UNIT - II

Service Delivery and

Support Process
 Topics
• Service Level Management

• Financial Management

• IT Service Continuity Management

• Capacity Management

• Availability Management

• Configuration Management

• Service Desk

• Incident Management

• Release Management

2
 Service Delivery Process
• Service delivery process is concerned with the management of IT services
and involves several management practices to ensure that IT services are
provided as agreed between the service provider and the customer.
• It is one of the two important components of IT service management
process.
• This Unit deals with service delivery process which involves five
sub-processes.
• These sub-processes concentrate on long-term planning and improvement
of IT services.
 Service Level Management
• Service level management deals with various issues related to service
delivery across business units and helps in the management of services that
an organization provides to its customers in a cost-effective manner.
• It assists in delivering, maintaining and improving IT services up to the
desired level through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and
reporting to achieve the customers' requirements, expectations and
objectives.
• Main objectives of service level management are to align and manage IT
services through a process of definition, agreement, operation
measurement and review.
• An organization which wishes to implement service level management must
first analyze the types of services that it provides to the customers and finds
out types of existing service contracts that are currently in place for these
services.
• This exercise gives the full insight of the services that an organization can
provide to its customer and can help in developing a good service level
management process.
• Before going into the implementation details of service level management
into business, let us first define the two terms: service level agreement and
operational level agreement.
 Service Level Management
Service Level Agreement
• The scope of service level management includes defining the IT services for
the organization and establishing service level agreements (SLA) for them.
• SLA is the written negotiated agreement documenting the required levels of
services to be provided by the organization to the customer.
• It is the part of service contract. It clearly states common understanding
about services, priorities, unambiguous and measurable service targets,
responsibilities, guarantees and warranties, IT service quality requirements
(for example, performance and security) and communication structures.
• It usually includes elaborate definition of services, performance measures,
problem management, disaster recovery, customer duties, warranties,
termination of agreement, etc.
• Each area of service scope should have the level of service defined for it.
Level of Service (LOS) is a measure-of-effectiveness by which the quality of
service on elements of IT infrastructure is determined. For example, SLA
may clearly describe the levels of availability, serviceability, performance,
operation, or other attributes of the service such as charges and billing.
 Service Level Management
Operational Level Agreement (OLA)
• The relationship between the internal parts of an organization is defined in
this type of agreement.
• It states the interdependent relationships among the internal support
groups of an organization working towards supporting a service level
agreement.
• This agreement gives the description of the responsibilities of each internal
support group towards the other support groups.
• It provides detailed description of the internal process including the
timeframe for the delivery of their services.
• The focus of the OLA is to present a clear, concise and measurable
description of the internal support relationships of service providing
organization.
• Use of service level management in an organization usually does not give an
immediate improvement in the levels of services delivered.
• It is in fact a long-term commitment. Initially, the services are likely to
change slightly but improvement can be observed over a period of time.
 Service Level Management
Operational Level Agreement (OLA)
• This improvement happens as the targets are achieved and then exceeded.
Service level management expects that the organization fully understands
the services that it offers to its customers to get the advantages of it.
• Major steps that are required to implement service level management are
as follows:
– Preparing Service Catalogue It provides the details of range of services that can be
delivered and the levels of services that are available to the customers.
– Developing Service Level Agreement (SEA) It consists of the negotiations agreed
upon by the customer and the service provider to deliver the required levels of
service support.
– Operational Level Agreement (OLA) It is an agreement between two internal areas.
It describes the delivery of one or more components of the end-to-end service.
– Service Spreadsheet This is a detailed document identifying what is agreed in the
SLA and the required technical specifications to deliver the service.
– Service Quality Plan This contains the management information necessary for
steering the organization to meet its goals. For each process, target values are
defined and solution time—with its impact level—is set.
 Service Level Management - Approaches
• There are two main approaches which are followed in service level
management and they are linear approach and cyclical approach.
– Linear Approach Besides the process of defining service catalog and SLAs, linear
approach of service level management follows four more processes.
– The below figure illustrates the block diagram of it. Each of these processes is
explained below:
 Service Level Management - Approaches
– Setup Activity It consists of a series of preliminary steps that are carried out at the
starting phase for the assessment of service level management project. These early
steps help the business in determining if there is a requirement for service level
management and whether it possesses the resources for its implementation. To do
this, the IT department sets up a baseline for the business by considering a quick
view of the existing services and management activities.
– Service Catalogue It is a guide to the services available to the business. It provides
details of variety of services that can be delivered to the customer and their level of
service. It gives end-to-end details of the service components used to deliver the
services and the IT functionality used by the business.
– Service Level Agreements It is a mutually agreed-on and negotiated agreement
documenting the required levels of service. It is agreed on by the IT service provider
and the business or the IT service provider and a third-party provider to deliver the
required levels of support.
– Service Level Monitoring Each service is monitored according to the agreed-on SLA
criteria in order to ensure compliance with the SLA. Service level monitoring
involves continual measurement of mutually agreed-on service-level thresholds and
the initiation of corrective actions if the thresholds are broken.
 Service Level Management - Approaches
– Service Level Reporting It is an interface between an IT department of an
organization and the person responsible for a business process. Service level reports
contain the monitoring data used to measure performance against objectives. This
helps to quickly react to risks and continually improve the delivery of IT services.
– Service Level Agreement Review It is conducted to formalize and renew service
level agreements. It is a two-way communication between the IT department and
the organization. It ensures that the services are being delivered efficiently and are
optimized to meet the organization's requirements. SLA review is a time-based
process and is a key management inspection which is carried out at specified
intervals. For example, SLA reviews can be carried monthly, quarterly, or
bi-annually. The figure below shows the various stages used in setting up and
operating the SLA review.

SLA review Processes

 Service Level Management - Approaches
– Cyclical Approach illustrates cyclical approach of service level management and
shows the phases that IT department of an organization can follow in implementing
effective service level management. Cyclical approach is applied to each process in
turn. It is considered at each stage and can be used to add value in the
implementation of the elements of service level management.

Cyclic approach of Service level management

 Service Level Management - Approaches
– This cycle does not stop after the service level management processes are
implemented.
– It is subject to the service level reviews and changes are made according to the
review outputs. Four steps of cyclical approach are discussed below.
– Defining Services This is a strategic step of service level management. Goal of this
step is to define and document the services offered by the organization.
– Agree and Operate Mutual agreement is laid down in the form of SLA document
between the IT service provider and the customer, or the IT service provider and a
third-party service provider, to deliver the required levels of support.
– Monitor and Report This phase includes monitoring of the services as per the terms
and criterion mentioned in the SLA document. It also considers the report
preparation based on observations.
– Review and Optimise This step reviews the offered services based on the monitory
report and ensures that the services are being delivered efficiently and are
optimized to meet the requirement of the organization.
 Service Level Management - Advantages
• To implement service level management, an organization must first
determine various services that its IT department can offer to its customers
and should find out different service contracts that are currently in place for
these services. This helps an IT service department in getting aware of the
full range of services that can be offered.
• With the information gained through this exercise, the organization can
develop and implement the full advantage of the service level management
process. Service level management can be used to improve communication
between IT service providers and their customers.

• There are many benefits that can be easily obtained by implementing

service level management. Few major benefits are listed here:
• Increased Service Quality Main objective of service level management is to
improve the services available to the customers in the long term and
resolve service provision issues that currently exist.
 Service Level Management - Advantages
• Reduced Cost In addition to the improvement of service, other benefit
includes an increased knowledge of business expectations and improved
cost management.

• Improved Communication with the Customers Very often, management of

an organization finds dissatisfaction among its customers for the quality
and cost of IT service delivery of the organization. Usually dissatisfaction is
due to one of the two factors—first is the bad quality of service delivery
and second is the poor communication between IT service providers and
their customers. Implementation of service level management can help to
improve the communication. It includes use of appropriate SLAs, supported
by an effective service catalogue that shows the full range of options
available to the customers.

• Improved Customer Satisfaction It can quickly affect the overall reputation

and success of the organization. Service level management allows the IT
department to meet customers' expectations and opens a dialogue to
confirm these expectations.
 Service Level Management - Advantages
• Other Advantages The main goal of service level management is to improve
the services available to the customers in the long term and to resolve the
existing service provision issues. It helps to improve the services, provides
increased knowledge of customers business expectations and helps to open
a dialogue to confirm these expectations, and improves cost and quality
management.
 Service Level Management – Cost
• Implementation cost of service level management can be divided into many
components. The below shows the pictorial representation of these
components. Following discussion provides more insights about them.
• Personnel cost It includes the cost of staff such as service level managers
and the project team. Cost comprises of personnel's salary, perks, etc.
• Training cost It is the cost incurred by the training program to train the
project members.

Service level management implementation cost

 Service Level Management – Cost
• Documentation cost It includes the cost of the documentation of related
items such as service level agreements, service catalogue, etc.

• Operational cost Costs of operational activities related to modification of

the service quality plan, service level agreements and service catalogue.

• Miscellaneous cost It includes costs of accommodation, hardware,

software, etc.
Service Level Management – Relationship with other
Processes
• Service level management is an important component of service delivery
process and it is closely related to the other processes of service delivery.
The following section discusses the relationship of service level
management with other service delivery processes and a brief description
of the same is given in below figure.

Relationship of Service level management with Other service delivery processes

Service Level Management – Relationship with other
Processes
• Service Desk: Although it is not a process, the relationship between the
service desk process and the service level management process is
particularly of much importance. The service desk is the initial point of
contact for users to any IT organization and through incident management,
it aims to recover the agreed service levels as soon as possible in the event
of an error. Because of its direct contact with the users of the IT services,
the service desk can often provide valuable information about the quality
perception (user satisfaction, etc.) of service level management by the
users.

