and essential to protect valuable customer and ﬁnancial data from hackers and viruses. INVESTIGATE SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS – many cost effective software packages are available on the market, and could save you money in the long run. For example, inexpensive accountancy software can complete complex calculations, simplify invoicing, give a professional appearance to paperwork, and save you valuable time. GET LICENSES – businesses risk prosecution and heavy fines if they operate software without the correct licenses. Make sure all software is original and registered, and ban staff from installing unauthorised software on computers.

csa1236-smarts-vital-8x5.qxd

8/8/07

ALWAYS ONLINE – having access to emails away from the ofﬁce through smart phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) can be advantageous as they allow you to instantly respond to new business enquiries or customer queries, regardless of location or time. MAXIMISE ONLINE PRESENCE – having a website is a great way to promote your products and services. Websites can be a simple, relatively cheap and effective way to increase exposure for your business to a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day. Maintain your site and keep it up to date with fresh and interesting content for users. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) – SEO is crucial to promoting your site through the major search engines. Few people go beyond the first couple of pages of results and if your company isn’t listed you could lose out to competitors. Speak to your web developers to set up responses to key words pertinent to your business, and always keep the site live with fresh content to help with search engine rankings.

5:22 PM

LEGAL OBLIGATIONS – there are a number of legal obligations that must be adhered to when operating online. See the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations, and the E-commerce Regulations 2002 for full explanations of responsibilities at www.oft.gov.uk . With the amount of ‘must have’ technologies on offer, it is no surprise that owners and managers can feel bewildered and scared when it comes to developing an e-strategy. However, ﬁnding one that suits their business model needn’t be as daunting as they think, and can soon pay dividends in terms of simplifying theirr business and increasing proﬁtability.”

Footnotes [i] FSB report, 2006, ‘Lifting the barriers to growth in UK Small Businesses’. [ii] Ofﬁce of Fair Trading statistics, 2006. [iii] Pricewaterhouse Coopers, March 2007. [iv] Based on UK 2006 IT spend of £38bn (Forrester, HYPERLINK “http://www.itjungle. com/” \o “blocked::http://www.itjungle.com/” www.itjungle.com).

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When information comes together, business looks up.

EMC® Smarts® manages your IT infrastructure from a business perspective. It’s the only management solution that pinpoints the root cause of problems affecting services; correlates application, storage, and network availability; and helps you maximize the delivery of business services. Our solutions for ITIL process automation and CMDB strategy enable you to roll out your ITIL initiatives with minimum risk and automatically populate your CMDB with realtime information on network, server, and application resources. Automate incident management using patented auto-discovery and root-cause analysis. And automatically feed application-to-infrastructure dependency mapping to populate CMDBs. No wonder business is looking up. To learn more, visit http://uk.emc.com/smarts/itil or contact us at EMCsmartsEMEA@EMC.com. EMC2, EMC, Smarts, and where information lives are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. © Copyright 2007 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Organisational and cultural change Change shouldn’t just happen, good managers will manage it and the people involved

DUCATING AND empowering IT staff and customers across an organisation, to act upon a declared vision of transformation to a service based culture, can be the most challenging element of an IT Service Management implementation. The past ten years has seen the gradual adoption of ITIL® (IT Infrastructure Library) as the de facto Best Practice guidance for IT Service Management, with accelerated growth in the past ﬁve years. This is especially true of large, complex, global organisations, which have been driven by a number of factors, not least regulatory and legislative initiatives, coupled with the need to adopt a more formal, quality driven approach to the management of IT Services. All of which combine to represent a fundamental shift in historical IT practices

VitAL : September / October 2007

from technology driven silos to service driven process based environments. ITIL® in itself is not a formal methodology but a set of best practice guidelines which are intended to be used as a framework to be adapted and adopted to the speciﬁc and unique needs of individual organisations. Although the guidelines, in isolation, are applicable to organisations of all sizes and industry sectors, the political, economic and cultural climates of each company and the relationship of each with its employees are unique, and require close management. The decision to implement ITIL triggers the move from a system to a service based culture, and is one which has caused many a project to stall or fail in the light of resistance to change, issues with morale, or complete project failure

Words: Caroline Wyatt

60% stated that their main ‘challenge’ when implementing Service Management was their staff’s lack of knowledge and experience of process based methodologies

NEW STANDARDS FOR CATALOGUE & SERVICE MANAGEMENT Words: David Percy Whatever stage an organisation is at in the adoption and use of ITIL® version 3 is certain to have an impact on its use of service management best practices. Two areas in particular set to beneﬁt from the change are Catalogue Management and Knowledge Management.

Catalogue Management moves centre stage Mentioned only briefly in ITIL® v2, the Service Catalogue now comes under Catalogue Management - clear recognition that this topic merits an entire process to itself. Up until now organisations would consider purchasing two tools - one for the Service Catalogue and another for the rest of ITSM with customised integration then required between the two. The role of the Service Catalogue as the main interface for ITSM is now indisputable – underlining the importance of ﬁnding a single tool to provide both the inherently different functionality required for services as well as for regular conﬁguration items.

Integrated Knowledge Management The Service Management Knowledge System has also come to the fore in ITIL® v3. A key aspect of Knowledge Management is taking advantage of call data already captured; for example the ability to publish known errors and workarounds. Once again, to maximise the efﬁciency of knowledge publication and retrieval, Knowledge Management must form an integral part of the ITSM tool. A best practice standard already exists for Knowledge Management solutions - KCS Veriﬁed (KCS stands for Knowledge Centred Support). This is the ‘gold standard’ that organisations should look out for when implementing ITIL- compliant Knowledge Management.

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Evolution not revolution ITIL® v3 is likely to be a case of evolution not revolution with most changes occurring at the process rather than technology level. Signiﬁcantly, the refresh has brought the key areas of Service Catalogue and Knowledge Management into the spotlight; testament to the importance of viewing these processes as very much part of fully integrated ITIL Service Management Solution.

This is not just about transformation at organisational level, but in the minds of the people being asked to deliver the change due to a lack of direction. Although organisations genuinely want to improve the service to their customers (reducing costs almost comes as a bi product) there is still overwhelming resistance, on the part of IT staff, to the change required to adopt ITIL®. While in a recent Forrester survey for the itSMF, 60% stated that their main ‘challenge’ when implementing Service Management was their staff’s lack of knowledge and experience of process based methodologies. ITIL should not be viewed as a technology change, but as an organisational transformation. Problems arise when companies literally try to implement ITIL from the books. The recent launch of ITIL® v3 has seen a move towards an end to end lifecycle approach to the management of IT, rather than a process

by process approach. This is progress. It is not uncommon for companies to implement a fragmented process approach, whereby they metaphorically tear out the individual chapters from the Service Support and Delivery books and hand each to a new process owner to go away and implement in isolation. What they need to be implementing for success is a philosophy, and that philosophy is one of IT Service Management. It puts the customer of IT, not technology, at the forefront. The IT service provider must understand the aspects of the IT systems and infrastructure that relate to business processes and services, and they must also understand the Service Levels that are required by the business. Without this level of understanding it is extremely difﬁcult to align IT with the business, and equally difﬁcult

to know whether IT services are addressing the business imperatives. ITIL® brings the guidance required to implement process. It does not provide the leadership and skills required to transform the working practices of an organisation or the culture which exists within it. And that’s what Implementing IT Service Management is about, transformational change. The implementation of process will enable cross functional operations within the IT organisation where there once were silos. It may also require large amounts of organisation change, perhaps to the actual structure of the organisation or the reporting lines within it. Depending upon the organisational model adopted, there may be a requirement for people to be managed under a matrix approach or for employees

September / October 2007 : VitAL

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Figure 1

Vision & Mission

Where are we now?

Analysis

Where do we want to be?

Goals And Objectives Feature sponsored by:

How do we get there?

Process Improvement Plans & Implementation

Are we improving? Did we get to where we wanted to be?

Measurements & Tracking Source: ITIL – The Business Perspective

to adopt new or additional roles, which have implications from a legal and HR perspective, as well as the effort required to engage employees, so that they are supportive and embrace the changes. This is not just about transformation at organisational level, but in the minds of the people being asked to deliver the change. From an inside out perspective of IT to one that puts the customer and service ahead of technology developments. It requires a shift in mindset and also and exercise in Education and re skilling the workforce. Karen Price, Chief Executive of e-Skills UK, was recently quoted in Computing Magazine (19/07/07) as saying, “Transformation requires a sophisticated set of skills and understanding – one that encompass business, communication, team working and project management skills, and in-depth and up to date technical knowledge.” So once a company has determined that adopting a quality best practice approach is required, it is key to understand the nature of an ITIL transformation, the logical steps for implementing Service Management, and the business value it will deliver. The guidelines of ITIL® can be applied incrementally in a phased approach, but that approach must be guided by an overall strategy and plan that deﬁnes the delivery of IT Services enterprise wide. ITIL® itself supports this view as is demonstrated in Figure 1 above. These changes all require executive support, long term funding and an overall business plan. ITIL Programmes that do not have a clear strategy at the start, are the most likely to show little or no business value, as their organisations will resist the necessary changes.

SERVICE MANAGEMENT – THEN AND NOW Words: Jack Robertson-Worsfold In ten years we have seen a monumental shift in the way that IT permeates our business and personal lives. How to manage this progression has been a constant challenge and the evolution of Service Management has been a key factor. The ideas of service support and delivery were compounded in the ﬁrst iteration of ITIL® - virtually unrecognisable to any practitioner today. In 1997 real knowledge was still the preserve of the few and Service Management still had not captured the collective imagination of the IT world. It was soon recognised that ITIL® needed to evolve if it was to keep up with the pace of change in IT. Essentially this time could be seen as being the real starting point for Service Management as an IT discipline. Slowly the idea of services instead of systems began to dominate. Organisations began to realise it was no longer feasible to talk about the business and IT in separate terms. The dichotomy this set up was that to develop and evolve, IT had to become simpler to understand, whilst constantly becoming ever more complex. At this time ITIL® itself paused with little being released as new content. But in 2001 version 2 was released. Over the following few years it has become, by far, the most widely used IT service management best practice approach in the world. The arrival of version 3 has seen more of a lifecycle approach to service management, with greater emphasis on IT business integration. Over the next 10 years this refined framework needs to be fully utilised to ensure its benefits come to fruition. ITIL is now so complex that only learned experience will ensure it’s implemented effectively. Consequently it requires organisations to look to outside help in order to maintain the status quo whilst building towards a brighter future.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

ISO/IEC20000 GETS STRUCTURAL SUPPORT Words: Shirley Lacy How ITIL supports ISO/IEC 20000

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The Office of Government Commerce, (OGC), the owner of ITIL, has always been committed to maintaining an alignment between ITIL® and the IT Service Management standard. Some of the key success factors for ITIL® version 3 were to build on the ITIL® v2 and support easier integration of ITIL with ISO/IEC 20000.

• Developing a knowledge capability for decision and management of services.

