ITSM MIDTERM

This is considered the most popular framework centered on delivering IT services. It has become the standard for organizations to use as it aims to provide guidance on how services must be defined, developed, built, and operated.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

following known to be using ITIL for their internal operating guidelines.

*Microsoft

*IBM

*Hewlett-Packard Enterprise

This is a structured set of activities made to accomplish specified objectives and takes different inputs to turn them into defined outputs. It can be envisioned as a set of activities performed one after the other to achieve something.

Process

In V3, it is said that ITIL is made up of processes and functions.

ITIL Processes

This is described as a team or group of people and the tools and resources they use to conduct processes or activities. These teams could be the networking team, the Java team, the web development team, or any group of people that are selected based on their depth of knowledge on a specific specialty.

Function

In ITIL V3, there are 26 processes and only four (4) functions. Processes do not run by themselves and need people to perform the individual process activities that come from functions. Simply put, functions give the resources needed by the processes to complete their objectives.

ITIL Functions

This can be considered an extension of a process as it not only defines the activities but also brings various capabilities and tools together to accomplish a set of objectives.

Practice

ITIL 4 fused functions with processes to produce the concept of practices. For instance, a problem management team in an organization is considered a function in ITIL 3, and they work on problem management processes to meet their objectives. In ITIL 4, it becomes problem management practice which is a system whose objective is to deliver all problem management outputs. This is changed in ITIL 4 to collaborate better and to deliver value efficiently.

ITIL Practices

seven (7) ITIL guiding principles which are a set of recommendations for ITSM that help organizations make smart decisions and take actions aligned with their goals

-Focus on Value

-Start Where You Are

-Progress Iteratively with Feedback

-Collaborate and Promote Visibility

-Think and Work Holistically

-Keep it Simple and Practical

-Optimize and Automate

Everything the organization does must always bring value to its stakeholders, specifically the customers. The services should be designed with a customer’s satisfaction in mind. It is key to determine what the customers want to precisely match it with a value they will appreciate. But this is something that changes over time that can benefit an organization to grow with their customers.

Focus on Value

This does not mean resetting everything from the start. This means focusing on what is already available and improving that existing system. Existing systems already have value on their own, so it is best to assess their strength and use that as the starting point. Focus on optimization and improvement as much as possible.

Start Where You Are

This reminds the people involved not to accomplish everything at once, as it can be overwhelming. Divide tasks into smaller parts and focus on each step to assess the value it can provide. Getting feedback after every step is also advised to ensure problems are solved, and oversights are reworked before it is too late. Progressing iteratively with sustained evaluation assures results are useful, tangible, and completed promptly.

Progress Iteratively with Feedback

This aims to take advantage of the different sets of strengths and weaknesses that each member of the IT team has through delivering collaborative efforts. It is best to prioritize honesty and visibility to collaborate effectively. Communicate each progress, whether good or bad and allow to be open to whatever feedback others might give.

Collaborate and Promote Visibility

To create the best service, it all must be connected, as no service, practice, process, or function stands alone. All activities should align with the same focus on the delivery of value. This is critical when working in a collaborative environment to ensure that the work does not affect any part of the organization and create any hindrance or disruption.

Think and Work Holistically

This is a reminder to not over-complicate anything to be done. Complicating any process increases the risks of going wrong and having more errors. Continuously assess the work and ensure that only the necessary steps are involved. Eliminate any process, step, or action that does not add value to the organization or the customer.

Keep it Simple and Practical

Optimization makes things functional, so automation of any activity should be optimized first to utilize the resources to the best of their limits. Automation relieves the work on frequent and repetitive tasks. The human resources that could have been working on those tasks can be put into more complex tasks that contribute to the value.

Optimize and Automate

Why cant the organization cannot choose only one or two principles to apply?

The organization must consider the relevance of all principles and how they can be applied together in their ITSM practice which involves reviewing and updating existing processes, training employees on the principles, and using the principles to guide better decision-making and action-taking

It brings people together from across disciplines to collaborate as a unit with an open mind and to remove inefficiencies.

DevOps

DevOps is the combination of?

development and operation teams to deliver an objective

In DevOps, the responsibility of accomplishing a task is not considered an individual responsibility, but a shared one. Wherein if the person in charge fails or succeeds, the entire team gets the consequence or the praise. This creates a culture that acknowledges the fact that humans make mistakes. What is this culture?