• Financial Management for IT Services: It provides service level

management with information about the costs associated with providing a
service. It also provides information about charging methods and the rate
that the customer may be charged to recover the costs of a service.
Service Level Management – Relationship with other
Processes
• IT Service Continuity Management: It is concerned with the rapid recovery
of IT services in the event of a disaster and monitors the appropriate
measures and procedures. The agreements about this with the customer
are made within the service level management process.

• Capacity Management: It is responsible for managing the capacity of the IT

infrastructure. It supports service level management by providing
information about the impact of a new service on the overall capacity and
also indicates whether the use made of a service is within the agreed limits.
Service level management provides information to capacity management
about the expected current and future use which service level management
has agreed—or is about to agree—with the customer.

• Availability Management: Service level management provides availability

management with input about the required availability of the IT services
and availability management provides information about the actual
availability of IT services to service level management.
 Financial Management
• The objective of financial management is to manage the monetary
resources of the organization to achieve organizational goals.
• It provides cost-effective management of the IT assets and resources used
to provide IT services.
• A properly functioning financial management process helps IT managers in
making decisions for planning and investment.
• In common practice, financial management for IT includes the following:
– IT cost accounting
– Budgeting for IT services and activities
– Project investment appraisal
– Cost recovery
– IT charging and billing activities.
• In short, financial management ensures that IT infrastructure is obtained at
the most effective price and helps in estimating the cost of the services, an
organization offers to its customers. Various factors which are considered in
financial management for estimating costs include equipment, software,
personnel cost and costs of third party service providers.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
• The cost is divided into two types—direct cost and indirect cost—and it can
be capital or ongoing.
• Primary activities where financial management is used include cost
accounting, budgeting, project investment appraisals, cost recovery and
billing.
• The below figure gives an overall view of financial management.

Components of the financial management process

Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
• IT Cost Accounting It is an inward-looking activity which is used for
monitoring the financial management process. It examines the actual costs
of performing the IT activities of an organization. It involves the
identification of assets and the identification of the activities to which costs
can be assigned. It is also responsible for the development of cost allocation
schemes to each element. It breaks down the costs associated with a
particular activity and may assign these costs to a project or customer. Cost
accounting can also be used to measure the efficiency of the IT department.
Major roles of the cost accounting are listed below:
– It allows IT departments to track costs and to make informed decisions about the
best way to achieve cost savings related to IT activities.
– It enables IT departments to quantify and understand their costs.
– It helps users to feel in control of costs and understand the method of allocation of
costs. This reduces customer frustration and confusion.
– It provides assistance to managers in planning and controlling the operation of the
IT organization.
– Cost accounting and cost management are very helpful in protecting IT departments
from cost-based attacks from outside vendors.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
• An effective accounting system tracks the cost of life cycle of all IT assets
and to have a system for recording and tracking these costs.
• Life cycle costs consist of costs for procurement, maintenance and disposal
of IT components. To facilitate cost recording and tracking, the
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is usually used.

• Budgeting of IT Services Budget includes a detailed plan which specifies the

method followed to obtain specific resources and is used over a specified
period of time. Budgeting is the planning activity of the financial
management process. It includes planning of the future activities and
assessment of the performance of current activities. It is the activity of
foretelling the estimated expenditure to be incurred by an organization
during a specified period of time. It also involves controlling and
distribution of money to the areas for which it has been originally
budgeted. This ensures that sufficient funds are available throughout the
entire period. Budgeting enables organizations to plan for routine
operational costs as well as for important expenses such as purchasing a
new group of servers, storage devices, etc.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
• While developing budgets, the financial manager must get information
from various sources such as the organizational department that uses IT
services and each Service Management Function (SMF) within the IT
department. Some of the factors that must be considered at the time of
developing a budget include:
(i) Prior period trends Financial manager should examine the trends of
service levels over past budget periods and use the experience to
approximate future requirements.
(ii) Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with each organizational group SLAs
tell about the service levels that are provided to customers as well as the
costs for providing those services, and these must be referred before
making the budget.
(iii) IT organizational requirements such as personnel training and system
upgrades Changes in IT environment may require significant resources,
which must be planned in advance.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
(iv) Industry and economic trends Industry or general economic trends
affect the need for IT services; so they must be examined beforehand.
(v) Special requirements such as developing "in-house" applications There
may be some special requirements in some cases. For example, depending
on the scope of the applications to be developed, significant resources may
be required.
(vi) Customer satisfaction Satisfaction of customer is very much important
for an organization to succeed. Customer survey can be used to find out the
service performance from the previous budget. This will certainly help to
determine if the correct levels of services are being provided to customers.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
• Methods Used for Preparing Budget There are many methods used for the
preparation of budget. Two frequently used methods are previous year
budgeting and zero-based budgeting.
– Previous Year Budgeting In this method, new budget is based on the previous year
budget. The budget process begins with a copy of the previous year budget and any
modification done to the budgeted amount is based on the actual cost incurred to
date.
– Zero-based Budgeting In this technique, the budget planning process begins with a
zero balance and each activity that is to be funded must provide a justifiable reason
for its inclusion in the budget. Zero-based budgets are built from the ground up,
with all funds appropriately justified before they are included in the budget.
Zero-based budgeting method has an advantage over the previous year budgeting
method because it is not simply a reworked version of the prior period's budget.
Zero-based budgeting requires that all prior period costs be evaluated before they
are included in the budget.

• Project Investment Appraisal It is an analyzing activity of the financial

management process. It involves the evaluation of costs and benefits of
proposed changes by the IT department then suggests for the investment.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
• Project Investment Appraisal (Cont). Methods used for analyzing the
financial impact of a change include payback period, net present value,
return on investment, total cost of ownership and real cost of ownership.
Each method has its own advantages and drawbacks and none is best for
evaluating all kinds of changes.
– Net Present Value (NPV) It is defined as the total Present Value (PV) of a time series
of cash flows. In other word, loran investment (or project), it is the difference
between the sum of the discounted cash flows which are expected from the
investment and the amount which is initially invested. It is a standard method for
using the time value of money to appraise long-term projects. Computation of NPV
comprises of following three steps:
1. Calculate the expected free cash flow (usually per year) that results out of the
investment.
2. Subtract /discount for the cost of capital (an interest rate to adjust for time and
risk). The intermediate result is called Present Value (PV).
3. Subtract the initial investments from PV to get Net Present Value (NPV).
More clearly, formula for the computation of NPV over the last n years can be given
as follows:
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
– Net Present Value (NPV) (Cont.) where PVi, is the present value or the cash flow
from the ith year (positive for cash inflows, negative for cash outflows).

– Payback Period It is defined as the length of time required to recover the cost of an
investment. It can be formulated as follows:
Payback Period = Cost of Project / Annual Cash Inflows
For example, if a project costs Rs 1,00,000 and is expected to return Rs 20,000
annually, the payback period will be 5 years.
There are two main drawbacks of payback period method:
1. It disregards any profit that occurs after the payback period and therefore, it does
not measure profitability.
2. It also disregards the time value of money. Time value of money is defined as the
value of money figuring in a given amount of interest for a given amount of time.
Because of these reasons, other methods of capital budgeting such as net present
value are generally preferred over payback period method.

– Return on Investment (ROI) It is a measure of the performance of any investment

and sometimes referred as the Rate of Return (ROR).
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
– Return on Investment (ROI) (Cont.) It is the ratio between the financial benefit or
loss of an investment and the amount of money invested. To calculate ROI, the
benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment and the
result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio. The Return on Investment (ROI) can
be obtained by:

ROI = [(Return from Investment – Cost of Investment) / (Cost of Investment)] *

100

IT appraisal methods should be developed with the assistance of the finance

department and approved by officials such as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the
organization. This often helps in building a better system as it can explore and
exploit some preferred methods. It is important to note that making an investment
decision should not only rely on investment appraisal methods. Other measures
should also be considered in order to have a complete picture of the advantages
and disadvantages of making a particular investment. For example, the financial
measures may not take into account whether a project is intended to reduce the
number of support personnel to actually accomplish its intended goal. In short, IT
managers must consider many components in addition to financial measures and
evaluate the role of each component to know its influence on any decision.
Financial Management – Components of Financial
Management
– Cost Recovery It is also referred as charging. It is charge-back activity of the
financial management process. It involves the development of charge-back
methods and the billing of costs to customers. There are two key aspects that
one should keep in mind while charging customers.
First, the bill should be prepared in such a way that customer easily
understands the costs included in the bill. Costs of those which are not easily
understandable may lead to confusion and create distrust of the IT department.
• Second, cost should be tied to specific customer-perceived benefits that the
customer realizes through the use of the IT services. The amount charged back
to customers is referred to as the price of transfer or the charge-back. The
prices that are charged to customers are generally negotiated on an annual
basis as a part of the SLA negotiation process. It is very important to negotiate
these prices so that customers are not surprised by the cost of the IT services
that they have received.

– IT Charging and Billing Financial management also performs charging and

billing service. These activities involve deciding the charges for various services
that IT department of an organization provides, to prepare the bill and to send
them to the concerned people.
 Financial Management – Advantages
• Financial management practices are becoming an integral part of the
business operations in current scenario. A good financial management
process generates benefits in many areas such as cost visibility, planning,
optimization and cost of recovery. An IT organization with proper financial
management can do the following effectively:
– Cost Estimation of IT Services Financial management helps in determining the cost
of the IT services. It assists in fair allocation of cost to IT services provided by the
organization to internal and external customers. It accurately and efficiently
formulates charges and cost of recovery for IT services.
– Revision of Cost Structure It identifies and classifies the cost structure of IT services.
It checks the charges at regular interval to find out if they are still realistic or need to
be revised. It periodically performs audit of IT financial information to ensure its
accuracy.
– Budget Planning Financial management helps in effective IT budget and planning
activities. It does precise bookkeeping of IT expenditures and revenues and also
maintains the costs and revenues on a regular basis.
 Financial Management – Cost
• The costs of this process can be divided into three heads:
• Administrative cost,
• Organizational cost and
• Tools cost.