How ITIL® v3 supports the Service Management Processes ISO/IEC 20000 speciﬁes a number of closely related service management processes, as shown in Figure 2. The standard recognises that the relationships between the processes depend on the application within an organization and that these are complex to model. ITIL® v3 provides guidance on all these processes and on managing the complexity related to integrating the service management processes.

Figure 1: How ITIL supports ISO/IEC 20000

How ITIL v3 supports the Management System and Continual Improvement To achieve ISO/IEC 20000, an organization needs to demonstrate that it uses management systems and practices in order to be compliant to the standard and to deliver managed services of an acceptable quality for its customers. An organization must understand and measure how it provides value to their customers. ITIL® v3 provides concepts, models and guidance on integrating all aspects of IT service provision to deliver value to the business by linking improvement efforts to the outcomes. The ITIL service lifecycle approach provides a closed loop feedback system, based on the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle speciﬁed in ISO/IEC 20000. The v V3 guidance is useful for: • Establishing the integration of business strategy with IT service strategy; • Establishing the service management systems, policies, guidelines and processes across the ITIL service lifecycle; • Ensuring that the organization can handle the costs and risks associated with their service portfolios;

There are studies around organisational and cultural change, and extensive studies and supporting texts around management styles, techniques and managing and delivering projects. What is harder to find is good information on how to effectively engage the minds of those people who will in effect deliver the transformation for the organisation. How do you successfully engage employees and consequently get their buy in for the planned transformation? John P. Kotter, a professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School in Boston, wrote an article in 1995, for the Harvard Business Review entitled ‘Leading change: Why

VitAL : September / October 2007

Figure 2: ISO/IEC 20000 Service Management processes

How ITIL® v3 supports planning and implementing new and changed services The requirements in ISO/IEC 20000 are challenging for organizations that have a dynamic, high risk, rapidly changing business environment. To provide true value to the business, IT services must be developed with the business objectives in mind and ITIL V3 fully supports this. The ITIL® v3 Service Design lifecycle stage turns Service Strategy into the blueprint for delivering the business objectives. Service Transition provides guidance for the development and improvement of capabilities for transitioning new and changed services into live service operation. It provides guidance on how the requirements of Service Strategy encoded in Service Design are effectively realized in Service Operation while controlling the risks of failure and disruption.

Transformation efforts fail’ (HBR March-April 1995). He based this article upon extensive research that describes why many projects fail and what the eight most important major steps are for successfully realising a transformation. 1 Establish A Sense of Urgency; 2 Form A Powerful Guiding Coalition; 3 Create a Vision; 4 Communicate the Vision; 5 Empower Others To Act Upon The Vision; 6 Planning For And Creating Short Term Wins; 7 Consolidating Improvements; 8 Institutionalising the Changes.

What is harder to ﬁnd is good information on how to effectively engage the minds of those people who will in effect deliver the transformation for the organisation

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Figure 2

IS020000 Alignment Initial Wins

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Assessment

Planning

Process Implementation

Where are we now?

How will we get there?

How do we get our Vision?

Control How do we know we’ve succeeded?

IT Service Management Communication Plan

The first four stages are particularly relevant here as Kotter identified that 50% of transformations fail in the first phase. Establishing a Sense of Urgency involves identifying and discussing crises, potential crises, or major opportunities and ensuring that at least 75% of a company’s management are convinced of the need for the project. Without good leadership and motivation, people will be reluctant to help and effort is sporadic and wasted. Do not underestimate the difficulty of driving people out of comfort zones. In order to successfully realise a transformation it is imperative to Form a powerful Guiding Coalition. This should be a group with enough power and enthusiasm to lead the change effort, and to prevent opposition from stopping the change initiative. These people should be the ones to encourage groups to work together as teams to achieve a common goal. Creating A Vision is important as it provides an agreed, clear and understood future for all interested parties to relate to. It also provides the necessary direction to ensure the project stays on the planned path and is meaningful to those trying to deliver that vision. It is true however, that a Vision is only useful if it is communicated effectively. The Guiding Coalition should lead by example and demonstrate and teach expected new behaviours. Communication is essential and provides the platform to engage all stakeholders. Issues around cultural change and engagement are compounded by problems surrounding retention, loyalty and skills

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All potential stakeholders need to be involved so as they can take ownership of the Vision and understand what the Service Management implementation is to achieve amongst today’s workforce. Quoted in HR Magazine – (August 2007 Issue) – Rebecca Clake – Resourcing Adviser from CIPD said that currently ‘seven in 10 organisations were experiencing retention difﬁculties and eight in 10 had problems with recruitment’ The impact of this in an industry where a large number of personnel are freelance contractors, only serves to compound the challenges transformation brings. How do you engage the support of people who may not have any loyalty to the organisation, who do not have the requisite skills, or in the worst case scenarios have to re apply for their own jobs as a result of the impending changes? It is necessary to strike a balance between a set of strategic goals and the need to address issues here and now. It helps to use a very simple model in order to achieve a successful Service Management implementation. This model concentrates vital effort to establish a clear Vision of the desired future state. Then a subsequent assessment of the current position

enables a plan to be devised that plots the appropriate Service Management Road Map. Establishing a Vision for any project is a major contributor to the successful implementation of IT Service Management. It provides a clear focus for the implementation and gives all participants a sense of direction. The Vision also provides a ‘ﬂag’ for all staff involved in the project to rally around and it also helps to bring all stakeholders together around a common objective. Stakeholders are those with a vested interest in the outcome of the project and will come from all areas of the business, from within IT as well as the other business units. Constructing a Vision is highly desirable, however it should be noted that the breadth of involvement across the organisation can be extensive. All potential stakeholders need to be involved so as they can take ownership of the Vision and understand what the Service Management implementation is to achieve and why it needs to be done. Stakeholders involved will include representatives from the business as well as the IT department. It may also include third party suppliers particularly where large parts of the IT service provision have been outsourced. A Vision will provide a common sense of direction and purpose against an agreed set of values for a shared future. Engaging all interested parties in establishing the vision from the start helps people to understand the reasons why change is required, and how their personal contribution will affect the change. As an exercise, inclusion encourages ownership and responsibility for personal contribution and shared success.

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IT Service Management Training & Consultancy

The riches of relevance Technology has made big company marketing and customer management available to businesses of all sizes. Words: Yolanda Noble

USINESS START up rates have fallen during the past decade in spite of government attempts to stimulate UK enterprise, reveals a report from the University of Shefﬁeld that also claimed that Government’s policies aimed at stimulating entrepreneurial activity have been unsuccessful. According to this study, business start up rates have decreased since 1997, while self employment ﬁgures have remained steady. Ten years ago, 3.2 people in every 1000 were setting up a new business in the UK. By 2004, this statistic had dropped to 3 per 1000. The report pinpointed the Government’s ‘any new business will do’ approach as a root

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cause of the phenomenon, citing speciﬁcally the closure of the Training and Enterprise Council infrastructure, originally established in the 1990s by the previous government, and an over dependence on public sector employment which has allegedly diverted people from taking the risk of setting up their own business. The study also claimed that to close the enterprise gap with countries such as the United States, government must take a new view of enterprise policy through commitments to lower taxation, reduced bureaucracy, and improved support for existing and emerging entrepreneurs. It is the contention of this article that one of the

greatest needs for SMEs is to improve their use of targeted marketing, and that new print and database marketing developments are placing the technique more easily within their grasp. Targeted marketing communications used to be something of a pipe dream for SMEs. Database analysis could establish an all round view of each customer, but the processes of translating this intelligence into targeted, personalised communications was either unwieldy or unaffordable. However, three things have come to pass over the last two years. Personalised colour printing has become affordable for all sizes of company, rather than just the large ones. The ability to create a tailored set of contents for each customer’s envelope has become very sophisticated and in addition to this, forward thinking SMEs have established the initial proof that personalised content on the website improves customer retention, satisfaction, cross ales, and ultimately proﬁtability.

New Colour Recent developments in variable colour printing – where content and text can be altered for each document printed – are revolutionising the extent to which communications with existing and potential customers can be personalised. Another recently published piece of research has conﬁrmed the close correlation between the personalisation and relevance of customer communications and the levels of customer satisfaction achieved. So personalised communications and reporting tangibly help to cement and develop customer relationships (and therefore the amount of business done with each customer). Digital print means that there is now no need for minimum quantities. And because the technology can now operate at high speed, then the economies of production scale are available to commercial printers to pass on more affordable pricing to SME customers. Personalised marketing and customer communications used to be very much a service only for the highest value customer segments. This is no longer the case. The economics offered by high speed variable colour printing mean that even the low value customers can receive such a service. This is a critical point for the whole theory of database marketing. Here, the job is not just to identify who the lower and higher value customers are, but also spot the segments with the greatest value growth potential and create strategies to migrate them from a lower value to higher value group. If we cannot afford to communicate in a personalised fashion with the lower value groups, how can they ever be persuaded to upgrade?

Finally, the new capabilities and economics of variable colour printing are also being harnessed by a handful of SMEs for combining various communications into a single document. Here the process can become very interesting – we know of at least one ﬁrm that is using personalised colour to collate each customer’s portfolio of reports into a single quarterly publication, which then encourages the customer to visit a personalised version of the ﬁrm’s website, where they can access all their detail online. Throughout this process, targeted additional product advertising is served up to the customer with the aim of increasing their value via product offers they are likely to be interested in.

Measuring Outcomes So much for the new capabilities of communicating in personalised colour. How should the outcomes of this targeted activity be measured? The second part of this article examines the key underlying business measurement which should result from efﬁcient and effective database marketing.

Finally, the new capabilities and economics of variable colour printing are also being harnessed by a handful of SMEs for combining various communications into a single document As a result of the Internet, available markets for SMEs have expanded enormously. The tiniest ﬁrm can now access global markets. Yet at the same time, the transparency – especially in terms of price – which the Web has allowed has also meant that competition has increased enormously at the same time as national boundaries and local anomalies have disappeared. Consequently, product differential has diminished and the customer relationship will become virtually the be all and end all of a successful ongoing commercial relationship. This has made SMEs focused on two things: ﬁrstly, to ensure that they provide such a good proposition for customers that they stay, increase their spend (if possible) and become more profitable; secondly, to understand

better the cost of winning, keeping and growing customers, so that value is returned to shareholders. The ability to retain and grow customers at as low a cost as possible is increasingly exercising the minds of investors who may be funding start ups and SMEs: the efficiency with which companies produce their profits is absolutely critical to sustainable shareholder value. Revenues and profits may be built in the short term through scale growth, either organically or by acquisition. But if, with each year that passes, profit per customer is dwindling then the future will be bleak – offering the prospect of either the cost of winning and servicing customers becoming unaffordable, or even running out of customers in niche markets. The database marketing industry has produced extremely affordable customer relationship management tools for SMEs with which to analyse and target the right people with the right offers. But unless one understands profitability trends at the individual customer level, then companies will not know who to target, why, and with what. Profit per customer helps to measure the value of different customer groups and the efficiency with which that value is produced. It reveals whether firms have to recruit twice as many customers to achieve the same profit growth – and therefore whether or not current growth rates are sustainable. By extension, profit per customer is the final output of earnings minus costs of obtaining, keeping and growing the customer. Also by association, the quality of the value proposition being put to customers is being measured – i.e. more compelling proposition, greater efficiency, higher profit per customer.