Blameless Culture

They are known to use DevOps in their organization.

-Amazon

-Etsy

-Netflix

-Target

The heart of DevOps, which is composed of a DevOps team consisting of a pool of tooling professionals.

People

This team is built around an application; if an application is being developed, all the people responsible for its development and operations must be grouped to create a single team.

DevOps team

DevOps team example which is an Internet banking program for individuals and small business owners

Application Z

The owner of the product and service backlog

Product Owner

For coding and unit testing

Developer

Involved in developing test scripts

Tester

Designs the software and are shared across multiple DevOps teams

Architect

For managing aspects of IT security

IT Security

The CI/CD pipeline consisting of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment is used for effective DevOps Methodology. This is a set of DevOps best practices to help teams deliver software faster and more efficiently.

Process

This provides a central repository for developers to use throughout a project. This automates anything in the central repository to reduce errors and compile artifacts into organized builds to perform initial tests.

Continuous Integration

This delivers the builds into the test environment and then needs human intervention to deploy the tested builds into production. It aims to get code changes like fixes or configuration changes into production faster and safely.

Continuous Delivery

This performs beyond Continuous Delivery and deploys automatically to production. This is viewed as a build on the established practices of Continuous Delivery, but this focuses more on a complete end-to-end automated approach, while Continuous Delivery requires human intervention.

Continuous Deployment

This is often regarded as the most important of processes. There are several tools that claim to support DevOps. However, choosing the right tools is just as crucial since not all tools can be used for all technologies.

Technology

As example of technology, for the source code repository function, these can be used as both provide a versioning capability for the source code and can be integrated with other toolsets for automation.

Git and Subversion

In technology example, Subversion is under the _______ category, while Git is under the ______________.

Central Version Control System (CVCS); Distributed Version Control System (DVCS)

This has a server-client relationship to store and retrieve the code, and the developer is required to first check out the existing code, make changes, and check it back in.

CVCS

In this, each developer has the entire code on their computer that requires no check-out and check-in, allowing multiple developers to work seamlessly. As the source code is locally available in this, accessing, adding, combining, and delivering the code is faster than in CVCS.

DVCS

DevOps principles are everchanging, but these are the most widely believed set of principles, known as?

CALMS

CALMS stands for?

Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing

This cannot be changed in an instant as it is embedded into human behavior and would require an overhaul to do so.

Culture

some behavioral traits that DevOps seeks to change in Culture

-Taking responsibility for the entire product and not just the task performed

-Stepping out of the comfort zone to innovate

-Communication, collaborating, and developing an affinity with the teams

-Experimenting as much as possible

an enabler of faster delivery and crucial for providing rapid feedback. Repetitive tasks that do not require human intelligence are the kinds of activities that can be efficiently automated. For instance, building infrastructure before was a major task for hardware architects and administrators and building servers took a significant amount of time. Now, cloud infrastructures are much utilized, and servers can be created through coding.

Automation

DevOps borrowed from this technology which is about keeping things simple and not overcomplicating them. This allows the teams to focus and work on things that are easy to comprehend and simple to work with.

Lean

The first part of the Lean principle addresses that?

That the primary issue is not to bloat the way to do things, just do them straightforward and minimally.

The second part of the Lean principle is?

To reduce waste from the methodology such as defects and convoluted processes. Defects and convoluted processes delay the overall delivery, and it takes much more time and money to address and fix them.

The only way to find out whether the outcome is favorable is by measuring it. This principle provides direction about the measures to implement and keep tabs to feel the reception of the overall software delivery. Feedback could be used as a measurement to automate processes.

Measurement

Measurements in monitoring such as in applications and infrastructure, can what?

It can indicate when an event is a warning or an exception.

This is the need for collaboration and knowledge sharing between people. The shared knowledge, experience, ideas, and thoughts can help others in making them better and more profound. This leads to collaboration instead of competition and skepticism. In DVCS, accessing, adding, combining, and delivering the code is faster compared to CVCS.

Sharing

This is a software company that has its service management called ServiceNow IT Service Management.

ServiceNow

It is a modern, cloud-based, and silo-busting ITSM solution that promises to consolidate on-premises legacy tools into a single cloud platform. It uses AI and machine learning capabilities with virtual agent chatbots to help IT staff and boost overall productivity by 30%.