• Cost under first two heads is associated with planning, introducing and
carrying out the process while that under the third head includes the cost of
necessary tools, such as hardware cost, application softwares cost, etc.
 Financial Management – Relationship with Other
Processes
• Financial management involves the planning for the future of an
organization to ensure a positive cash flow. To achieve this, it works closely
with the other service delivery processes. The figure below provides an
overview of the relationship of financial management with other processes.

• Financial management Relationship with other Service Delivery Process

Financial Management – Relationship with Other
Processes
– Business Processes The work of service level management is to define
the vision, strategy and planning in accordance with the business
processes. Though the activities of business processes come outside the
scope of financial management, they play an important role in this area.
This is due to the fact that any business always has a vision of the future
which is used to define various objectives for IT organization affecting
all business units. It is therefore important that IT strategy should be
based on the business objectives.

– Capacity Management Information on cost and business benefits may

affect the decision on whether to buy additional capacity or not. It is
important and very relevant to discuss the cost of any provision of
increased capacity with the customer or the business as a whole.

– Availability Management It is very similar to capacity management, and

the decision on whether to buy improved availability may also be
affected by the information on cost and business benefits.
Financial Management – Relationship with Other
Processes
– As in the case of capacity management, it also becomes very important
and relevant to discuss the cost of any provision for improved
availability with the customer.

– Configuration Management It focuses on establishing and maintaining

consistency of performance of a system or product. It specifies,
identifies and records all changes to various IT infrastructure elements.
Configuration management can be utilized to conciliate asset data with
the data available from financial system.

– Service Level Management The financial manager of an IT organization

consults with the service level manager about issues such as the costs of
meeting current and future business requirements, the charging policy
of the organization and its effect on customers, and how the policy
influences customer behavior.
 IT Service Continuity Management
• In the current scenario, companies are expected to continue to operate and
provide services at all times.
• The objective of the IT service continuity management is to help in ensuring
that all IT services are capable of providing value to the customer at the time of
failure of normal availability solutions.
• It is concerned with managing risks to ensure that an IT infrastructure of an
organization can continue by providing services in the event of an unlikely or
unexpected event.
• It supports the overall business continuity management by ensuring that the
required IT infrastructure and IT services, including support and the service
desk, can be restored within desired and agreed amount of time if such a
disaster happens.
• Availability of the IT services or their absence has much influence on customer's
satisfaction and can quickly affect the overall reputation and success of the
organization.
• The task of IT service continuity management is achieved by a process that
analyses business processes, their impact on the organization and the IT
infrastructure susceptibility that these processes face from many possible risks.
 IT Service Continuity Management
• There are many factors that influence the availability of an IT service.
• Among them, hardware failure, environmental issues and human error are
important.
• A hardware failure, such as a broken power supply or disk drive, is one of the
most critical factors to consider.
• For example mere failure of power supply to a server might cause the whole IT
services to be discontinued.
• Dual redundant power supplies attached to the server can be employed to
minimize some of these kinds of risks.
• If power to the whole computer room or data center is interrupted, battery
backup systems can be used to cover the time it might take to start up a
standby generator.
• These kinds of problems are referred to as availability risks, and the actions
taken to minimize these problems are called countermeasures.
• If any of the countermeasures fails, more drastic actions must be taken.
• These actions are outlined in a document called the contingency plan.
 IT Service Continuity Management
• The need of a contingency plan can be understood by the following example.
• Consider an organization having an arrangement that when power fails,
generator should be used as a backup system.
• Now suppose normal power supply and generator both fail.
• The manager has to implement the contingency plan and has to move the
service to another site.

Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management

• The process flowchart of IT service continuity management process is given in
below figure.
• It consists of four major processes involved in IT service continuity
management process.
Collection of Service Level Requirements: Once risks are known, users take the
help of IT to decide which risks are to be minimized and which ones are to be
assumed.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Collection of Service Level Requirements:
• Since, in order to reduce a risk, one needs to handle many resources like
people, time and money, IT management takes the necessary steps to
determine a risk which is so small that it does not want to incur much cost to
minimize it.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Collection of Service Level Requirements:
• IT service continuity management begins by cautiously agreeing to
availability targets with the customer and determining the cost of
downtime or unavailability of the concerned IT service, so that a realistic
and effective IT budget can be setup.
• It is also desirable that the negotiation contains realistic expectations of
reduced system availability while the contingency plan is in place.
• This process needs an element of education and negotiation on both sides,
i.e., the customer and the IT organization.
• To implement IT service continuity management effectively, customers
need to understand the methods that they can use to define their
availability requirements, and IT organization needs to understand the
functions required for providing IT services and which of them are the most
critical.
• Effective implementation of IT service continuity management requires
consideration of following two steps.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Collection of Service Level Requirements: Identify Information Technology
Service Layers
• To find out the probable places where risk may be introduced, IT
environment needs to be broken down into some logical components.
• To do this, services provided by an organization can be divided into layers.
• In the layered structure, an IT service can be delivered only if all the
services underneath are functioning.
• The figure below presents an example of layers (IT stack) for the services
provided by an IT department.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Collection of Service Level Requirements: Identify Information Technology
Service Layers
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Collection of Service Level Requirements: Identify Risk to Each Information
Technology Service Layer
• Single point of failure can be identified by inspecting possible risk
vulnerabilities of each layer in the IT stack.
• Also, one can identify a single layer that may address risk on the layers
above.
• An example of risk assessment is given in Table below, which addresses the
risk involved in some of the layers shown in above figure.
• The first column of this table provides the names of various possible risks
while rest of the columns give the level of risk present at various layers.
• Risk levels are categorized into three types, namely, Low, Medium and
High, representing low, medium and high level of risk respectively.
• Empty cell in the table shows that a risk does not affect that particular
layer.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Collection of Service Level Requirements: Identify Risk to Each Information
Technology Service Layer – Risk Assessment (source: MOF)
Risk Fire Flood Virus Power Outage Logon Failure Lack of Staff Human Error

Egress Medium

Facilities Medium Low Medium

Network Medium Medium

Hardware Low High Low

Operating System High

Middleware

Application High Medium Medium

Service
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Proposing Contingent Solution:
• Once the possible risk factors for the important business process have
been recognized and their relative importance and financial implications
are understood, one can start preparing its contingency plan.
• IT service continuity management ensures that the services are available in
the case of a service interruption, irrespective of the cause of the
disruption.
• Service continuity involves two main processes: Failover and Restoration.
• Failover - It is an act of automatic or manual movement of the operations
of a component from its primary location to a secondary location.
• Following two examples illustrate automatic and manual failover.
• Example 1 (Automatic Failover): Assume that computer has dual
redundant power supplies.
• At the time of normal operation, each supply provides half the load
required by the system.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Proposing Contingent Solution:
• Failover - Following two examples illustrate automatic and manual failover.
• Example 1 (Automatic Failover):
• When one of the supplies fails or goes off, the other automatically starts
supplying all the power to the system.
• This is an example of automatic failover.
• Example 2 (Manual Failover): Consider a data center site which has got
destroyed by a natural calamity.
• In this situation, the whole IT infrastructure must be recreated at a new
place located at some distance away.
• This needs manual intervention and comes under manual failover.
• Restoration - It involves the act of bringing the operation of a component
back from the secondary location to the primary location.
• This is an important activity and must be carefully dealt with while creating
a contingency plan.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Proposing Contingent Solution:
• Restoration - Usually, it has been found that organizations have detailed
plans for moving the service to a new location in case of an emergency, but
they rarely have any plan to restore the service back to the original
location when the time comes.

Formalizing Operation Level Agreement:

• Once IT department of an organization and the customer agree on a
cost-effective level of service continuity, an agreement needs to be
formalized between various internal support groups of an organization.
• This agreement is called an Operation Level Agreement (OLA).
• The OLA is an important building block for the Service Level Agreement
(SLA) and defines the interdependent relationships among the internal
support groups of an IT organization working to support a service level
agreement.
• The main objective of the OLA is to present a clear, concise and
measurable description of the internal support relationships of the service
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing Operation Level Agreement:
• While SLA is a legal document formalized between IT and its customers,
OLA is an agreement between the IT entities within the organization.
• It should be understood that OLA is not the substitute for SLA.
• OLA has to be considered as the basis of good practice and common
agreement; however, some portions of it which may contribute to an SLA.
• Following are few important components that an OLA should include:
(i) Definition of the business processing
(ii) Impact of downtime or non-availability of IT services on business
(iii) The cost of downtime or non-availability and the way these costs can
change over time
(iv) Minimum performance characteristics and hours of service required
(v) Critical periods of service, where downtime is intolerable
(vi) Less critical periods of service, where downtime is more tolerable
(vii) Scheduled downtime periods for planned maintenance
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing Operation Level Agreement:
• Following are few important components that an OLA should include:
(viii) Amount of downtime can be tolerated before contingency plans
should be invoked
(ix) Number of users.