Managing M&A Finally, we should look at the theme of mergers and acquisitions. Small and medium sized enterprises often find that to reach the next stage of growth, they have to raise the finance to buy out a competitor or to gain foothold in a new product line. In this situation, the new capabilities in variable digital print and online marketing are of little value unless they are based on good customer data. Typically, following a merger or acquisition, databases are not merged quickly, and customers are subject to irrelevant or inappropriate offers – sometimes even for products they already hold. This can seriously undermine the value of the acquired organisation. After all, the advantage of any acquisition must lie in being able to extract greater value from the acquired company than the price paid, whether through share of customer wallet (product diversification) or share of market

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(product consolidation). Following a merger or acquisition, the first step is to understand what has been bought. That means a top level analysis at a customer level. This in itself may not be a simple process – in that a wide variety of different datasets may need to be combined – product holdings, transactions, credit status, lifestyle profile, customer service record, and a host of other third party attributes. Luckily, the data may be complex, but there are now software products available that rapidly merge disparate datasets without the need for expensive hard coding. Larger companies would consider doing this process in house. Smaller firms can turn to data processing bureaux that license such software and then use it to provide SME services on a ‘number of records’ basis. Once high revenue, multi product customers have been identified, they can then be profiled using one of the major geodemographic or

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lifestyle consumer proﬁling systems available across Europe. This helps identify customers with a proﬁle similar to high revenue, multi product customers, but who are not yet generating these levels of income or product holdings. From a consolidatory point of view, it helps identify patterns of retention, loyalty and potential future usage of core product.

Conclusion In summary then, new print and web technology capabilities mean that SMEs can now affordably generate personalised, high quality marketing and customer communications. However, none of this is any use unless a sound, accurate database drives such communications and campaigns. So long as this is achieved, however, variable digital colour is now putting marketing sophistication into the hands of SMEs, which was previously only available to large companies.

SMEs can now affordably generate personalised, high quality marketing and customer communications. However, none of this is any use unless a sound, accurate database drives such communications and campaigns

Easy payments are smart payments

A Case Study in IT-Product Development

Words: Dr Garry Homer

late 1980’s moved its core business into the provision of specialised computer system solutions. In 2000, KPR recognised that their local government and housing association cash receipting product needed to have a software rewrite. The decision was made to automate the cashier function and provide additional information services available on a 24/7 basis. This concept was thought to be complementary to the emerging local authority concept of ‘one stop shops’. Although kiosk technology existed alongside payment machines there was not a product on the market that met all of the requirements. KPR speciﬁed the product and

HE IT Futures Centre is the consultancy arm of the School of Computing at Wolverhampton University. It was setup some four years or so ago, partially funded by the local Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands (AWM) , with the stated aim of providing IT impartial, cost effective development and support for Small Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) in the West Midland Region. Currently, the IT Futures Centre has some twenty plus staff, administrative and technical, lead by a Business Director and myself as technical Director, responsible for delivering IT assistance via some ﬁve or so individual funded projects to well over 300 SME ‘beneﬁciaries’

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(Development Agency terminology!) This article discuss a typical ‘case study’ as an illustration of this approach to improving the technical capability of small businesses who make (or wish to make) extensive use of IT and associated technologies to grow their business. A case study in introducing new technology to an existing software product Wolverhampton based KPR Midlink Ltd was formed in 1973 as management consultancy, Midlink Management Services Limited. Midlink specialised in the improvement of productivity for industry and the public sector, assisting many blue chip companies. KPR Midlink changed focus over the years and during the

The birth of the RPKiosk (Remittance Payment Kiosk) occurred in 2001 and the arduous task of persuading a very conservative marketplace that the future of cash receipting required the implementation of unattended payment kiosk technology, began

found a manufacturer, Thomas Automatics, who specialise in the provision of cash vending equipment. The birth of the RPKiosk (Remittance Payment Kiosk) occurred in 2001 and the arduous task of persuading a very conservative marketplace that the future of cash receipting required the implementation of unattended payment kiosk technology, began. The business case for using unattended payment kiosks to accept payments from the public centred around: • Increased security; • Increased opening hours and accessibility; • Reduced cost of accepting and processing payments (reduced cashier costs). 2002 saw the ﬁrst two RPKiosks going into two very different sites. Ellesmere Port & Neston Borough Council had experienced a robbery at one of its payment ofﬁces and felt that automation would provide the security element it required. Blaby District Council

wanted to offer increased payment hours and opted to place the RPKiosk in a community centre with extended opening hours. In 2003/04, most local authorities started to offer Internet and telephony payments, the need for cash counters started to diminish and the cost benefits of introducing the RPKiosk became more obvious. However, this awakening of the interest and awareness of a traditionally conservative sector (Local Authorities) in newer and better ways of accepting payments from the public bought with it the need for the company, KPR, to constantly revise and refine their kiosk product. They were faced with constantly improving the software systems to meet ever more stringent audit and financial controls, and, more worrying for the company with a finite and modest number of software development staff, to integrate new payment devices and methods into their product. The first challenge came some two years or

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so ago with the need to provide the payment kiosk with the capability to accept Chip and PIN credit card payments. Prior to this, the kiosk had been equipped with a conventional magnetic stripe card reader device, capable of accepting card payments this way. However, the introduction of Chip and PIN rendered this payment method obsolete. If KPR Midlink Ltd were to maintain their lead position as major supplier of payment kiosk technology to Local Authorities, they had to move quickly and decisively. They recognised that they were unlikely to have either the capacity or the expertise in house in order to develop a Chip and PIN solution for the kiosk. Due in some part to their geographical nearness to University of Wolverhampton, KPR were already aware of the existence of the IT Futures Centre. In Late 2005, KPR enlisted the help of the IT Futures Centre team. The team worked with KPR to introduce chip and PIN technology for card payments, the IT Futures team conducting an in depth evaluation of the available Chip and PIN solution providers in order to be able to make detailed recommendations to KPR. The IT Futures Centre team not only identiﬁed and recommended the most appropriate Chip and PIN technical solution, but also designed and built the software interface between the card reader and the host kiosk software. This process of identifying the preferred third party supplier of Chip and PIN technology was demanding since, at the time,

the technical implementation of the software interface was rendered more complex than it need to have been by virtue of the fact that most third party suppliers were still dynamically developing their Chip and PIN product factual information regarding the regulatory requirements of the banks and acquirers was both contradictory and difficult to obtain. (It is worth noting that some significant high street businesses intentionally delayed their implementation of Chip and PIN until clarification was available) Similarly, the technical implementation of the software interface was rendered more complex than it need to have been by virtue of the fact that most third party suppliers were still dynamically developing their Chip

and PIN product in parallel with us attempting to integrate this into the kiosk product. The chosen solution has been in successful operation since mid 2005, well in advance of the ‘deadline’ of February 2006. KPR now approached IT Futures seeking further assistance in developing their payment kiosk product via another project. This time, rather than responding to a non negotiable requirement (i.e. the introduction of Chip and PIN technology), KPR needed to place themselves in the forefront of technological advances in payment kiosk technologies. In particular, they wished to explore how best to introduce both biometric and smart card technologies. When making a payment via an unattended kiosk, the customer is often advised, via the screen, of the remaining balance owed, for example, on their Council Tax Account. In order to minimise the opportunity for fraud, and in order to comply with data protection concerns, the customer is required to enter their unique account PIN number via the touch screen before they are able to access their account details. However, there is a potential problem. Many Local Authority customers wishing to make payments via the kiosk may have difficulty in remembering ‘yet another’ PIN number. In particular, the elderly may particularly be compromised in this way, resorting to ‘writing down’ their PIN so that they might not forget it, or, possibly changing their PIN to something memorable, e.g.

Dr Garry Homer

Initially training as a Metallurgist, Garry joined the Computer Profession as a Systems Analyst in 1970. After a lengthy period working in both small and large companies, Garry joined the lecturing staff of University of Wolverhampton where as Head of Technology Transfer within the School of Computing (his role previous to the current position) he lead many multi thousand pound, industry based R&D projects. He has presented numerous papers at both National and International conferences in diverse topics ranging from Computer-Learning to eBusiness and the Internet. Previous research activity has been focused in the dual domains of Statistical Process Control in the Cold Rolling Industry and in e-Business and ICT within the Automotive Supply Chain. More recently, he has been instrumental in assisting a market leader company in document management to develop an Internet based distributed document management system that is currently used by many ‘blue chip’ financial organisations. A further important project has been the design of a payments kiosk system for a Wolverhampton company. These kiosk systems allow unattended cash and card payments to be made for Council Tax etc, and embraces recent developments in Chip and PIN technologies, finger print technologies etc. Currently, Garry is Technical Director of the University’s ‘IT Futures Centre’, an initiative funded by Advantage West Midlands(AWM) and ERDF that aims to provide SMEs with assistance in introducing technological solutions and innovation to support their business and commercial activities. He is also Technical Director of the ‘e-Innovation Centre’, a small ‘Science and Innovation Park’ based at the Telford Campus, providing incubation space and support for new and established companies operating in the high value, technology rich market place, and is in charge of the ‘West Midland Regional RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Centre’

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In particular, the elderly may particularly be compromised in this way, resorting to ‘ writing down’ their PIN so that they might not forget it, or, possibly changing their PIN to something memorable, e.g. ‘1111’ ‘1111’, but at the same time, vulnerable. In an attempt to alleviate this scenario, the IT Futures team designed and implemented a prototype biometric finger print PIN device for use with the kiosk. In this way, a customer can elect to record their finger print through the kiosk so that when they make future payments into their account, they are offered the opportunity of presenting their finger to the device instead of entering their PIN in order to authenticate themselves and thus, access their account. To overcome the reluctance some people may have to recording their finger print (overtones of ‘surveillance’), the finger print solution is completely optional, the customer can still elect to use PIN if that is their preference.

This either/or approach also accommodates situations where the customer may not be able to use their ﬁnger for identiﬁcation, through injury or perhaps the presence of gloves. KPR wished to introduce smart card capability into the kiosk. Smart cards are increasingly being used for the purchase of low value items or travel etc. Probably the best known application of such cards is the ‘Oyster Card’ used on the London Underground system. The kiosk thus allows the customer to ‘charge up’ a smart card ‘purse’ via the kiosk by making cash or card payments. The customer can then than use that smart card to make cashless purchases, for example, in the Local Authority or Company coffee bar. Similarly, the customer

can offer the smart card to make payments or purchases via the kiosk, for example, for low value items such as green plastic garden sacks. Again, IT Futures Centre was able to design and implement a smart card capability into the kiosk product. Payments technologies are constantly evolving. For example, there has recently been a successful trial by Royal Bank of Scotland of the use of contact less cards for low value payments and purchases as an alternative to cash. Further current developments involve the use of mobile phone technologies, again for low value’ purchases. IT Futures Centre will continue to work with KPR in order to assess the potential of these new payment methods for their kiosk product.