ServiceNow IT Service Management

following goals ServiceNow ITSM aims to provide

-Boost employee satisfaction by enabling employees to solve issues 24/7, raise questions, and get relevant, precise, and consistent information.

-Make smarter decisions, automate services, and constantly enhance services in role-based workspaces.

-Triage, collaborate, and enable agents to resolve incidents and stay connected from anywhere to resolve risky incidents and improve agent productivity by 30%.

facts about the ‘Entertainment’ value of ServiceNow

-The peak value of The Star Entertainment Group offers diverse hotel and entertainment experiences and gaming facilities as it aims to become the leading integrated resort company in Australia.

-The company’s IT Operation & Services team uses ServiceNow ITSM through its Project Renovation program to drive improvements in services, security, and user satisfaction. The different departments in each property of the company have their processes and methods for service request management before, but with ServiceNow ITSM, they were able to digitalize over 80 paper-based processes and have a single platform that increases the efficiency of their technology service operations.

-The IT team now has real-time visibility into the company’s entire infrastructure, which helps enable faster diagnosis of trends in incidents, such as constant load increase within an application that can negatively impact the employees or the customer experience. This has helped the company to proactively fix problems before they become one and minimize the impact on the employees and customers.

facts about the ‘Education’ value of ServiceNow

-The University of Maryland in the United States prides itself on having state-of-the-art technology to become a leader in education, research, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

-It has a Division of Information Technology that provides world-class support for university staff and students to access new services, get issues resolved quickly, and have their questions answered. The division uses ServiceNow ITSM, which has transformed how they deliver service. They now have a unified IT Support Center portal that allows university staff and students to report issues, access services, and share questions and answers with other school members.

-With the portal, users can ask ServiceNow to create a website for a new research project or to schedule delivery of audiovisual equipment for a class or an entire course. This integration has helped the school reduce incident resolution times by 75%, reduce incident volumes by 25%, and reduce incorrectly routed incidents by 66%.

facts about the ‘Finance’ value of ServiceNow

-Banco de Costa Rica is a financial conglomerate that drives Costa Rican socioeconomic development, including economic growth, attraction of foreign investment, and sustainable tourism development.

-The bank used ServiceNow ITSM in 2016 for its service catalog, allowing customers to complete processes digitally using their platform. This was done after the need for technical support rises for their more than 250 offices. From initial usage by their IT team, their IT agents are now able to address problem management, catalog requests, and troubleshooting.

-By their integration of ServiceNow ITSM, the bank has increased its workflows by 22%, and the number of customer requests has increased by 48%. Service requests outside the bank using a ticketing system have also increased by 41%, and problems have decreased by 24%.

facts about the ‘Government’ value of ServiceNow

-The city of Raleigh in North California is the home of about 500,000 people and is recognized as one of the best places to live in the United States.

-Before integrating ServiceNow, the city operated various IT service desk systems that manually tracked ticket status updates using spreadsheets and email, making it harder to resolve issues quickly. Now, with ServiceNow ITSM, the city has replaced six (6) legacy service management solutions and reduced the city’s IT call center team from eight (8) to two (2) employees. The six (6) employees were placed in areas where they more directly impact the services provided to the city staff.

-The city saved $315,000 on IT service desk costs and garnered 300 daily visits to the employee portal, with less than 25% resulting in manual entry.

facts about the ‘Healthcare’ value of ServiceNow

-The Francis Crick Institute, Europe’s largest biomedical research facility, is dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology of health and diseases to discover new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat illnesses.

-As Crick brings 1,500 scientists and support staff working collaboratively across disciplines, they were committed to letting them continue working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

-Using ServiceNow, Crick built a track-and-trace application within 22 days. This created an automated workflow across testing, results, and notifications where staff can manage their testing with results synced to the building entry system. It allowed the staff to continue their critical research work.

facts about the ‘Retail’ value of ServiceNow

-7/11 is a convenience store with over 66,000 stores in 17 countries. Its success relies on its customer focus, which includes prioritizing an easier way for customers to receive help when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. They began to separate customer feedback from help requests.

-ServiceNow ITSM was used to build the 7-Help Customer Help Desk consisting of various help desks, including payroll, HR, and merchandising help desks, to separate help desks for IT and facilities maintenance.