• The service level manager is ultimately responsible for the agreement and
the documentation (SLA, OLA) of service levels with the customers.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing the Contingency Plan:
• The contingency plan is like a guide for the IT personnel which is to be used
to failover and recover the service in case of a disaster.
• This document includes the information on escalation and notification
procedure, start up and shut down procedures, communication methods
and status reporting requirements.
• These procedures are discussed in detail below.
• It is also required that the document containing contingency plan should
discuss the levels of contingency (level increases as the severity of the
problem increases) and the procedure to be used to define the levels of
contingency.
• This helps in taking the appropriate measures to handle any emergency
situation.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing the Contingency Plan: Escalation and Notification Procedures
• This is the document which maintains the information about who can fix
the problem at the time of contingency and who is affected by the break.
• This list may also include the relevant times when an individual can be
contacted.
• The table below shows a sample notification list where each column
represents one week day.
• Content of a cell shows the name of the person to be contacted, his or her
area of expertise and availability timing.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing the Contingency Plan: Escalation and Notification Procedures
Escalation and Notification List
1 2 3 4 5

--- Jay Singh, IT Jay Singh, IT Jay Singh, IT Jay Singh, IT

Meenu Roy, Finance Meenu Roy, Meenu Roy, Finance

--- --- (7am – 7pm) Finance (7am – (24 hours)
7pm)

Kiran Rao (7pm – Jitendra Singh, CIO

--- --- --- 7am) (24 hours)

Meenu Roy, Public

--- --- --- --- Relations (24 hours)

Kiran Rao, Finance

--- --- --- --- (7pm – 7am)
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing the Contingency Plan: Startup and Shutdown Procedures
• Startup and shutdown procedures are important for the data centre of any
organization.
• In case of any disaster, the sequence of the steps to be followed should be
made available in advance.
• Startup and shutdown procedures can be grouped by technology and by
dependency.
• In case of natural calamities, availability of this information helps in
rebuilding and activating a recovered data centre with less time needed for
resolving the dependencies.
• It is important to document startup and shutdown procedures properly so
that there is no confusion in understanding these processes when required
at a later time.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Processes involved in IT Service Continuity Management
Formalizing the Contingency Plan: Communication Methods
• The contingency plan should describe clearly the methods of
communication that are used by the repair staff to communicate with each
other and with the affected processes.
• Contingency plan should also be made for each communication type.
• For example, it should include the set of actions to be taken if
communication media such as telephone, e-mail fails.

Formalizing the Contingency Plan: Status Reporting Requirements

• The contingency plan needs to be described clearly so that in case of any
emergency, the list of people that need to be notified for each contingency
level can be identified.
• It also needs to describe the frequency at which this communication is to
take place.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Advantages of IT Service Continuity Management
• IT service continuity management is the process by which plans are formulated
and managed to ensure that IT services can recover and continue in case of a
serious incident.
• The guidelines of IT service level management can be used to limit and manage
the impact of disasters.
• If a disaster occurs, businesses with an IT service continuity management
process have the following advantages:
- Organizations implementing service continuity management can manage
recovery of their systems.
- Organizations lose less time for service availability and offer better continuity
to the users if they use IT service continuity management.
- It minimizes the interruption to their business activities.
- It defines proactive measures to reduce the risk of a disaster in the first
instance.
- It is regarded as the recovery of the IT infrastructure used to deliver IT
services.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Cost of IT Service Continuity Management
• Major cost components associated with IT service continuity management
implementation are as follows:
- Initial time and cost required to initiate develop and implement IT service
continuity management.
- Cost of hardware and software associated with the results of the introduction
of risk management.
- These costs can be reduced if measures are considered within the limit of
availability management.
- Cost required for continuing the recovery arrangements.
- For example, cost of making test arrangements and the period during which
the recovery facilities are available.
- Ongoing operational costs of IT service continuity management.
- This includes cost of testing, auditing and updating the plan.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Relationship with other Processes
• The relationship of IT service continuity management with other processes is
shown in below figure.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Relationship with other Processes
Service Level Management
• Service level management formulates and manages service level agreements
(SLAs) and operating level agreements (OLAs).
• It provides information about the IT service obligations.

Financial Level Management

• Financial management ensures that the solutions proposed by capacity
management, availability management and IT service continuity management
are justifiable in terms of their cost of implementation against their profit to
the customer.
• Financial management monitors, controls and recovers cost incurred by the IT
organization.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Relationship with other Processes
Workforce Management
• People need to be trained properly to any new technology which is introduced
into the IT environment.
• Workforce management makes sure that existing personnel of the organization
are motivated, properly trained and ready to operate a new availability solution
when it is ready.

Capacity Level Management

• It ensures that the business requirements are fully supported by the
appropriate IT resources.
• Capacity management has a very close relation to IT service continuity
management since the contingency plan may outline reduced capacity
capabilities in the event of a disaster.
• These reduced capabilities should be clearly outlined in the OLAs that build the
service.
 IT Service Continuity Management
Relationship with other Processes
Availability Management
• IT service continuity management is closely related to availability management
and because both processes work to eliminate risks to the availability of IT
services.
• The main focus of availability management is handling the routine risks to
availability (such as power failure) that are expected on a day-to-day basis
while IT service continuity management addresses the more extreme and
relatively rare availability risks (such as fire and flood).
 Capacity Management
• The primary goal of capacity management is to ensure that IT capacity meets
current and future business requirements of the organization in a cost-effective
way.
• It is the process of planning, analyzing, sizing and optimizing capacity to satisfy
demand in a timely manner and at a reasonable cost.
• It provides the required capacity for data processing and storage at the right
time and in appropriate volume.
• It also ensures the efficient use of IT infrastructure.
• Improper planning for capacity may lead to wastage of resources, resulting in
unnecessary cost or may lead to shortage of resources which may be
responsible for poor performance or the unavailability of an IT service.
• Capacity management is an important quantitative aspect of an IT service
management because it includes both a business and an end-user focus on
capacity requirements.
• It continuously tries to optimize existing and future IT resource demands and
supply, and ensures the balance between them.
 Capacity Management
• It proactively adds components, space or people in a cost-effective manner
while assuring that the performance is at acceptable level for new additions
and older components.
• Capacity management is very much aligned with the business case and planning
process.
• There are three main elements of capacity management:
- Inputs: Usual inputs include business plans, processes, technology and related
information used by each of the sub-processes.
- Sub-processes: These are the levels of analysis where capacity is considered.
- Outputs: Capacity plans, databases, reports, changes and recommendations
are the main outputs of the sub-processes.
• Capacity management is an iterative process.
• The below figure gives an overview of the various management tasks involved
in capacity management process.
 Capacity Management
• Capacity management as an iterative process (Source: MOF)
 Capacity Management
Monitoring
• It monitors utilization of each resource and service on an ongoing basis to make
sure that each hardware and software resource is being used optimally.
• It helps to ensure that everything is happening as agreed in service level
agreement document.

Analysis
• Data collected during the monitoring phase need to be analyzed and used to
carry out tuning exercises and to establish profiles.
• Analysis activity helps in identifying the following issues:
(a) Contention in data, file, memory, processor
(b) Inappropriate distribution of workload across available resources
(c) Inappropriate locking strategy
(d) Inefficiencies in the application design
 Capacity Management
Modelling
• Modelling is a central element of the capacity management process.
• It relies on the data obtained from other capacity management sub-processes
and activities.
• Particularly, it gets data from forecasts of workloads and the use of resources
by applications in development and associated hardware specifications.
• Modelling techniques with the effective use of simulation software helps in
investigating capacity planning in order to build a model that simulates the
desired outcome.

Optimizing
• Analysis of the monitored data may identify few important areas of the
configuration that could be tuned and optimized to make better use of the
system resources or to improve the performance of a particular service.
• Optimizing techniques that are helpful include balancing workloads, balancing
disk traffic, defining an accepted locking strategy and efficient use of memory.
 Capacity Management
Change Initiation
• It implements changes to the services that have been identified by the analysis
and tuning activities.
• This activity also includes the identification of the necessary changes and
subsequent generation and approval of change requests.