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From listening comes wisdom You may know what you want to hear but you should listen to what customers want to say

EEDBACK CAN be initiated by the customer or by the organisation. Either way it is a free source of vital management information that should be properly harnessed as part of an enterprise feedback management strategy in order to drive valuable business improvement. The letters E, F and M are the latest to join the alphabet soup of business acronyms. Together they make EFM, or Enterprise Feedback Management, a comprehensive set of related software applications deployed across an organisation to support those processes designed to ensure enterprises fully engage with their customers. EFM encompasses both organisation initiated and customer initiated forms of feedback and is deployed across all channels of customer communication and at all customer touchpoints. Put another way EFM is a new and evolving approach to encouraging, capturing and analysing customer sentiment

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to drive business improvement, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. Improving customer satisfaction is a high

Even the most customer focused organisations can struggle to know what a satisﬁed customer actually looks like. Others simply fail to recognise the real value of the feedback priority for most businesses but many fail in this endeavor due to poor processes and technologies, or simply because they underestimate how difﬁcult it is. Even the most customer focused organisations can

Words: James Heavey struggle to know what a satisﬁed customer actually looks like. Others simply fail to recognise the real value of the feedback their customers give them in the form of complaints, comments and compliments, focusing instead on efficiency based metrics like how long it takes to resolve the complaint or how quickly a letter is replied to. But by focusing on efﬁciency gains as a means of driving improvements in customer satisfaction, businesses can simply find themselves doing the wrong things faster.

Understanding feedback It is not possible to understand EFM without first understanding what is meant by ‘feedback’, although even this is easier said than done. The most obvious form of feedback is complaints, which are relatively straightforward to deal with. When a customer makes a complaint it is understood that it is in everybody’s interest

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to respond to it promptly and appropriately: the customer will appreciate the efforts that have been made and will be better disposed to come back for more business; the company on the receiving end of the complaint will benefit not only directly from satisfying its customers’ needs but also indirectly both from word of mouth recommendations and lessons learned that should prevent similar grievances in the future. Partly as a result of this but also, in some cases, to comply with best practice and regulations designed to protect the rights of the customer, complaint management strategies and software solutions are being widely adopted. But companies with a defined strategy for handling complaints find it less clear how and why they should be reacting to more general comments: customer feedback that does not have the specific negativity of a complaint or clear processes for redress. Whereas complaints tend to be structured, typically focused on a particular detail that can be addressed to lead to a specific resolution, other forms of feedback tend to be more general and unstructured. It can be customer initiated interactions with an organisation in the form of compliments, comments or requests for information, or feedback can be organisation initiated interactions in the form of surveys or market research. It might be positive, ‘My replacement credit card arrived the very next day – it was a real life-saver’, neutral, ‘Couldn’t we have our bins collected on Tuesdays?’ or of course negative, complaints. It could be a targeted comment about a specific individual or a general impression about a whole product or department. Either way feedback is seen as messy, difficult to collect and hard to manage. Small wonder, then, so few companies adopt a feedback management strategy. But you can’t avoid receiving feedback: it is freely given and businesses will receive it whether they want to or not. It therefore makes sense to have a strategy in place to deal with it and those companies that do decide to capture and analyse feedback soon find themselves reaping the benefits. The top level business arguments are relatively easily made – the customer is, after all, always right – but the perception remains that feedback is by its nature difficult to collect and analyse and therefore resistant to any sort of automation and a drain on resources. This need not, however, be the case.

CRM and EFM A common mistake is the assumption that feedback management is just a part of CRM and that a CRM system will automatically cover a business’s feedback management requirements. While EFM does certainly extend CRM, they are better dealt with as

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you can’t avoid receiving feedback: it is freely given and businesses will receive it whether they want to or not. It therefore makes sense to have a strategy in place to deal with it

separate, albeit complementary, disciplines. CRM applications typically focus on the acquisition phase of the customer lifecycle. That is, marketing and sales force automation, contact and opportunity management. A CRM system provides tools that help to segment a mass market, plan and execute campaigns to selected targets that generate interest, leads and prospects and ultimately ends in successful sales to individual customers. Most CRM applications run out of capability in the post sale, customer service area as the organisation migrates into the customer retention phase. Customer service is the crossover point from most CRM applications and the starting point for customer initiated complaints and feedback management applications. Applications need to ensure prompt and proper evaluation and resolution of issues while ensuring compliance with any regulatory framework. After the fact, individual cases should be aggregated, reported and analysis performed to determine, prioritise and ﬁx any underlying issues with products, services, personnel or other systemic failures. These actions will typically involve change projects or programmes, part of whose justiﬁcation will be the evidence produced as

a result of analysing and interpreting trends and emerging issues within complaints, compliments and other types of feedback. CRM is focused primarily on ‘talking’ to the market and customers, while EFM focuses on ‘listening’ to customers. Combining the data from CRM and EFM applications leads to a powerful, holistic understanding of customer sentiment and intentions. The output of this is actionable insights and organisational learning.

Feedback value chain Feedback is an inevitable consequence of the kind of customer focused service most successful modern companies are committed to, the natural extension of which is true customer collaboration. You can only collaborate with your customers if you listen to what they have to say. But of course the real goal is to turn the feedback into an asset: knowing what your customers are saying is not the same as paying attention to it. Those companies who do listen, who reﬁne and structure the feedback they receive until it becomes the useful asset it always promised to be, soon realise its potential as a driver of change, an early warning system of trouble

ahead and – crucially – a demonstration to new customers that their opinions will make a difference. Those who don’t soon ﬁnd that unless they want to annoy their customers by ignoring them completely they have to devote unbudgeted resources in disparate departments to responding to the feedback they inevitably receive. The perception may be that it is expensive to manage feedback, but in fact doing nothing turns out to be the costly option. Key to the effective management of feedback is planning. The best way of addressing the inherently unstructured nature of feedback is to do what you can to force some structure upon it. Successful feedback management strategies begin with fundamental decisions about what information will help most, where that information will come from and what is the most appropriate way of getting it. All customer touchpoints will need to be brought into the concept in order to capture the information and in many cases a culture change within the organisation will be needed to deliver on the strategy. Everyone within the organisation has a role to play in the effective management of feedback and as the most revealing and useful information is often only

delivered via an anecdote, so it is important customers are given the freedom to tell their story when and how they want to. There is an important balance to be struck between knowing what questions you want answered and preventing your customers telling you what they really think. Without effective processes in place the feedback you receive will incur costs but be of no beneﬁt.

Tactical and strategic beneﬁts The information gathered during an individual feedback case - be that compliment, complaint or survey result - can be useful in many different ways. The value that it brings to the organisation can be multiplied if it is exploited fully, with the ultimate aim of increasing customer loyalty and driving service recovery and customer advocacy through the elimination of the causes of dissatisfaction. Initially, the data is used by front line and dedicated feedback handling staff to effect a ‘transaction’ between customer and organisation. The key objectives at this level are operational efﬁciency and effectiveness, and members of staff need appropriate tools to help them manage individual workloads and ensure a consistently good experience for

the customer. Once the individual transaction is completed the emphasis switches to the aggregation and analysis of the data. For example, a single complaint about credit card charges needs to be properly resolved but is not, in itself, signiﬁcant for the organisation overall. However, several similar complaints should prompt action to investigate the root cause of the dissatisfaction and correct the problem at source. EFM provides the necessary tools to proactively manage feedback in any form, across all functional departments and multiple end to end processes. The result is the ability to provide enterprise wide analyses of customer concerns, issues and behaviour; deliver actionable insights arising from root cause analysis that lead to business change projects and improvements in performance; and promote organisational learning. In short, feedback is valuable at both a tactical and a strategic level. Granted it can be messy and is more often emotional than rational, but thanks to powerful feedback management applications now available, these are factors that need no longer deter businesses from leveraging feedback as a powerful instrument for change.

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But what does it do? What does ITIL® mean to different people in the organisation?

Words: Steve White

HEN I ask people whether they use the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) there seems to be polarized views – some love it, think it’s saved them from unnecessary pain, and support it; others run a mile, telling tales of fear, uncertainty and misery. How can a collection of things that seem to be such a good idea polarize users to that extent? I think it’s all about the implementation. ITIL® claims to be the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management in the world, and has risen above other standards like ASPL and COBIT because of it’s non proprietary, comprehensive and process driven approach. The ﬁnancial industry was an early adopter; it started in Europe and is now conquering the world. ITIL® focuses on four main objectives: • An increase in the customer focus of IT organisations; • An increase in the quality of the IT services; • Reduction in overall IT Service Costs; • Improvement in process thinking in the IT organisation. It does this through the deﬁnition of a common service management language and standardized processes. Here’s the rub: ITIL® doesn’t say ‘how’ to implement ITIL, and I think that’s the root cause of the differing opinions. ITIL® divides the support organization into two big sections – Service Support and Service Delivery, and a bunch of sub functions and an irreverent summary of them could be: • Service Support - typically the management functions to keep day to day operations running smoothly – has within it: • Incident Management – think of them as the paramedics – they get the patient on the stretcher, stand clear <thump> — all working again, service restored, hurrah, chuck the patient to the Problem Managers

VitAL : September / October 2007

and be done with it. With a focus of service recovery they are not bogged down by the need to ﬁnd root cause. Mostly likely to be heard saying ‘Just reboot it’. • Problem Management – the forensic department whose goal is to find out what went wrong, make it all better and stop it from happening again. Problem Management can get to dislike Incident Management as Incident Management can trample all over and contaminate the scene of crime. Likely to say ‘We could tell what happened if they hadn’t rebooted it’. • Change Management – the troublemakers. Without change managers changing things we know most of the problems the Incident Managers have to recover and the Problem Managers have to investigate would not have happened. Everyone dislikes the Change Managers unless they are Very Good. Likely to say ‘Calm down dear… It’ll be OK, I had it tested’. • Release Management – if the Change Managers are disliked, the Release Managers are several times worse – they get to change lots of things at the same time in large bundles. Need to replace every laptop in your organization to run Vista? Bring in the Release Managers. ‘Trust me, I’m a Release Manager’. • Configuration Management – every organization needs train spotters and these are they – happy when everything has an asset tag, and never happier than when tending their Configuration Items in their Configuration Management Database. A piece of software has a new security bug? You can ask the CMDB for a list of everywhere that it’s running that piece of software, and then pass the list to the Change Managers to fix. • Service Desk – the acceptable face of the IT department – people you phone and mail when it’s all gone horribly wrong. Their job is to ignore and frustrate you unless you are Very Persuasive. Buying them chocolate can often help. On the other hand, sitting with dark shades on at shiny desks in a darkened room are the Service Delivery staff: • Service Level Management – the lawyers of the IT department – if you want a agreed recovery time for your service you speak to them – they’ll draft Service Level Agreements and Operational Level Agreements, negotiate underpinning contracts with suppliers and

maintain and improve IT business service quality. Or they’ll make a pig fat by weighing it. ‘You want how much uptime!’ • Financial Management – You want another server, another building, to write off deprecated equipment, a calculation of Net Book Value, and an understanding of absorbed and unabsorbed costs – they are your pals in integer mathematics. ‘How many beans would you like to make ﬁve?’ • Availability Management – your friends in ﬂoating point mathematics – statistics, graphs, charts, Service Outage Analysis, Fault Tree analysis, Component Failure Impact Analysis, they are there to spot trends to save you from sleepwalking into unavailability through predictable failures. ‘I’m telling you, that thing needs replacing, now…’ • Capacity Management – crystal ball specialists to save you from sleepwalking into unavailability through bad sizing. How

much is your data/network/processing growing each month – when will it all come crumbling around you? Someone in IT needs to know the company business strategy and plan accordingly. ‘You want it to do what?’ • Continuity Management – wizards and warlocks - when badness occurs how do you get your production up and running again? They have cunning plans and clever tricks, and regular tests to maximize the chances of your business continuing even if a Very Bad thing has affected your IT department. ‘We’re testing our business continuity, please report for work at this bunker tomorrow…’ Implementing ITIL The way to eat an elephant is, of course, one mouthful at a time (apparently, I have not personally eaten an elephant, but you know what I mean). There is no one way to implement ITIL – it just says ‘you should have this function’, now you, using your vast experience of the IT industry have to