-This gave customers and store franchisees a single platform for reporting issues when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it by prioritizing cases when they arrive and routing them to the right agent for rapid resolution. This has a 205% improvement in case resolution rates and a 75% reduction in customer service response time.

This is a framework for organizations that want to implement, monitor, and improve the best IT management practices.

Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT)

COBIT has also emphasized differentiating “IT Governance” from “IT Management,” wherein the former, IT Governance, is?

more concerned with setting standards and objectives

COBIT has also emphasized differentiating “IT Governance” from “IT Management,” wherein the latter, IT Management, is?

tasked with execution

Benefits of IT Governance: IT governance influences how the performance of the IT department will be measured. It also dictates where measuring points of the performance should be located within the IT organization.

Measuring Performance

For example, if the mission is to become the best web hosting service worldwide, then IT governance must establish evaluation points for this goal. For this benefit, the percentage of server uptime percentage could be a metric to consider. The same goes for feedback from customers who use the service and are prepared to endorse it as reliable.

Measuring Performance

IT governance is used to monitor budgetary matters. A system should be set up to monitor IT spending to ensure that it is justified in proportion to the business’s needs for its services.

Budgetary Matters

When new IT resources are purchased, the money to be spent must pass the scrutiny of the IT department’s governing techniques.

Budgetary Matters

IT governance standards are also applicable to disaster planning. IT governance should establish clear damage control whenever the worst-case scenarios happen, such as a security and service failure.

Disaster Planning

This in the banking industry should be applied since critical financial records are stored on servers. IT governance sets standards for backup redundancy, ensuring that a massive data calamity would never leave critical records completely unrecoverable.

Disaster Planning

IT governance is also used to help an organization define and position itself.

For example, suppose the company is determined to build a reputation as having the most responsive service desk. In that case, IT governance should be used to establish and monitor incident resolution times.

Reputation

Suppose the business does an internet-based stock trading platform and earns commissions on every trade. In that case, IT governance sets a particular threshold for the specific number of trades needed to be processed on any given day.

Reputation

When pursuing ITSM principles, there is a constant effort to show how IT is creating real business value. But when it comes to security, IT professionals are caught in the middle where they are not much credited for preventing things that never happen but will face every consequence if they fail to prevent a security breach.

ITSM Security

This is a highly tricky facet of ITSM, as it is difficult to prove that a security system is working. It can appear that a security system is not working, but it is preventing various dangerous attacks.

Security

following security key performance indicators (Security KPIs) used to monitor the effectiveness of information security.

-KPI 1: Number of Implemented Preventative Measures

-KPI 2: Implementation Duration

-KPI 3: Number of High-Risk Security Incidents

-KPI 4: Number of Security-Related Downtimes

-KPI 5: Number of Security Tests

-KPI 6: Number of Identified Shortcomings During Security Tests

This charts the number of security measures that have been implemented based on perceived vulnerability or a known or successful intrusion attempt. This can standardize resolutions and be used to keep track of security changes.

KPI 1: Number of Implemented Preventative Measures

This tracks the time between the point a justified security concern is identified and the point in time when a resolution is placed. For example, the time when malware is detected until it is completely cleaned out of the organization’s server. This can be used as a reference completion time in case the same incident happens again.

KPI 2: Implementation Duration

This tracks the number of security incidents and them with a specific severity level. Putting severity levels for incidents will help the IT department prioritize major and high-risk problems that could jeopardize the organization’s operation. A malware attack is more of a priority than a blue screen monitor.

KPI 3: Number of High-Risk Security Incidents

This tracks the number of downtimes that prevented service from being available to customers due to security concerns. This is for documentation purposes that could be used for explaining quarterly reports. All significant information should be listed, such as the cause, affected operations, duration time, and resolution.

KPI 4: Number of Security-Related Downtimes

This tracks the number of proactive steps taken that measure existing data security, such as tests and training. Hiring white-hat hackers to purposely harm the system is an effective way to test the security system, and they can further pinpoint the organization's vulnerabilities.

KPI 5: Number of Security Tests

This takes the measurements in KPI 5 and plots them against the identified shortcomings during the tests. This organizes the weaknesses of the security system to help categorize them based on severity. This way, the IT team can easily understand and address shortcomings.

KPI 6: Number of Identified Shortcomings During Security Tests