Process involved in Capacity Management

• Capacity management aims to prevent surprises and rushed purchases by
making better use of the available resources and to increase capacity at the
right time.
• Implementation of capacity management helps in preventing unnecessary
investments and adhoc capacity changes.
• There are three main sub-processes involved in capacity management.
Business Capacity Management - It is a part of capacity management activity
which is responsible for ensuring that the future business requirements for IT
services are well considered, planned and implemented in a cost effective and
timely manner.
 Capacity Management
Process involved in Capacity Management
• There are three main sub-processes involved in capacity management.
Business Capacity Management
• Business capacity management is strongly connected to service level
management and works jointly with the business planning efforts of the
organization.
Service Capacity Management - Service capacity management addresses the
issues of IT services.
• It is responsible for ensuring that the performance of all services is monitored
and measured properly, as discussed in service level management
Resource Capacity Management - Resource capacity management
concentrates on the technology components and supports the service
provisions.
• It ensures that all components with declared finite resources are monitored
and measured accurately.
• Also, Resource capacity management is referred as component capacity
management in ITIL version 3.
 Capacity Management
Advantages of Capacity Management
• The implementation of capacity management in an organization provides
following advantages:
Reduced Risk - As the capacity management effectively manages the resources,
it reduces the risks associated with existing service and monitors the
performance of the resources continuously.
Reduced Cost - It helps in making the decision of any investment at the
appropriate time, neither too early nor too late, which results in reduced
service cost.
• Hence, purchasing process does not have to do last-minute purchases or over
purchases of capacity too far in advance of need.
Greater Efficiency - Since demand and supply are balanced at an early stage,
this results in a greater degree of efficiency.
Reduced Business Disruption - Capacity management has close connection
with change management.
• So it reduces business disruptions by preventing urgent changes resulting from
inadequate or incorrect capacity estimates.
 Capacity Management
Advantages of Capacity Management
• The implementation of capacity management in an organization provides
following advantages:
Improved Customer Satisfaction - Capacity management ensures better
customer satisfaction.
Better Validation of IT Spending - Use of capacity management ensures
avoidance of incorrect capacity sizing which results in appropriate use of
resources and sufficient capacity availability in time to meet production
workload needs.
Improvement of Relationship with Suppliers - Further, purchasing, delivery,
installation and maintenance agreements can also be planned more
productively and effectively.
 Capacity Management
Cost of Capacity Management
• The costs of setting up capacity management in an IT organization must be
estimated during the preparation.
• Following is the list of various components where investment is needed to be
done:
Cost of Software and Hardware: This includes the cost of purchase of hardware
and software tools.
• Common tools needed are monitoring tools, trending and modelling tools for
simulations and statistical analysis, reporting tools, capacity management
database etc.
Project Management Cost: It is the cost associated with the implementation of
the project management process.
Cost of Training: This includes the cost incurred in providing personnel training
and to develop support base.
Facilities and Services: This includes the cost of facilities used and cost of
services provided.
 Capacity Management
Relationship with other Processes
• Relationship of capacity management with other processes is pictorially shown
in below figure and discussed.
Service Level Management - Capacity management helps service level
management by advising about the feasibility of service levels, for example, for
response times and service level requirements.
• It also helps in defining the OLA that results from service level requirements.
• It monitors and measures the performance levels and supplies information for
checking and changing the agreed service levels where ever it is necessary.
• Capacity management works closely with service level, availability, service
continuity and financial management personnel to formulate precautionary
measures to improve the quality of the service at justified cost.
Financial Management - Capacity management provides valuable information
to financial management activities such as investment budgeting, cost-benefit
analysis and investment decisions.
• It also provides required information for charging capacity-related services,
such as the usage of network capacity.
 Capacity Management
Relationship with other Processes
• Relationship of capacity management with other processes is pictorially shown
in below figure and discussed.
Financial Management - Capacity management must ensure that the necessary
resources are acquired and implemented in a cost-effective manner.
• It is essential that the capacity plan is consistent with all aspects of financial
planning.
Relationship of capacity management with other service delivery processes
 Capacity Management
Relationship with other Processes
• Relationship of capacity management with other processes is pictorially shown
in below figure and discussed.
IT Service Continuity Management - Capacity management informs about the
minimum capacity required to continue the service or recover service in case of
a disaster.
• Also, the capacity needs of IT service continuity management should be
constantly reviewed to make sure that they reflect day-to-day changes in the
operating environment.
• Capacity management helps service continuity management in judging the level
of performance when countermeasures are executed.
Availability Management - There is a close relation between capacity
management and availability management processes.
• They both use many common tools and techniques to identify faults in the
components.
• For example, component failure impact analysis and fault tree analysis are used
by both of them.
 Capacity Management
Relationship with other Processes
• Relationship of capacity management with other processes is pictorially shown
in below figure and discussed.
Availability Management - Moreover, same technology solution can often
meet the needs of both the processes.
• Since these two processes are very much dependent on each other, the
availability plan needs to be coordinated with the capacity planning process
and availability and capacity plans should be created in collaboration.
• Due to many dependencies with each other, these two processes should be
coordinated effectively.
 Availability Management
• Availability refers to the ability of a service or component to perform the
function as desired at a stated instant or over a stated period of time.
• The goal of the availability management is to make sure that any given IT
service delivers its functions consistently and cost-effectively at the level of
service availability that the customer requires.
• It optimizes the capability of the IT infrastructure, services and supporting
organization to deliver a cost effective and sustained level of service availability
that meets stringent business objectives.
• Availability management needs to ensure that the processes used for the
support of critical IT services are mature enough and have the necessary
personnel, skills and tools to take effectively on their responsibilities.
• It also makes sure that, if there is a difference between supply and demand,
then availability management may have to provide a solution.
• Furthermore, availability management ensures that the achieved availability
levels are measured and, where ever necessary, are improved continuously.
• This means, the process needs to include both proactive and reactive activities
to accomplish this.
 Availability Management
• Availability management focuses on two distinct areas:
New IT service
• It needs the clear definitions of complete requirements and design phases.
• The main goal of new IT services is to achieve the desired availability targets
from the very beginning and to successfully manage the levels of availability in
entire life cycle of the solution.
• New IT services also provide the best opportunity to an organization for
achieving desired availability targets in a cost-effective manner because
availability considerations can be built from the earliest stages by selecting
suitable technologies and an efficient IT support infrastructure.

Existing IT Service
• It may require considerable amount of short-term effort to improve levels of
availability.
• Existing IT services can have their availability levels much improved and
stabilized through the use of a formal availability management process.
• Then, they can benefit from a continuous improvement process and by careful
managing the future changes.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
• There are many different IT approaches that can be employed to deliver the
required levels of availability, each having its own cost implications.
• However, in this section, most popular ones of these approaches are discussed
in detail.
• The figure below illustrates the three major sub-processes involved in this
approach of availability management process.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Defining Service Level Requirements
• Availability management is required to understand the availability targets of
the customer before agreeing.
• It should also determine the cost of downtime or unavailability of the required
IT service, so that a feasible IT budget can be set up.
• To set up an adequate availability management procedure, a complete study of
individual elements and negotiation on both sides is required.
• It is important because of the fact that the customer needs to understand the
way to define and articulate availability requirements clearly.
• At the same time, IT organization needs to understand the different customer
functions that make up the overall IT service and which of these functions are
the most critical.
• The detailed description of the task of negotiating service level objects is the
subject matter of service level management.
• A brief description is given below.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Determining Critical Customer Functions
• An IT service may contain multiple customer functions or transactions.
• These functions or transactions usually have varying availability requirements
and impacts on the business if they fail.
• So business functions or transactions need to be studied carefully and ranked in
an order.
• Based on the order, functions or transactions that are very important and
critical for the business can be identified.
• Also, customer's requirements should be compared with what can be provided
by the organization.
• In case of any mismatch, the cost impact of this should be determined.

Determining the Availability Requirements

• Normally a customer puts his requirements in very simple terms without
knowing and understanding its consequences.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Determining the Availability Requirements
• If inappropriate expectations are being set, it leads to many undesirable
consequences such as misunderstandings between IT organization and the
customer, inappropriate levels of investment and at the end, customer
dissatisfaction.
• For example, one availability requirement may refer to the availability of only
the hardware platform while another may talk about the availability to mean
the complete end-to-end service.
• Moreover, the definition of complete end-to-end service availability can vary
greatly.
• To avoid such kind of problems and misunderstandings, it is very important to
understand exactly how an availability requirement is to be measured.
• The availability manager should try to educate the customer and make sure
that he or she fully understands the terminology and that the end results are
realistic.
• Defining the availability requirement is the earliest possible stage of how the IT
organization can fulfill the customer requirements.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Determining the Availability Requirements
• This process must be carried out before a SLA is concluded and should address
both new IT services and changes to existing services.
• This activity consists of the following:
- Define key business requirements
- Identifying and negotiating the periods of downtime for planned maintenance
activity, technology upgrades and the introduction of new business functions.
- Identifying quantifiable availability requirements
- Defining the business hours of the customer
- Setting up agreement about maintenance channels
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Proposing Availability Solution
• Once the availability requirements for the business functions are identified and
their relative importance and financial implications clearly defined, the process
of designing IT infrastructure that delivers the required levels of availability can
be started.
• This process involves six major steps, namely identification of major IT service
components, availability design, recoverability design, maintenance
management, development of availability plan and measurement and
reporting.
Identification of IT Service Components
• This is the first step of availability design process. In this step, the available IT
services are divided into manageable components and these components are
dealt with individually.
• For example, MOF breaks down the infrastructure that builds and supports IT
service into following components:
- Service
- Application
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Identification of IT Service Components
• For example, MOF breaks down the infrastructure that builds and supports IT
service into following components:
- Middleware
- Operating system
- Hardware
- Network
- Facilities
- Egress
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Design for Availability
• For each component identified above, the lifecycle for each component is
studied in detail.
• This helps in obtaining the maximum IT services that a component can provide.
• Study of each component can be done in two aspects:
- Availability risk and countermeasures: Risk associated with each IT
component should be considered and appropriate countermeasure should be
defined to overcome them.
- Lifecycle management needs: The full lifecycle management to achieve
maximum availability of each component should be determined.
• The main goal of defining this step is to determine any operational task that can
be undertaken to maximize the availability of the IT component, for example,
startup and shutdown times.
• Common management needs for each IT component includes efficient handling
of:
a. Monitoring of IT components
b. End-to-end health checks
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Design for Availability
• Common management needs for each IT component includes efficient handling
of:
c. Startup and shutdown of components
d. Proper password maintenance
e. Housekeeping administration
f. Backup and restore methodologies
g. Upgrade and change methodology
h. Emergency upgrade methodology
i. Configuration documentation requirement
j. Failover and feedback requirements
• Also, the problems which affect the availability standards should be determined
at the earliest.
• This can prevent excessive development costs, unplanned expenditure at later
stages, Single Points of Failure, additional costs charged by suppliers and
delayed releases.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Design for Recoverability
• In-spite of taking all the measures in designing and managing an IT service,
problems in its delivery of service may still occur.
• So there is a need of a recovery plan which can be used in case of an incident
such as an unexpected event or even in the failure of a countermeasure to
protect a service.
• Efficient incident discovery and recovery mechanisms are also needed during
less complicated situations, as even small problems may need to be handled
properly to prevent errors from escalating further down the chain.
• For example, in the case of dual redundant power supplies, any failure in
primary component needs to be identified and corrected before the secondary
unit also fails and results in total loss of service.
• The lifecycle of a component includes elements is shown in below figure.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Design for Recoverability
Incident Life Cycle Stages
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Design for Recoverability
• The below figure shows the various periods that can be measured.
• Occurrence of the Incident - This is the time when the fault is identified by a
user through other means (e.g., technically or physically).
• Detection - After the occurrence of the fault, service provider is informed about
the fault. The time required for this is known as the detection time.
• Diagnosis - Service provider needs some time to respond. This is known as the
response time.
• This time is used for diagnosis of the fault.
• The Incident Management handles the fault following these steps: Acceptance
and registration of fault, classification of fault, matching, analysis and diagnosis.
• Repair - Diagnosis is followed by repair. At this stage, service provider restores
this service or the components that caused the fault.
• Service Recovery - This is the stage when service is restored to the user. This
includes activities such as configuration and initialization.
• Normal Service Restoration - After the service recovery, normal services are
restored.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Design for Recoverability
Availability Measurement
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Maintenance Management
• Maintenance refers to all technical, administrative and managerial actions
during the lifecycle of a component intended to retain it in, or restore it to, a
state in which it can perform the required function.
• Maintenance management characterizes the process of leading and directing
the maintenance.
• Normally, when an organization provides IT services, it keeps a scheduled time
for windows unavailability, when normal services are not available to
customers.
• This period is utilized in preventive actions, such as software and hardware
upgrades.
• If any change is needed in any component, it can also be implemented during
this period.
• The maintenance must be carried out when the impact on services can be
minimized.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Maintenance Management
• So, it should be known in advance what the maintenance objectives are, when
maintenance should be undertaken and what types of maintenance activities
are involved.
• This information is useful for change management and other activities too.