September / October 2007 : VitAL

go and do it. There are broadly three ways to implement ITIL®: • One process at a time (could be a job for life followed by the presentation of a carriage clock and retirement to a little cottage in the country); • Clustered implementation of inter related processes (for instance Service Desk, Incident Management and Problem Management ﬁrst, with other management structures following later seems to be a popular strategy); • All at the same time (a recipe for overwhelming a support organization, or causing elephant induced indigestion and the aforementioned disgruntlement). IT Service Management of course needs to consider the people aspect of the inner workings of the IT organization – in the long term no one changes their behaviour unless there are considerations for the performance system (this is not the ‘management performance system’, that lovely thing that tips numbers into our bank accounts periodically, defines vacation policies and if we’re lucky showers us with employee

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discounts) I’m talking about the performance system that we work inside, whether we acknowledge it’s existence or not – it’s the thing that, if it’s not implemented properly, drives us to do wrong things even if we know it’s the wrong thing to do. During the implementation the ‘how’ also needs to be worked out. This is both a strength and a weakness – a strength in that you can implement ITIL® to suit your own environment, and a weakness in that two ITIL compliant organizations may not easily be able to talk to each other if they’ve implemented ITIL defined functions completely differently. If there are Problem and Incident Management functions they both need an effective Situation Appraisal and Root Cause Problem Analysis method defined and implemented. ITIL® doesn’t say how to do these functions; it just says that you should. ITIL® helps intercommunication by defining terms; ‘incident’, ‘service request’ and ‘escalation’. By extending ITIL’s defining terms and selecting the same method of

Problem Analysis as many other ITIL compliant organizations you can create advantages for yourself and your customers that are bigger than the sum of the parts.

ITIL® – How it supports the IT Service industry. Given that ITIL® was originally forged when British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them was not sufficient, and has been developed over a number of iterations, the thinking is proven and refined. By ITIL® keeping vendor neutral, it has given organizations the flexibility to implement ITIL where they see the best benefit for themselves, which in turn starts with a clear set of improvement objectives. By providing a comprehensive set of best practices and consistent definitions of key IT terminology and processes across the industry, it is being taken up by an increasing number of large support organizations – and the probability of it becoming a global standard increases every day.

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As a result of this in-depth assessment you will receive an external view of what can be achieved in a particular division of your business including the quick wins, high level implementation estimates and an outline business case.

Is service letting you down? Or worse still, is poor service sullying your company’s name and driving away repeat business

W 48

HEN I recently bought a laptop, I didn’t anticipate the process taking long. I generally buy computing equipment online, as I know what I’m looking for and how much I want to pay. Yet when I logged on, that particular specification was not available, so I called the helpline. The call centre operator not only filled in the information gap but processed my order there and then, at the same price as the online offer, and even provided me with an approximate time of delivery. While I was delighted by the service I received, I fear that my experience was an exception to the rule. Don’t we all just love to complain about bad service? The time spent

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waiting for the gas man, the sofa delivery that never comes, the washing machine spare parts that never arrive… there’s always something. And the more people we tell, the more impact our advice has on the business of the company in question. The image of a company is directly inﬂuenced by the perception of the level of service provided to its customers. The 2:11 principle – that a customer receiving good service will share their experience with two people and a customer receiving poor service will go on to tell eleven people – rings true across all sectors and industries. But how do we measure the loss in revenue resulting from poor service, or

Words: Gavin Hartland the failure to provide good after sales service? And how does this impact the bottom line? Geography no longer separates consumers from the best deal. They have the means and know how to ﬁnd the products they want, whether through internet research or by quizzing friends and family. They no longer passively rely on advertising to establish what’s on offer. With so many purchasing channels, consumers are increasingly aware of what they can expect from their purchases and are demanding more for their money. Walking out of the store with a new laptop isn’t where the consumer supplier relationship ends anymore. Consumers want goods delivered

at a convenient time, with a guarantee that any repairs will be carried out efﬁciently and promptly. We all expect the right part at the right place, at the right time, delivered by a person with the right skills to make the repairs. Reasonable, right? Yet this rarely happens. According to Forrester research: “The importance of after sales service will increase as the major source of manufacturers’ revenue shifts from product based sales to service based sales over the next decade. Many leading companies are shifting their focus from improving product delivery to improving sales.” So why is this side of the business often not given the same focus or level of investment? After all, staff can only provide good levels of service if they are equipped with the right tools to do so. So why does service management still often fail to climb the boardroom agenda?

Service: Old fears For many enterprises, service is an area of inescapable complexity and unrewarding costs. After sales service has been considered a necessary evil rather than a business opportunity; research concludes that service offers exciting opportunities for those willing to address the issue. As differentiating on product is increasingly tough, companies must use innovative service strategies to gain competitive advantage. AberdeenGroup1 suggests that best in class Strategic Service Management (SSM) companies derive 75 per cent higher revenue and 111 per cent higher proﬁts from their service operations than other companies. They are also three times as likely to report customer retention rates greater than 90 per cent and twice as likely to achieve SLA compliance rates greater than 90 per cent, as other companies. However, Aberdeen has also established that only 20 per cent of companies are abiding by best in class principles, with 50 per cent falling in the average category and 30 per cent classed as laggards. Companies can still be part of this service revolution: but they can ill afford to stall any longer, as the research also concluded that companies who ignore SSM core principles in the next 5-7 years will forfeit signiﬁcant growth, with many more becoming increasingly irrelevant in the marketplace. Aberdeen Group had previously established2 that the level of investment in technology for post sales service financial management

The 2:11 principle – that a customer receiving good service will share their experience with two people and a customer receiving poor service will go on to tell eleven people – rings true across all sectors and industries. does not live up to its perceived importance, with spreadsheets and accounting systems dominating the technologies that companies rely on to evaluate their service performance. The study concludes that these are cumbersome and inefﬁcient tools for data analytics and urges businesses to consider business intelligence and service parts management solutions. The good news is that there are products on the market that can help businesses take a more strategic approach to managing their service business – and early adopters are already seeing the beneﬁts.

best in class Strategic Service Management (SSM) companies derive 75 per cent higher revenue and 111 per cent higher proﬁts from their service operations than other companies.

Turning challenges into competitive advantages Never before have there been so many tangible results to be gained from investment in service. Transformation of traditional after sales business into Strategic Service Management will go a long way to improving your customer satisfaction levels. Meeting these levels of service will make you stand out from the competition and presents an opportunity to reap the financial benefits on offer. Quality after sales service can be used as a competitive weapon to increase profits and drive customer loyalty. The rewards that good after sales service can offer have been repeatedly confirmed by the analyst community: an AberdeenIndustry Week3 study found that profit margins for after sales service and parts ranged from 25 per cent to 1,000 per cent higher than margins for initial product sales. The study further revealed that after sales service accounted for 20 to 30 per cent of revenues and about 50 per cent of profits for most companies; quite a staggering proposition. Servicing the old goes a long way to driving sales of the new. Investment in service is an enthralling proposition – and one that becomes downright compelling when it can deliver cost savings at the same time. Offering such exciting opportunities to drive your business’ reputation and increase profitability. Whereas companies used to rely on simple Enterprise Resource Planning systems or shared apathy towards their service business, key players are starting to take note of the opportunities this brings. Management consultants are coming on board at major organisations to improve after sales efficiencies. These consultants are even recruiting service management specialists, signalling that they’re in it for the long haul. Previously just a thought or note for the future is becoming reality. Companies renewing their servicing processes and systems are actually reducing cost of service whilst improving customer service and profitability of the service organisation. When the management of service goes strategic, the benefits to the customer and to the business bottom line are tangible and long term. So, is service letting your business down? It’s time for a revolution.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

Evolution or revolution? Change is not replacement; it’s about making what is good better and more in tune with current challenges

TIL® IS the world’s most widely applied framework for Best Practices in the delivery of high quality IT services. Over the past two years, ITIL v2 has been reviewed and transformed to reflect the maturity of IT Service Management Best Practice. Now renamed the ‘ITIL Service Management Practices’, the ITIL® v3 framework consists of a mature set of Best Practice guidelines that reflect the broader scope of IT Service Management, instead of simply focusing on operational processes. ITIL now provides guidelines for the management of IT services across the full lifecycle of a service – from planning and implementation, day to day operation, service improvement, through to the retirement of the service. This new context provides a more logical fit for realising the objectives of the business. Indeed, the refresh has applied a more mature business oriented focus from day one, including strategy for identifying, measuring and communicating the value of ITIL® to the business. Now relevant to even the very top

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echelons of an organisation, ITIL has become more holistic, business focused and easy to apply. ITIL® has evolved.

Service lifecycle approach Moving from a process based framework into a Service Lifecycle framework, ITIL® v3 provides guidance on how IT services should be managed from inception to retirement. To reﬂect this, the library has been restructured according to the main components of the lifecycle. Previously, the IT Infrastructure Library consisted of ten books, each covering a speciﬁc practice and the related processes (Service Support, Service Delivery, Application Management, Software Asset Management, ICT Infrastructure Management, Security Management, Planning to Implement Service Management, The Business Perspective I & II and Small Scale Implementation). These practices have not been made obsolete by ITIL® v3, rather the lifecycle approach can be used to further mature these existing processes to encompass a more service orientated

Words: Markos Symeonides approach to IT Service Management. Now, the ITIL® Service Management Practices comprises of five slimmer core volumes, revolving around the new ITIL® Service Lifecycle: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

Five core volumes The ﬁve core volumes form a cohesive suite of generic IT Service Management Best Practices – the established foundations of the ITIL framework which remain constant. These Best Practice guidelines have been, over the past twenty years, proven to cut costs and improve quality for many hundreds of organisations across the globe. The core guidelines include Best Practices for the ten Service Management processes and the Service Desk function, which have been positioned in the new Service Lifecycle framework according to their relevancy at particular stages of the Service Lifecycle. Some ﬁt within a single Service Lifecycle stage, others appear in multiple phases.

