As a business leader, you understand the importance of strategy, governance, and compliance. For the most part, you will want to be certain that your IT service provider incorporates these elements within their organization, but often this is out of the direct control of the business customer.
If your business uses third-party IT service providers, you will want to investigate that your providers use strategy, governance, and compliance, but there will rarely be an occasion to negotiate the specific terms of such elements. IT service practices are where the rubber meets the road and where you need to focus on fit-for-purpose IT service provision for your business.
Most ITSM provisioning uses a combination of internal and external services. It’s common for the internal IT organization to take on the role of managing third-party service providers; however, this is often an area where problems can occur if the IT organization does not clearly understand the business service needs. There are more than enough examples of internal IT organizations that do not understand business requirements alone.
It’s a pretty safe bet that anyone reading this article has heard of McDonald’s. Started in 1940 and now a household name around the world, there is a reason that a McDonald’s consumer is a loyal one—sustained and consistent customer experience. As a business, McDonald’s is like any other. It produces products and services, it has competitors, it must change its services as consumer tastes change, and it relies on a complex supply chain and technology to deliver to customers. Today companies and businesses require a similar business model that incorporates not only the traditional models of profitability but also a highly systemic, coherent and unified IT management structure that would replicate the efficiency of McDonald’s.
It should not matter whether your IT services are provided internally or externally if you are knowledgeable about what you need and how to get it from IT. Most ITSM books are written for IT and start from a lower level of IT component detail and work their way up to a service. We are doing the opposite here: deconstructing a business service to identify what service artifacts you need to get the right service.
It is important that as a business owner you are aware of how to articulate your business needs, define business services, and create business outcome statements and improvement statements. But it is also equally important to look at the basics of IT service practices that ITSPs use and what you need to know to develop a beneficial relationship with your ITSP. Because ITIL is the globally recognized best practice and stands alone in this part of the ITSM spectrum, we focus on it as the basis for understanding and exploiting IT service practices for business profitability.
With RFID, Think Process and Not Just Technology
As always, the very real danger is that managers themselves will become seduced by the new technologies and then appreciate them only superficially and misunderstand their true purpose and potential.
How are Firewall Systems Incorporated in Remote Monitoring?
Firewall implementations are available today from a wide array of vendors. With the ever-increasing awareness of network security and the costs of lost information, many new firewall implementations continue to emerge.
What is ITSP Sourcing?
An entire library could be written on this topic. In the ITSM world, sourcing is considered part of the service design model and something every business customer plans well before the service requirements are finalized.