Developing the Availability Plan

• Availability plan is a long-term plan concerning the availability of the IT services
in next few years.
• The availability plan is one of the important outcome of availability
management.
• At the initial stage, availability plan describes the existing state and at a later
stage, it can be enlarged to include the activities for improving the existing
service and guidelines.
• It can also be enlarged to include plans for new services and guidelines for
maintenance.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Developing the Availability Plan
• Development of an accurate and detailed plan requires communication with
areas such as service level management, IT service continuity management,
capacity management and financial management.
Measuring and Reporting
• These are important activities of availability management as they provide the
foundation for verifying service agreements, resolving problems and defining
proposals for further improvements.
• The following metrics are commonly used in availability management.
- Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) - It is defined as the average time between the
occurrence of a fault and service recovery. It is also known as the downtime. It
is the sum of the detection time and the resolution time (which is the sum of
response, repair and recovery time). This metric is concerned with the
recoverability and serviceability of the service.
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) - It is the average time required
between the recovery from one incident and the occurrence of the next
incident. It is also known as uptime. This metric is concerned with the reliability
of the service.
 Availability Management
Processes Involved in Availability Management
Measuring and Reporting
- Mean Time Between System Incidents (MTBSI) - It is defined as the mean
time between the occurrence if two consecutive incidents.
Thus, MTBSI = MTTR + MTBF

Formalizing Operating Level Agreements

• When an IT organization and the customer agree on a cost-effective level of
availability, the agreement needs to be formalized.
• This agreement document is called Operating Level Agreement (OLA).
• The OLA helps in defining the SLA.
• SLA is a two-way written agreement between an IT service provider and the IT
customers while OLA is an agreement between internal IT service providers.
• To define an effective OLA, the mechanism for reporting availability back to the
customer, the degree of granularity required, the format of presentation and
the frequency of reporting needs to be formally agreed upon.
 Availability Management
Advantages of Availability Management
• The IT services which implement availability management fulfill the agreed
availability requirements.
• It aims to maximize the availability of IT services and customer satisfaction
within the defined constraints.
• Other benefits of availability management include:
- Availability management ensures that new products and services fulfill the
availability requirements and availability standards that are agreed with the
customer.
- The associated cost is acceptable.
- It makes sure that the availability standards are monitored continuously and
improved.
- In case of the unavailability of the service, it ensures that corrective action is
taken when the service is unavailable and tries to minimize unavailability
duration.
- It is easy to prove its added values of an organization which follows availability
management in providing its services.
 Availability Management
Cost of Availability Management
• In general, cost and availability are proportional to each other. That is, the cost
increases as the availability increases.
• Therefore, finding the optimum solution is an important job of availability
management.
• Experience shows that, in most of the situations, it is possible to reach an
optimum state with limited resources, rather than with significant investment.
• The availability management process can contribute to the objectives of the IT
organization in these areas by providing the required services at an acceptable
and justifiable cost.
• The costs of availability management includes following major components:
- Cost of Implementation: It includes cost of implementation of availability
management in the organization.
- Personnel Costs: This is the cost incurred in providing training to personnel.
- Facilities Costs: This is the cost which is required to provide various facilities
to customers.
 Availability Management
Cost of Availability Management
• The costs of availability management includes following major components:
- Measuring and Reporting Tools: It relates to the cost incurred in
measurement and reporting tools.
• In order to improve the availability, availability management should identify the
areas where investment is needed.
• It is important that a cost-benefit analysis is carried out in all cases wherever
investment is needed.
 Availability Management
Relationship with Other Processes
• Availability management is closely related to other service delivery processes.
• The figure below shows the diagram depicting the relationship of availability
management with other service delivery processes.
 Availability Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Service Level Management
• Service level management is responsible for managing the service level
agreements.
• It negotiates and manages SLAs and OLAs of which availability is one of the
most important components.

Financial Management
• The responsibility of financial management is to monitor, control, and if
necessary, recover costs incurred by the IT organization.
• Financial management is closely associated with other service delivery
processes such as availability management, capacity management and IT
service continuity management.
• It acts as a filter and ensures that solutions proposed by availability
management, capacity management or service continuity management are
justified in terms of their cost to implement against the benefits that they offer
to the customer.
 Availability Management
Relationship with Other Processes
IT Service Continuity Management
• Availability management and IT service continuity management are related
because both processes work towards eliminating risks to the availability of IT
service.
• In practice, many measures taken to enhance availability also enhance IT
service continuity and vice versa.
• While IT service continuity management is responsible for restoring the
business processes after a disaster and deals with the more extreme and
relatively rare availability risks such as fire or flood availability management
focuses on handling the routine risks to availability that can be expected on a
day-to-day basis, such as the failure of a hardware component.
• The situations where no straightforward countermeasures are available or
where the countermeasure is relatively expensive, availability risks are passed
on to IT service continuity management to handle.
 Availability Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Capacity Management
• Changes in the capacity affect the availability of the service and vice versa.
• These two elements often exchange information about scenarios for upgrading
or phasing out IT components and about availability trends that could change
the capacity requirements.
• Availability management has a very close link with capacity management
process since optimal use of IT resources to meet performance levels at a
justifiable cost relates to the result of effective availability management.
• Capacity management is concerned with ensuring that IT resources are
available to meet customer requirements by planning for additional resources
when the use of the resources of the existing system begins to approach the
point of full capacity.
 Configuration Management
• Configuration management is a process which identifies and defines
configuration items in a system.
• It involves monitoring the status of these items, processing requests for change
and verifying the completeness and correctness of configuration items.
• It provides a logical model of the IT infrastructure (hardware, software and
associated documentation) by identifying, maintaining and verifying the version
of all configuration items.
• It controls the IT infrastructure and ensures that only authorised hardware and
software are in use.
• The figure below shows process flow of configuration management.
• Some basic terminologies used in configuration management are defined
below:
Configuration Item (CI)
• It is a fundamental component of IT infrastructure.
• It refers to the basic structural unit of a configuration management system.
• Size, type and complexity of one CI may vary from another and ranges from an
entire system to a single software or a minor hardware component.
 Configuration Management

Process flow diagram of configuration management

Configuration Item (CI)
• Also, a CI can be composed of other CIs. Examples of CIs include individual
requirements documents, software, plans, models and people.
 Configuration Management
Configuration Item's Attributes
• The information of a CI is stored in the database in the form of various
attributes such as name of the item, location and description of detailed
configuration settings and associated options.

Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

• It contains the details of CIs together with important relationship among them.
• The database may include category, copy and serial number, version, model,
location, responsibility or historical information about the item.
• It also contains information about the relationships between system
components such as incidents, problems, known errors, changes and software
releases.
• In addition to this, CMDB contains corporate data about employees, suppliers,
locations and business locations.
• The level of details available in this database depends on either the objectives
or the degree to which information is required to be available.
 Configuration Management
Configuration Manager
• It is responsible for managing the activities of the configuration management
process of an IT organization.
• Various roles of configuration manager include selection of staff, assignment of
responsibilities to staff and their training.

Functions of Configuration Management

• Configuration management does detailed recording and updating of
information to describe an organization's IT infrastructure.
• In addition to several other functions, it is responsible for following main tasks:
1. Identifying configuration items for entry into CMDB.
2. Finding relationship among configuration items.
3. Planning, designing and managing a Configuration Management Database
(CMDB).
4. Verification of CMDB accuracy.
 Configuration Management
• Configuration management is becoming an essential process but often it is
difficult to introduce and keep it up to date mainly because of the following
reasons:
- Configuration management is an overhead and requires resources which are
costly and not easy to manage.
- Technical staff performing configuration management have other priorities.
They have work to do which is in the "firing line".
- Technical staff also look down on administrative work and would rather
correct a program than update a database.