Service Strategy Service Strategy forms the hub of the Service Lifecycle ‘wheel’, with the Service Design, Service Transition and Service Operation phases responsible for the design, implementation and operation of the required services. Continual Service Improvement surrounds the lifecycle wheel, applying quality management and progressive improvement to all phases of the lifecycle. The Service Strategy volume provides a business level view of the ITIL® framework and illustrates Best Practices for symbiosis between IT and the customer. Acting as a hub for the IT Service Lifecycle, it ensures that at each stage in the life of a service, the focus is on supporting the needs of the business. For this reason, the needs of the customer must be clearly understood. The business requirements dictate the policy and objectives of the Service Strategy phase. Services required by the business are identified and the provision of these services is planned and justified as being of strategic value to the organisation. Roles and responsibilities are defined, risks are assessed, and critical success factors for the provision of each service are identified. Service Strategy outlines what should be documented and how, so that it can be communicated to the subsequent lifecycle phases. Where ITIL® v2 focused on aligning IT with the business, ITIL® v3 positions IT services even closer to business processes. Service Strategy provides the interface between business and IT, identifying the customer’s requirements and proposing service solutions in business language, not technical jargon. It is irrefutable that IT services now comprise of indispensable components in the provision of business services and as such should not simply be aligned, but fully integrated. Under ITIL® V3, the business and IT have become a single entity.

Service Design Service Design is responsible for the translation of strategic plans into a service portfolio, specifying the technologies, architectures, models and processes needed to deliver the portfolio. The result is a comprehensive blueprint of everything that is required to support, measure, manage and maintain the service - throughout its entire lifecycle. When designing new services, consideration must be made for existing services which may share the

common technologies and architectures. New services may be dependent on the support of existing services, which themselves may require redesign effort to ensure consistency of provision. For this reason, the Capacity Management, Availability Management and IT Service Continuity Management processes are included within the Service Design volume.

Service Transition The Service Design phase outputs a Service Design Package (SDP) which is produced at the introduction, alteration or retirement of a service. This includes everything from the business requirements of the service to a Service Lifecycle plan and forms the major input of the Service Transition phase. It is the role of the transition processes to manage the implementation and change activities involved in turning a pipeline service into a live service in production. These activities are speciﬁed in the Service Transition Plan which forms part of the SDP, and may include the introduction of new technologies or architectures to support a new service, or the removal of hardware supporting a service which is being retired. Resources must be carefully managed throughout to ensure that transitioning complies with predicted cost, quality and time constraints. As service transitioning is primarily concerned with the management of changes to services and the supporting IT infrastructure, the Service Transition volume incorporates the Best Practice guidelines for Change, Release and Conﬁguration Management processes.

Service Operation When a service has been transitioned into production it is assessed against Service Acceptance Criteria included in the SDP and passes into the realm of Service Operation. Service Operation focuses on the managed, day to day operation of IT services, encompassing Best Practices for the identification and reporting of interruptions in the delivery of services, as well as handling service requests. In addition to Incident Management, Service Operation handles Event Management, Request Fulﬁlment and Access Management. Event Management is a process internal to IT, focusing on proactive identification of problems before they result in service outages. Events coming from system monitoring tools and other sources are ﬁltered and categorised

for analysis to assess the potentiality to cause disruption to services. Incident Management and Request Fulﬁlment are customer facing processes for logging incidents and handling service requests. Standard services and frequently occurring changes can be dealt with by the Service Desk without invoking full scale Change Management processes. Access Management defines policies for granting access to services based on Security and Availability Management constraints and the policies dictated by Service Strategy.

Continual Service Improvement The Continual Service Improvement (CSI) volume reflects the ITIL principle of ongoing optimisation of quality and cost efficiency. It is concerned with improving the health of all aspects of IT Service Management, with drivers coming from both the business and IT. Service performance is measured and analysed and recommendations for improvement are justified and implemented. These improvements in process efficiency lead directly to improvements in service quality and value for money. Continual Service Improvement is the engine which drives Best Practices to continually evolve and improve.

Putting service first The five core texts outlined above form the foundations of ITIL® v3. In addition, there is a Complimentary Guidance Portfolio - a living library of continual improvement. Whilst the core texts remain non prescriptive and will only be updated at the next library refresh, the Complimentary Guidance Portfolio will be continually amended and updated to provide an up to the minute, prescriptive element to the framework. These dynamic publications are aimed at specific target audiences and will be sourced from industry experts, the user community and research and academic institutions. The benefits of adopting the ITIL Best Practice framework are indisputable. Costs are reduced, service quality is improved and customers are more satisfied with the way that IT supports their business. ITIL® v3 offers organisations with existing and relatively mature processes from ITIL® v2 to evolve into a more service centric organisation and enables IT directors to increase the transparency and efficiency of their IT operations.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

Off and running ITIL version 3 is a lot more than simply a catalogue of rules. While ITIL version 1 featured over 40 books and ITIL version 2 was scaled down to a mere 10 core books and ITIL version 3, as already stated, consists of just ﬁve books Words Robert Stroud

HE CAPACITY and capability of IT have continued to evolve over the years until today it is at the heart of business processes and performance. But also, as it has grown more business critical, so the governance of IT has had to evolve to match its growing responsibilities. This has meant that the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has also had to evolve; expanding from its initial, narrow focus on the management of IT operations to address the broader issues associated with the development and delivery of end to end business services. The newest edition of the ITIL best practices framework arrived on May 30. A total of ﬁve books (Service Strategies, Service

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Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement) will replace the current books. These new books emphasise not only the operational aspects of IT but additionally, IT service strategies, design, transition and continuous service improvement. They focus on the positioning of the ITIL processes at appropriate and multiple points in the lifecycle of IT services – as well as providing updated guidance for currently implemented ITIL processes. ITIL version 3 (V3) draws upon lessons learned from earlier ITIL efforts. While ITIL version 1 featured over 40 books and ITIL version 2 was scaled down to a mere 10 core books and ITIL version 3, as already stated, consists of just five books; all reflect the changes in the delivery of IT services over the

past few decades. The objective is to educate IT organizations on the implementation of individual ITIL processes (such as change, incident or problem management, etc.), the adoption of a business service centric approach in order to deliver transparency and manage the relationship between IT and the business. From feedback gathered in the ITIL version 3 development workshops, it was clear that more prescriptive guidance was needed. ITIL version 3 delivers this in the form of detailed flow charts, process models, organization charts, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and feedback loops to speed implementations and lower costs. In addition to new processes that map to current ones, forward thinking and practical ITSM implementations such as knowledge management, service portfolio management and the service catalogue are now included. Practitioners should keep in mind that the templates provided in these documents are merely guidelines for organizations to define their business and IT requirements. If those requirements are not appropriately defined, no template or version of ITIL will deliver much in the way of tangible business results. ITIL has been called the ‘de facto standard’ for IT Service Management, but it is not a standard. ITIL is really a set of best practices that provides guidance on how to implement ITSM in your environment. There is no organizational certiﬁcation. ISO/IEC 20000 offers an ITSM standard and, as part of the development, the alignment with 20000 has been preserved. ITIL version 3 will provide businesses with the ability to measure the value of ITIL process implementation and the business services delivered using those processes. This, in turn, will enable them to focus on business value, rather than the mechanics of IT and therefore enable IT staff to focus their efforts on actions and behaviours that drive value to the business. Driven by a proliferation of support, education and tools from vendors, ITIL version 3 aims to ease implementations. This guidance helps people understand how to better apply process discipline to their environment, so they can ultimately deliver a higher quality of service at a lower cost to the business. Because ultimately, that’s what IT is for; using technology to automate business processes and allowing people to innovate on top of those processes to deliver a higher quality service or product.

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Who’s connected? 54

And who might be trying to compromise your network’s (and your business’s) security

Words: Luke Brown

How are leading organisations overcoming these challenges?

S A business grows and changes along with the times, the complexity of its network, and in turn the level of security risk, also increases. Even a single vulnerability can disrupt a business, including the loss of data or the inability to actually conduct business. On top of this, unknown attacks are becoming far more likely due to the amount of connections to an

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organisation’s network. It is no longer just insiders that have access to critical business assets, but outsiders, such as customers, partners, contractors, outsourcers and service providers, also require connections to an organisation’s network. Here lies the greatest risk to organisations with businesses not knowing to who or what their network is connected.

To succeed, organisations must deliver the agility necessary to drive growth – while assuring that constant change does not compromise network performance, introduce new security risk, or cause the organization to fall out of compliance with industry regulations. Based on conversations with enterprises, here

organisations now ﬁnd these approaches too cumbersome and costly, as assets evolve by the hour. Leading organisations remedy this by applying advances in ‘network assurance’ practices and technologies. Many of the advances stem from efforts to map the Internet itself. Consider how a major regional bank tests whether its business continuity plans are sound. The bank uses assurance practices to scan disaster recovery infrastructure, determining if assets are appropriately secured and linked to internal resources and third parties. In a matter of hours, the bank’s senior IT executives can validate that the disaster recovery infrastructure is in compliance and not compromised by network change. Using similar practices, one of the world’s largest drug makers enforces boundaries between its research and administrative networks. IT staff can regularly test connectivity and ensure intellectual property critical to growth is secure. When necessary, security efforts like patch deployment can be prioritized around related resources.

2. Look before you leap. Understand the implications of change.

are four techniques you can apply to your own organization:

1. Map your network. Repeat regularly. Information about the location and security of devices, hosts, and connections underpins IT strategies. Organisations must have conﬁdence that yesterday’s assumptions are adjusted to reﬂect the current network. This is impossible without a complete, regularly updated understanding of the relationship between assets, as well as whether assets are in compliance with security policy. To achieve this, IT organisations traditionally combined data from multiple, manually updated sources. Most

With enterprises increasingly dependent on IT to drive revenue, it is even more critical for organisations to manage projects to expected business outcomes. However, most IT organisations have no reliable way to predict the full impact of network change – the reason outages and compliance violations often accompany even basic modiﬁcations. This problem is compounded by change and intensive activities such as mergers, outsourcing and consolidation. To manage the ‘ripple effect,’ IT organisations require an accurate understanding of impacted resources. Consider if two Fortune 50 enterprises were to merge. The goal from an IT perspective would be to provide connectivity between their organisations. First, the IT staff would need to identify all entry and exit points within each organization’s network. The IT staff would then be able to pinpoint the full security implications of connectivity before any changes were rolled out. Network assurance practices would be instrumental to accelerating these efforts.

3. Validate that assets are under management and in compliance. When managing the security implications of network change, many IT organisations rely on the word of administrators. Others check a sampling of resources,applyingalgorithmstomakeassumptions about the remainder. Neither method inspires

confidence in the face of an audit. To better manage change, leading organisations should combine network assurance technology and practices to validate that compliance policies are reality across headquarter, divisional, partner, and remote networks. This minimizes human input, shifting compliance check ups from reliance on administrator ‘best guesses’ to auditable, automated processes.