Advantages of Configuration Management

• Configuration management helps in providing cost-effective, high quality IT
services.
• Following are the major advantages of implementing configuration
management:
• Managing IT Components and Services - Configuration management monitors
each component of the IT services which includes one or more configuration
items.
 Configuration Management
Advantages of Configuration Management
Managing IT Components and Services
• It also assists in processing changes, identifying and solving problems and
supporting users.
• This reduces the number of errors and therefore, also reduces costs by
preventing duplication of effort.
Efficient Problem Solving
• Configuration management helps in identifying affected CIs and manages the
modification and replacement of these CIs. It also provides information about
trends, as an input to problem management.
Improved Security
• It helps in managing and monitoring the licensing of the software products. It
manages the versions used and provides information about the authorised
changes to CIs and the use of different software versions.
More Rapid Processing of Changes
• It can do quick and accurate impact analysis which enables changes to be
processed more accurately and effectively.
 Configuration Management
Advantages of Configuration Management
• Configuration management helps in providing cost-effective, high quality IT
services. Following are the major advantages of implementing configuration
management:
Better Support for Other Processes
• Availability management and capacity management depend on correct
configuration details for analyzing and planning services.
• Configuration management provides the same to these processes.
• It also provides support to IT service continuity management by keeping
properly and maintaining the backup copy of the CMDB.
• CMDB plays an important role in restoring services after any type of disaster.
• It also helps in identifying the desired CIs for disaster recovery.
Compliance with Legal Requirements
• Configuration management can help in preventing the use of illegal software in
the organization which may contain the viruses and lead to damage of the
entire system.
• Illegal copies can be identified when audit results are compared with the CMDB
entries.
 Configuration Management
Cost of Configuration Management
• Implementation cost of configuration management largely depends on its
scope and level of details. The cost has three main aspects -
• Expenditure, People and Time, which can be depicted as shown in below figure.
Expenditure
• It includes the cost required to purchase software and hardware to create a
CMDB.
• The cost of software and hardware depend on additional hardware and
software required and their configuration, license fees of the software based
on number of users, application and database design, database development
and maintenance.
People
• The personnel cost depends primarily on the size of the organization and level
of detail of the CMDB.
• Configuration management requires full-time staff only if there is a large
volume of continuous changes.
• These type of changes usually happens only in large organizations.
• In a small organization, roles and responsibilities can be allocated to existing
staff members.
 Configuration Management
Cost of Configuration Management
• Expenditure, People and Time, which can be depicted as shown in below figure.
Time
• The amount of time taken up by the configuration management process is
difficult to quantify once it is operational, since this depends on the volume of
changes in an organization.
• Spending time proactively on a configuration management database and
keeping it up to date can save time and effort spent later trying to track down
equipment or trying to understand the infrastructure.
• System also takes some time for the implementation and integration of the
process into normal day-to-day activities.
 Configuration Management
Relationship with Other Processes
• Configuration management is heavily dependent on availability, capacity,
change, release and IT service continuity management.
• It also supports a number of the other disciplines.
• Specifically, there is a close relationship among the three service management
functions - change management, configuration management and release
management.
• Following discussion gives more insights about the relationship of configuration
management with other management processes.
• The below figure presents an overview of these relationships.
Service Management
• It requires information about services along with the relationship between
services and the underlying infrastructure of CIs.
• Service level management data can also be stored on the CMDB and related to
the appropriate CIs.
• The service level can be recorded against the service CI or the component
hardware or software CI.
 Configuration Management
Relationship with other Processes
Relationship of configuration management with CMDB and Other Processes
 Configuration Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Financial Management
• It requires information about the use of services and CIs.
• For example, the required information could be the name of the department
which uses a processing service and the name of the staff having a PC.
• It combines with information from the service level agreements to estimate the
prices to be charged.
IT Service Continuity Management
• It uses standard configuration data from the CMDB to describe the
requirements of disaster recovery and checks that these configurations are
available at the disaster recovery site.
Capacity Management
• It uses data from the CMDB to plan and to optimize the IT infrastructure, to
allocate the workload evenly and to develop a capacity plan.
 Configuration Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Availability Management
• It has a strong relationship with configuration management.
• It uses the CMDB to identify the CIs which contributes to a service and for
Component Failure Impact Analysis (CFIA), a way of evaluating (and predicting)
the impact of failures and locating Single Points of Failure (SPOF).
• It draws up plans for changes to address identified weaknesses.
• Configuration management provides information about the composition of the
chain as well as about each of the elements.
Incident Management
• It requires information across the whole infrastructure.
• While registering incidents, incident management needs to access CI
information.
• For example, it helps to determine the CIs location and its owner, to determine
if there is a problem or a known error with a workaround associated with the
CI, to know the customers and the services that are impacted and the relevant
SLA.
 Configuration Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Problem Management
• It needs to know the complexity of the infrastructure.
• It should be capable of linking problems and known errors to CIs and use CMDB
data to analyze incidents and problems.
• Deviations or defects in the infrastructure can be identified by verifying the
actual configuration of the infrastructure against the authorized configuration
in CMDB.
Change Management
• It uses the CMDB to find out the impact of changes to be implemented in the
system.
• It authorizes changes and associates changes with the relevant CIs.
• Change management is responsible for recording Request For Changes (RFCs).
• Therefore, change management provides the major input for updating the
CMDB.
 Configuration Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Change Management
• Change management is very much essential for the successful implementation
of configuration management.
• It provides authorization and tracking processes to ensure that only approved
changes are deployed.

Release Management
• It provides a packaged release for all changes deployed into production.
• It provides information about release plans with versions and status of CIs
including major and minor releases.
• Release management also provides information about implemented changes.
 Service Desk
The Role of the Service Desk
• Changes in the capacity affect the availability of the service and vice versa.
• Most IT organizations have some type of service desk to offer assistance to
end-users.
• In the past, IT managers used various names to designate this function,
including help desk, call center, trouble desk or technical support.
• As IT evolved to become more customer-oriented, the name of this area
changed to that of customer support or the customer service center.
• With the emphasis today on IT service management, many organizations have
renamed their help desks to that of service desk.
• The service desk is a function, not a process.
• A function is defined within a department on an organization chart, has strict
organizational boundaries, and is associated with numerous personnel
management issues.
• For example, the implementation of a service desk involves hiring staff, training
them, evaluating their performance, offering them career paths and
promotions, and rectifying unacceptable behavior. A process has none of their
characteristics.
 Service Desk
The Role of the Service Desk
• The table below summarizes some of these generic differences between a
function and a process.
Table - Differences between a Function and a Process
Function Process
Has strict organizational boundaries Goes across boundaries
Involves personnel management Involves process management
Uses performance metrics Uses process metrics
Example: Service desk Example: Problem management

• Because a service desk is a function and not a process, it is not designed as one
of the 12 systems management processes.
• But the service desk does play a very crucial role in problem management.
• It serves as the single point of contact into IT for all users and customers; also, it
is responsible for accurately logging all calls that come into the service desk,
classifying them, handling them as best as possible, and tracking them to
completion.
 Service Desk
The Role of the Service Desk
• The relative effectiveness of a problem management process is directly related
to the caliber of the individuals who staff the service desk.
• It is hard to overstate the significant role the service desk plays in the success of
a problem management process.

Segregating and Integrating Service Desks

• As IT services grow in many companies, the number of service desks frequently
grows.
• When PCs first came onto the scene, they were usually managed by a support
group that was totally separate from the mainframe data center, including a
separate service desk for PC-related problems.
• This pattern of multiple service desks was often repeated as networks grew in
size, number and complexity; the pattern was also prevalent when the internet
blossomed.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• As IT organizations began recentralizing in the early and mid-1990s,
infrastructure managers were faced with the decision of whether to segregate
their service desks or integrate them.
• By this time, many IT shops had grown out of control because they used
multiple call centers - companies with 10 or 15 IT service desks were not
uncommon.
• If non-IT services were included in the mix, employees sometimes had as many
as 40 or 50 service numbers to choose from for an inquiry.
• In one extreme example, a bank provided nearly 100 separate service desks for
IT alone, having grown a new one each time an application was put into
production.
• Over time the benefits of integrating service desks gradually prevailed in most
instances.
• This is not to say that segregated service desks are always worse than
integrated ones.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• Highly diverse user populations, remote locations, and a wide range of services
are some reasons why segregated service desks can sometimes be a better
solution.
• The table below summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of integrating
service desks.
Advantages Disadvantages
1. Simplifies process for customers by reducing 1. Lack of specialized support
numbers to call
2. Remote locations may sometimes feel 2. Enables cross-training of staff
abandoned
3. Reduces number and variety of tools 3. Diverse user population more difficult to
service
4. Integration with other systems management 4. Diversity of services offered very difficult
disciplines easier to manage
5. Less expensive to operate
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• Since the advantages and disadvantages of segregating service desks are almost
the exact reverse of those for integrating them, the table is not repeated for
segregated service desks.

Real Life Experience - One Stop Shopping, Eventually

• A major motion picture studio had an IT department with seven different help desks
that were slated for consolidation.
• An extensive marketing campaign was used to inform customers of the new single
help-desk number with a catchy slogan that said, "One call does it all".
• The slogan was posted all over the studio.
• In order to enact a single service desk number that would provide all of the diverse
services previously offered, automated menus were used.
• So many menus were provided initially that users often became confused and
frustrated.
• Many posters throughout the studio were written over to read, "One call does not do it
all!" or "These multiple menus will jerk and bend you!“.
• The frustrations eventually subsided as the menus were reduced and simplified and as
more help-desk agents were added to the staff.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• An integrated service desk is not only easier for customers to use, it lends itself
to the cross-training of staff.
• Furthermore, there is a cost savings because companies can standardize the
call-tracking tool by collecting all call records on a single, centralized database.
• Even more is saved by utilizing staff more efficiently.
• Also, since there are fewer and more standardized help desks, management is
easier and less complex.
• Finally, it is easier to integrate other system management disciplines into it,
particularly change management.
• The primary advantage of a segregated service desk is the ability to customize
specialized support for diverse applications, customers and services.
• For example, some consolidated service desks have attempted to offer fax,
telephone, facilities, office moves, and other IT-related services only to find
they were attempting to do too much with too few resources; they were
providing too little service to too many users.
• In this case, multiple service desks tend to work better, although
communication among all of them is critical to their combined success.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• A compromise hybrid solution is sometimes used in which all IT customers call a
single service desk number that activates a menu system.
• The customer is then routed to the appropriate section of a centralized service
desk depending on the specific service requested.
• The proper location of the service desk is critical to the success of almost any IT
infrastructure.
• There are many reasons for this. Paramount among these is that the level 1
service desk is the first encounter most users have with an IT organization.
• Placing the service desk higher in the organization or merging it with other
service desks can increase its effectiveness, visibility and stature.
• The initial impression that customers form when they first dial the service desk
number is often long lasting.
• Service desk specialists refer to this critical interaction as the moment of truth:
the point at which customers form their initial, and - in the case of poor
encounters – often irreversible opinions about the quality of IT services.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• The number of rings before answering, the setup of the menu system, and
especially the attitude of the service desk agent responding to the caller are all
factors that influence a user's perception of the effectiveness of a service desk.
• The following lists in order of preference 10 things users want when they call a
service desk.
1. Answer incoming calls within two rings.
2. Whenever possible, a service desk agent answers the call; users don't want
an automated telephone menu to select from.
3. If you must use automated telephone menus, design them to be as simple to
understand and use as possible.
4. Sequence most commonly used automated telephone menu items first.
5. Allow for the bypass of some or all automated telephone menu items.
6. Calculate and report to callers average hold times in real time.
7. Practice good telephone etiquette by being polite, patient, courteous and
helpful to callers.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• The following lists in order of preference 10 things users want when they call a
service desk.
8. When handling a call off to level 2 support, give the caller a reliable time
estimate for follow-up and resolution.
9. Follow up with level 2 support to ensure the problem is being worked.
10. Follow up with callers to ensure problems are resolved to their satisfaction.
• Another reason the location of the service desk is so important is that it defines
to what degree multiple service desks may eventually integrate into fewer
service desks or into one fully integrated service desk usually referred to as a
Customer Service Center (CSC).
• During periods of initial growth, many IT organizations increase the number of
service desks in response to expanding services and a growing user base.
• Several clients of mine would institute a new service desk number whenever
they implemented a new, major application.
• Eventually, a large number of service desks – or service desk numbers -
becomes unwieldy and unmanageable.
 Service Desk
Segregating and Integrating Service Desks
• Sooner or later, most shops realize that a consolidated service desk is the most
efficient way to structure a customer service department.
• Many shops today fold their desktop support unit into the customer services
department as a peer to the service desk.
• This configuration often facilitates handing off of desktop problems from the
service desk directly to desktop support.
• The organization of this type of infrastructure is shown below.