4. Keep score – globally. Is your network growing more or less secure over time? The organisations I talk with address this question not by focusing on the risk associated with specific devices or hosts, but rather by examining the network as a whole. First, their IT staff evaluates the network’s assets and connections, numerically scoring the aggregate level of risk. Members of staff then repeat these steps periodically and compare the results against the baseline score, determining whether risk is increasing or decreasing. With a single number in hand, organisations have an objective way to quantify overall risk or the security impact of specific projects. A score is determined by a mix of elements, including topology, address space, externally exposed devices, the risk profile associated with individual devices, and whether or not devices are in compliance with policy. Effective network assurance practices and technologies typically complete a network evaluation and scoring in days, without impacting service performance. An alternative is to compile existing data from audit and asset management tools. The benefit is that these tools may already be in place; the challenge is that the results may be out of date or incomplete – a function of uneven data quality across toolsets and the time the process takes to execute. No matter how you proceed, the end result should pinpoint your network risk score’s significant contributing factors. This flags problematic network changes or resources, so that they can be managed to improvement before a security breach or non-compliance occurs. In conclusion, organisations can increase their focus on top line business objectives when they have a regularly updated understanding of their network assets. Numerous blue chip organisations have proven this can be achieved without increases to administrative overhead or disruption to operations. Driving growth without this understanding is like a doctor operating without X-rays or an MRI. It can be done, but far less safely and effectively.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

Making services pay Using technology to improve the management of technology services

The only way managed services providers can grow the business, stabilise the revenue stream and improve customer retention is to embrace a business model based upon highly integrated remote monitoring and automation. VitAL : September / October 2007

N AN increasingly competitive environment, managed service providers simply cannot deliver the depth, breadth or quality of service required using the traditional on site, engineer based approach. This highly reactive business model fails to deliver the quality of service that customers require in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 24x7 environment. As a result, too many providers are experiencing untenable levels of customer attrition â&#x20AC;&#x201C; even as high as 30% a year. The only way managed services providers can grow the business, stabilise the revenue stream and improve customer retention is to embrace a business model based upon highly integrated remote monitoring and automation.

Outdated, unworkable The managed services market may be growing fast but, in the UK at least, few organisations are maximising profitability. With an over reliance on customer site visits to carry out

Words: Philip Samson both routine and emergency tasks, too many IT services companies are struggling to create a sustainable growth path. Using the traditional, resource heavy model, each new customer win prompts a ďŹ&#x201A;urry of technical staff recruitment simply to keep pace with demand. Yet these engineers are, at best, only productive 30% of the time. The rest is spent either travelling to and from customer sites or on emergency stand by. What business, irrespective of industry, can afford to have a highly skilled, high cost work force unproductive for the majority of the working day?

Furthermore, frequent on site engineer visits may appease a customer, but their presence is hardly indicative of a well managed, efﬁcient contract. In the majority of cases, it is simply too expensive or time consuming for managed services providers to complete the key routine tasks required to keep customer equipment in good condition. From regular patch updates to disk defragmentation, these core service roles are too often overlooked as organisations struggle to react to the day to day outages affecting customers.

Blue chip service, SME price Yet these day to day outages can be significantly reduced if the routine tasks are carried out effectively. This can, however, never be achieved using a manual on site team – the costs are unsustainable. As blue chip organisations have discovered over the past few years, it is only by combining remote monitoring with automation that core activities can be delivered cost effectively. There is now a very real opportunity for managed services providers to leverage this automated, remote business model to deliver high quality customer services at a fraction of the costs experienced by blue chips. The economies of scale of the managed service model offer SME organisations for the first time access to the robust, highly available IT systems required to be competitive in today’s marketplace. Some providers have dabbled with point solutions that deliver remote monitoring or audit. However, without a completely integrated solution, they have been unable to achieve the high levels of automation required – such as link from email to ticketing system – to truly transform productivity and profitability. Using an integrated, automated solution, providers can ensure patch and security updates are always carried out; that anti spyware is up to date; anti virus software

correctly configured; and temporary Internet files deleted. Furthermore, alerts raised by monitoring software can be acted upon – not by an engineer on standby but by an automated solution that can repair and reboot machines remotely. By creating the right policies and services, via an automated framework, providers can ensure all machines under management are always running at peak efficiency. Managing by policy in this way to improve the quality and timeliness of core service tasks, will significantly improve service levels. Not only will this minimise the expensive and time consuming engineer call outs but, critically, customers receive the quality of service and uptime traditionally experience only by blue chip companies that have made a significant investment in technology.

New Model, Sustainable Growth The implications for the managed service provider’s business model are signiﬁcant. Taking this approach, engineer productivity rises to over 80%, since engineers can manage

It also enables providers to introduce new services, such as back up and disaster recovery, to the portfolio, leveraging the lower cost of delivery to expand the business the majority of customer issues remotely, removing the need for time consuming travel. Furthermore, any engineer that is required on site can feel conﬁdent that the routine tasks

Comparing Traditional IT Support and Managed Services Models Traditional ‘break-ﬁx’

IT Support Managed Services

Product Centric

IT Operations Oriented

Technology Oriented

Business Oriented

Time-Limited Projects

Ongoing Management

Manual/People Intensive

Automated/Software Enabled

Reactive/Time-Consuming

Proactive/Efﬁcient

Onsite Service Required

Remote Management Provided

Mitigates Downtime/Disruption

Maximizes Availability Productivity

Commodity/Transaction Pricing

Subscription/Long-Term Agreements

Variable Revenue Streams

Predictable Revenue Streams Source Kaseya

have been completed and configuration is consistent. Engineers can work in teams remotely to support multiple customers simultaneously. This ensures new customers can be added without requiring an immediate increase in engineering resource. Suddenly the business becomes scalable, thus creating profitable, sustainable growth. And the billing method changes. Rather than enduring the peaks and troughs of the break/fix model, with its annual end of contract flurry of activity in a bid to entice the customer to re sign, organisations can offer a monthly subscription service. In addition to stabilising the cash flow, this approach enables customers to pick and choose service levels to reflect specific business needs – mixing high and medium system availability for different systems. It also enables providers to introduce new services, such as back up and disaster recovery, to the portfolio, leveraging the lower cost of delivery to expand the business and get quantifiable competitive differentiation.

Customer Evolution Of course, not all customers will be ready and willing to shift over to a subscription approach. Indeed, providers face a serious challenge of education to ensure customers understand that fewer on site visits does not mean lower service. However, even if customers remain on an annual contract, the provider will immediately gain from the lower cost of service delivery achieved via the proactive, off site model. Regular information updates combined with proactive visits from engineers taking on an account management role will be key to enable the customer transformation. Using the information collected by the remote monitoring tools, providers can track trends in system performance and predict possible failures ahead of time. Taking this approach both customer and provider can plan and budget for replacements and upgrades, rather than enduring an unpleasant surprise, hefty bill and costly downtime after a failure. Experience in the US demonstrates that customers rapidly acclimatise to the shift in service delivery model, enjoying the far higher service quality and proactive approach. For the provider keen to achieve business expansion and improve productivity and profitability, consigning the resource heavy break/fix model to history is essential. It is only by embracing a remote model with high levels of automation that providers can achieve a scalable, profitable business model that delivers the increase in service quality required by an increasingly demanding customer base.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

Web self-service Are companies providing customers with as good service via the web as they could get from their supermarket?

A 58

COMPANYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S customer service is often its only point of long term differentiation, yet so many companies fail to deliver good customer service both online and off. A recent benchmark study into the state of web selfservice in the UK found that 57 percent of UK companies offered little to no web selfservice: this is an alarming statistic given that organisations are increasingly using the web to interact and do business with consumers and business customers. There is no doubt that the number of people online is increasing at a phenomenal pace

VitAL : September / October 2007

with 56 percent of teenagers creating their own content online and online purchases, in the UK alone, expected to reach ÂŁ39 billion by 2010. Both businesses and customers are increasingly utilising the web, focusing on the younger audience as the priority. However, online customer service is surprisingly lagging behind. The research highlighted the fact that businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of their web presence to improve the service they provide to their customers, despite the clear benefits of increased sales, conversion rates,

Words: Ian Jones

businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of their web presence to improve the service they provide to their customers, despite the clear beneďŹ ts

companies are moving their customer service online before considering their broader corporate objectives such as, improving customer retention, increasing sales and growing revenue. This movement has led to many organisations offering inadequate web self-service to their current and potential customers. In building effective web self-service solutions, companies need to do it well, or not do it at all. Customers find it more frustrating if they search for answers or pose a query and can not find the answer or get a slow or poor quality response, than if you had offered no facility to search or pose that query in the first place.

In web self service, layout is not a limiting factor; the same information can be laid out in many different ways to meet the needs of individuals or groups

reduced abandoned rates and reduced costs. It is clear that a majority of UK companies are still failing to realise their full potential for customer retention and revenue growth by falling short in customer self-service via the web. In the past companies were able to get away with simply having a basic website with little or no customer service, but today’s consumers expect a lot more from companies online. Customers want convenience in access, the right answers - ﬁrst time and prompt and accurate responses - every time. Customers are more likely to use the Internet when they want a quick answer and believe these can be easily found using the web. Often customers who choose to utilise online customer service are PC literate, high value customers who are simply trying to avoid the call centre. In order to cater for these customers, companies need to ensure that they are providing the best web self-service available. However, many

When building effective web self-service companies can learn a lot from the principles used when designing supermarkets. The goals of the supermarket are very similar to those of web self-service, with the overall objectives being to get customers to purchase products, to encourage them to buy more than they planned and to make the experience pleasant enough for it to become a regular habit. For web self-service the goal is not spending money, but consuming information. Here are some insights that demonstrate the parallels between the supermarket and web self-service: • Appearance; layout matters: The entrance to the store has to be attractive or customers won’t enter, so the entrance is usually a rich display of colour and attractive produce. Like the entrance to a store, the self-service on a web site must be clearly marked and easy to ﬁnd. It must be designed to appear approachable and attractive to potential users. • The more time you spend the more you buy: Flowers and fruit are often located at the front of a supermarket. This is to slow people down from pavement speed to purchasing speed with the use of colours and smells. It is the same with web sites; companies need to make the start of the help page as interesting as possible to slow customers down to a reading pace. The goal of web selfservice is for visitors to consume information and become repeat customers. If customers can be drawn into buying additional services or products whilst experiencing web self-

service, this is an added bonus. • Customers must be able to find what they are looking for: Whilst a supermarket wants to encourage people to buy additional items, customers will probably not become regular visitors if they can’t find the things they went in for. The same is true for web self-service, so developers need to offer a variety of ways to find information to suit different types of users, as well as making sure that content is up to date and relevant. The limiting factor for supermarkets is that the physical layout has to meet the needs of all the different customer types. In web selfservice, layout is not a limiting factor; the same information can be laid out in many different ways to meet the needs of individuals or groups. However, providing a web self-service solution to a wide variety of customers can be challenging because it is difficult to predict the information demands of each individual customer. There is much less inertia to be overcome in visiting a web site than in writing an email or phoning a call centre and because of this, customer queries can be much more wide ranging and varied. The unpredictable nature means that web self-service solutions have to adapt on two levels if they wish to succeed: Content: Like a supermarket the self-service web site has to constantly monitor its stock; out of date items have to be removed, items that are less than satisfactory have to be replaced by items which are. Finally, there has to be constant monitoring of requests for items that are not currently available and there needs to be a regular review as to whether they should be added. Layout: When companies regularly receive calls and emails for information that is already on the web site, it suggests that the location or access method is inappropriate. Information may have to be relocated or made accessible from multiple points so it is certain that it can be found: different customer types will look for information in different ways. Companies are recognising the importance of web self-service and if they can learn from some of the basic principles used by supermarkets, they will be able to provide their customers with effective online customer service. By using new technology available in the market place, companies will not only be able to cope with the changing information demands of customers, but will harness these changes to continuously drive modification in content, layout and presentation, ensuring that they stay ahead of customer demand. And with fewer physical limitations than supermarkets, companies may soon see innovation in web self-service overtake innovation in the retail sector.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

A new way of walking The Impact of ITIL® v3 on Service Management Tools and their Users – a new way of doing classic tasks Words: Mark Sykes & Ralph Gray Précis As with other parts of the business, IT Service Management needs to be ﬂexible to meet evolving demands and challenges. ITIL v3, with expanded scope and new processes, presents additional challenges to the vendors of traditional Service Management / Service Desk tools. Will the vendors and their customers be able to adapt to the change?

Introduction and Background 60

The publication of ITIL®, version 3 (called ITIL v3 hereafter) in June this year means that many customers who have implemented their processes based on the previous version are wondering about the implications on their day to day operations. Likewise, the vendors of integrated service management tools will have to address their tool offerings to ensure future alignment with the new version of ITIL.

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Lets take a practical look at the implications of ITIL v3 on service providers, and on the tools they use. What has changed in ITIL v3 that will impact service providers? The following sections look at some of these changes, and highlight some key issues. Incident Management The deﬁnition of Incident Management has changed, effectively splitting the process into three separate processes: • Incident Management; • Event Management; • Request Fulﬁlment. Most service desk tools already cater for the separation between incidents (an event has already occurred), alerts (warning – a threshold has been reached) and service requests (nothing’s broken, but we would like IT to do something). Therefore, service providers can quickly implement this aspect

of ITIL v3 by ensuring that incidents, events and requests are all classified correctly, albeit within an existing ‘incident’ record. In most circumstances, this will be a simple configuration change. This will also support enhanced reporting capabilities so that when producing statistics, data on incidents, service requests and events (alerts) can be reported separately. Tool vendors may wish to update their packages eventually, to align with the new terminology, but this should be seen as an evolving update, rather than something that needs to be done immediately (provided that incidents can be classified into incidents, events/alerts and service requests). Configuration Management Configuration Management has changed its name to Service Asset and Configuration Management. Some service providers may

ﬁnd this a little confusing, because the Asset Management component of this process is usually handled by the asset component of the organisation’s financial management system. The challenge for tool vendors will depend on the two major circumstances: • Do I build full asset management functionality into my service management tool, as some customers may require this; or • Do I build an interface between my configuration management tool and the organisation’s asset management tool? The greater recognition given in ITIL v3 to the link between Asset Management and Conﬁguration Management means that neither service providers nor tool vendors can ignore this relationship any longer.

Service Knowledge Management System ITIL v3 introduced a new term call the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). What is this, and how can service providers and tool vendors meet the requirements? The SKMS is not a new concept, just a new name for an existing concept, but it also helps clarify the relationship between many of the other data repositories in ITIL®. Essentially, the SKMS is a structured approach to managing all of your data, information and knowledge about your service management activities. Gone is the concept (usually from misinterpretation) that everything is in the Conﬁguration Management Data Base (CMDB). Tool vendors will be happy that the CMDB now has a clearer deﬁnition, more closely aligned to what they have generally implemented. The illustration shows one view of the SKMS. A real challenge for tool vendors of integrated service management tools will be to adopt this structure, and to assist service providers to manage all the data and information about their services, customers and underlying infrastructure. For many organisations, most of these items will currently be held in disparate databases, and a key aspect will continue to be how vendors can manage the integration of these items within their service management tools, including managing the alphabet soup of acronyms: AMIS Availability Management Information System CDB formerly the Capacity Data Base, now “retired”

CMDB Configuration Management Data Base CMIS Capacity Management Information System CMS Configuration Management System SKMS contains all service management information

‘Software as a Service’ Option Whilst traditional ‘legacy’ solutions may still be in use within most organisations, more and more companies are migrating to ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) solutions. SaaS solutions are web based software applications that are typically hosted by a third party provider and are used by the customer via the internet utilising their web browser. One of the key features of these types of solutions is that customers are not paying for the software, but they pay for using it via the use of subscription licensing, and because the solution is web-based, no application has to be installed on the user’s computer. The solution developer retains control of the application, there is no need for internal administration, development, testing, etc. and the associated costs of running and maintaining the infrastructure to support the client server based application. So these new solutions can more rapidly evolve to cater for the ever changing demands and challenges that IT, including ITIL v3, brings. For example, if we look at Service-now.com as an example of SaaS, the solution provider handles the monitoring, tuning, availability and updates to the application. As the customer

only accesses the tool via the internet, all of the management and infrastructure challenges are the responsibility of the vendor. In this way, the vendor is able to rapidly make changes to their hosted solution, with ‘mass roll-out’ and the pain that goes along with that becomes a thing of the past for those organisations that have moved away from client server tools. So with ITIL v3 launching new processes and new terminology and with the ability to quickly make configuration changes, changes to templates, etc. the demands of the customer can be swiftly achieved. SaaS solutions can eliminate the obvious disruption that a software upgrade can cause for users and administrators of the system and it also means that the system stays fresh and up to date, allowing the customer to determine when to implement the latest functionality or module.

Summary Neither service providers, nor their tool vendors, should be overly concerned about the introduction of ITIL v3. It isn’t a radical change that will require organisations to go out and buy a brand new integrated service management suite of tools, as many aspects may just require re conﬁguration of existing toolsets. But where the opportunity does arise, then most definitely look at how vendors are meeting the new requirements of ITIL v3, and how you can maximise your investment and achieve the greatest business beneﬁt.

September / October 2007 : VitAL

IT transformed by â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Y2Kâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hysteria How the emergence of the IT service desk changed the management of business processes Introduction of business processes into IT

It all began in the lead up to the millennium, when mass hysteria and fear over what would happen to IT systems as the world entered the 21st Century predominated in the thoughts of business chiefs. Would all networks collapse? Would companies be able to cope and deliver their services? Extensive media hype led companies to invest heavily in hardware and software tools to address potential problems. IT departments had money thrown at them by the business and they bought accordingly. However, organisations soon realised that this was an error. The lack of business processes used in IT at the time resulted in unnecessary expenditure on a massive scale and business responded by developing processes to make IT more accountable and

VitAL : September / October 2007

manageable. IT departments needed to know everything about their systems and integrate themselves fully with the wider organisation. They had to make wholesale changes and become a facilitator of the business; not only delivering a better service but also saving and making the company money.

IT geeks becoming business savvy? Before this shake up, the perception of the IT department was that it loitered in the background, occasionally surfacing to respond to problems with the system. IT dealt with user requests and system issues as they came in and this became the established approach to helpdesk delivery. Users within the business would call the IT department with a problem and technicians would endeavour to ďŹ x it as quickly as possible, with responsibility being

Words: Richard Althorp

Extensive media hype led companies to invest heavily in hardware and software tools to address potential problems. IT departments had money thrown at them by the business and they bought accordingly.

passed from one person to another depending on the scale of the problem. This not only made it very difﬁcult for the IT department to track the history of an incident but also to prioritise jobs effectively. The IT department needed to change how it was being perceived and the only way they could do this was by introducing formal management processes. The IT director and manager has necessarily become more business savvy and transformed from the ‘technical geek’ into the ‘strategic thinker’. Like any other division, IT departments needed to improve business processes. Previous less structured approaches to service had put the IT department under considerable pressure by making it impossible to set deliverable expectations and communicate them effectively to the organisation. They had to start communicating in a common business language that the whole organisation could understand. As a result, service management has become critical in enabling IT departments to take a business driven approach to their management. IT directors and managers are increasingly looking to demonstrate the strategic business value generated by their department and deliver a higher quality service in line with the needs of the organisation it serves.

Emergence of the IT service desk The key to the helpdesk maturing and evolving into the service desk was the emergence of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). The approach was initially developed by Government departments as a framework to address IT service support and delivery issues and has subsequently been adopted by the private sector. In both the public and private spaces, it provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision. ITIL’s introduction has been vital for the development of business processes because it has established a set of guidelines and a common language for IT operations. This includes service delivery, problem resolution and solving customer enquiries, a language the

whole business could understand. Adopting this framework has helped IT departments manage their processes more efficiently and this in turn has reduced costs, improved productivity, use of skills and experience in the team and boosted customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery. The formalisation of IT processes has spurred development in the systems designed to manage the helpdesk function. These service desk solutions are now playing a central role in facilitating, rather than dictating, business processes. One of the key benefits of the service desk is that it has enabled the IT department to implement, monitor and manage service level agreements (SLAs) for its internal clients. SLAs can be allocated according to roles and responsibilities and can then be categorised under headings such as ‘critical’, ‘high’ or ‘medium’. These criteria can then be cross referenced with the applications/assets that these individuals need to perform their core functions. For example, remote access for a field engineer may be assigned ‘critical’ ranking because without it they can’t perform their job. In practical terms this means the IT department is now better placed to ensure its services are aligned with the requirements of the organisation. It’s the implementation of these systems that can help IT managers record and evaluate the number of incidents their users are experiencing. Before IT departments improved the management of their processes, they ticketed isolated incidents and a problem couldn’t be identified because the incidents had no linkage or life cycle. The introduction of the service desk has expedited this process, logging issues in a knowledgebase which is automatically searched when calls are logged, to identify trends and previous resolutions. This ensures that time spent on more complex queries is maximised. All of these best practice processes make call handling as straightforward and effective as possible, both for the service desk and for the customer. By maintaining a detailed audit trail of call actions it ensures that anyone can

The millennium bug looked like it was going to crash head on with IT and destroy everything in its path. Instead, it provided the ‘IT geek’ with an opportunity to ﬁght back and emerge as a ‘strategic thinker’ rapidly familiarise themselves with the history of a particular query and pick up where the previous technician left off.

Future steps With ITIL® now an established framework, working towards standards such as ISO20000 is likely to become a major priority for IT departments. ISO20000 comprises two distinct documents: a speciﬁcation for a service management system and a code of practice. Together, these form a top down framework to deﬁne the features of service management processes that are essential for the delivery of high quality services. As time goes on, more service providers and vendors are likely to adopt this as a means of demonstrating their expertise.

IT fights back The millennium bug looked like it was going to crash head on with IT and destroy everything in its path. Instead, it provided the ‘IT geek’ with an opportunity to fight back and emerge as a ‘strategic thinker’. By taking a business driven approach and becoming definable, repeatable and measurable, the IT department has come round in full circle from being a perceived drain on budgets to a true facilitator of the business.

September / October 2007 : VitAL