Figure - IT Organization Highlighting Service Desk

 Incident Management
• An incident is an event or problem which causes or may cause interruption or
reduction in quality of service to the customer of an organisation.
• The goal of incident management is to restore normal service operations (as
defined in SLA) as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either
the business or the user and minimum disruption of services, at a cost-effective
price.
• It also maintains continuity of the service levels and underlying service desk
function.
• Inputs to incident management usually come from users but can also originate
from other sources like management information or detection systems.
• The outputs of the process are typically RFC's, resolved and closed incidents,
management information and communication to the customer.
• Incident management handles all detected incidents and all service requests
that can be raised through the Service Desk.
• Overall flowchart of incident management activities is shown in below figure.
 Incident Management

Flow diagram of Incident Management Activities

 Incident Management
• Major activities of the incident management are summarized below:
1. Detection of incident and recording.
2. Classification of incidents and initial support: Incidents should be recorded and
classified. Few examples of classifications are as follows:
a. Application
i. application error
ii. disk usage full
iii. service not available
b. Hardware
i. system down
ii. automatic alert
iii. printer not working
3. lnvestigation and diagnosis of incidents.
4. Resolution and Recovery: Resolve incidents and recover services as per agreed
service levels.
5. Incident closure.
6. Incident ownership, monitoring, tracking and communication.
7. Prioritization of incidents based upon impact and urgency.
 Incident Management
• Incident management is associated with service desk.
• Whenever an incident is reported, information related to the incident is
recorded by the service desk.
• Common information which is recorded includes reporter details, incident
details, system affected due to incident, actions performed to resolve the
problem.

Normal Data associated with an

Incident
 Incident Management
Advantages of Incident Management
• Main task of incident management is to restore normal service operation as
quickly as possible and to minimize impact of any service discontinuity on
business operations.
• It ensures that service user gets best possible levels of service quality and
availability.
• The implementation of incident management provides following benefits:
1. The use of incident management results into a decrease in down time of a
user(where down time is defined as the amount of time that a user is on the
phone to the service desk or cannot work because of a failure).
2. Using incident management for timely resolution of incidents results in reduced
business impact and increases faith in the IT organisation.
3. Reduction of incidents provided by incident management improves quality of
the IT service.
4. Incident management does pro-active problem resolution. It makes an IT
organisation more effective as it decreases the incidents.
5. Incident management provides improved user and customer satisfaction with
better utilization of support resources.
 Incident Management
Advantages of Incident Management
• The implementation of incident management provides following benefits:
6. Incident management provides better understanding of the impact of incidents
on SLA targets and, as a result, it allows improved prioritisation.
7. It provides accurate information on the incidents that are occurring and
eliminates "lost" incidents and service requests.
8. It supplies increased availability of management information.

An organisation which does not implement incident management may have to face
the following problems:

Lack of Responsibility
-Due to the lack of incident management, responsibilities of the people may not be
decided properly, resulting in an incident becoming unnecessarily severe and
reducing the level of service.
- In such scenarios, users are repeatedly referred to other authorities without the
incident being resolved.
 Incident Management
Advantages of Incident Management
Improper Use of Specialised Personnel
-Lack of proper incident management may cause interruption to specialists for
answering the users' queries.
- This means that specialists cannot do their work properly and this may result in
several people working on the same incident and unnecessarily wasting time and
possibly coming up with conflicting solutions.

More Cost
Because of the above-mentioned problems, the costs incurred by the customer
and the IT organisation may be higher than needed.
 Incident Management
Cost of Incident Management
• Cost associated with the incident management can be divided into two parts:
initial implementation cost and running cost.
Initial Implementation Cost
- Initial implementation cost includes the cost incurred in
1. Defining and communicating the processes and the procedures.
2. Training and instructing personnel. This includes customers as well as staff.
3. Selection and purchase of tools to support the process.

Running Costs
- It is the cost associated with the personnel and use of the tools.
- These costs depend greatly on the incident management structure, its scale of
activities, its responsibilities and the number of sites involved.
- Cost of the incident management system can be significantly reduced by reusing
the existing resources.
 Incident Management
Relationship with Other Processes
• Incident management is responsible for restoring normal service operation as
fast as possible and minimising the impact on business operations.
• It is related to most of the service delivery and service support processes.
Service Desk
• It acts as the initial entry point to many of the IT processes including the
incident management process.
• The job of service desk is to simply pass the received service requests to other
IT processes.
• However, the connection between the service desk and the incident
management process is much closer.
• The main tasks of service desk include recording, classification and initial
support phases of incident management.
• When incidents are assigned to resolver groups, the service desk keeps
responsibility for ownership by monitoring and tracking all the incidents.
• If the service desk works effectively, many service requests and incidents may
be resolved efficiently without ever going outside of the service desk process.
 Incident Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Service Level Management
• It provides incident management with the essential information required to
correctly classify new incidents.
• At the same time, incident management supplies the information of service
target violations to service level management.

IT Service Continuity Management

• It aims to prevent or reduce the impact of future incidents by designing
continuity plans and by implementing continuity measures.
• The plans supplied by IT service continuity management are used to recover
failed services during major incidents.

Capacity Management
• It helps incident management in ensuring the availability of sufficient capacity
for service desk tools, incident diagnosis tools and self service facilities.
• Also capacity management planning aims at preventing incidents occurring due
to lack of resources such as CPU power, network bandwidth, etc.
 Incident Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Availability Management
• It deals with determination of the impact of incidents on service availability.
• Incident management gives information on the number and duration of service
breaks, including their cause and the actions taken to resolve them.
• Availability management tries to reduce both the impact and the likelihood of
future service breaks through the implementation of prevention and relaxation
measures.

Configuration Management
• It provides important information which is used during the whole incident
management process.
• The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) contains information that
can be used to:
- Provide and check caller details
- Provide information on Configuration Items (CIs)
- Help to classify incidents by pointing out services and SLAs impacted by the
failure of particular CIs
 Incident Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Configuration Management
• The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) contains information that
can be used to:
- Identify the relationship and mutual dependencies between Cis
- Recognize identical or similar CIs for comparison purposes
- Find out alternative routes and effective workarounds
- Record changes to configuration items caused by RFCs.

Problem Management
• Incident and problem management are very much related to each other but
their focuses are entirely different.
• While Incident Management aims at restoring normal services as quickly as
possible during an incident, problem management focuses on the identification
of root causes and resolution of underlying problems from their roots.
• Incident Management provides to problem management much of the
information that is required to identify the existence of underlying problems.
 Incident Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Problem Management
• Problem management performs the analysis of incident statistics to identify the
occurrence of multiple incidents or increasing trends for specific types of
incidents.
• To prevent the recurrence of the incidents, problem management works
towards resolving the underlying causes of these incidents.
• Problem management also keeps information regarding existing problems and
known errors along with known workarounds and solutions.
• This information is used by incident management to provide a quicker
resolution of incidents.

Change Management
• Changes on any configuration item are carried out under the supervision of
change management.
• Hence, in the case when incident management identifies resolution actions that
need changes to configuration items, these changes are carried out under the
control of the change management process.
 Incident Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Change Management
• Change management process helps in decreasing the amount of changes that
have to be backed out and ensures that the backed out plans are properly
documented, in case they are required at a later date.
• The coordinated testing of changes reduces the chance of succeeding incidents
caused by the deployment of changes.
• Change management also provides to incident management important
information on new changes, the configuration items affected due to these
changes and the reasons for those changes.

Release Management
• Sometimes, resolution actions identified by incident management need to be
incorporated and produced as new releases.
• Release management process plays an important role in coordinating and
managing these releases.
• As in case of change management, release management also provides the
effective planning, testing and coordination mechanism to ensure that releases
can be rolled out with minimal incident.
 Release Management
• It deals with the mechanisms of building and releasing a new software version,
and is an integral part of service support process.
• It offers proactive technical support which mainly focuses on the planning and
preparation of new services.
• Release management aims to ensure the quality of the production environment
by using formal procedures and checks while implementing new version.
• Unlike change management which is concerned with the complete change
process and focuses on risk, it is concerned with the implementation.
• Release management manages and distributes software and hardware version
used for production which are supported by the IT department to provide the
required service level.
• Release management is responsible for the following activities:
- It performs planning, coordination and implementation (or arranging for
implementation) of software and hardware.
- It is accountable for designing and implementing efficient procedures for the
distribution and installation of changes to IT systems.
 Release Management
• Release management is responsible for the following activities:
- It manages the release of software into the live environment and its
distribution to remote locations.
- It is responsible for communication with the users and for considering their
expectations during the planning and rollout of new releases.
- It ensures that the original copies of software are securely stored in the
Definitive Software Library (DSL).
• It also observes that the CMDB is updated.
• The same applies with respect to the hardware in the Definitive Hardware Store
(DHS).
• The need of release management is to oversee the integration and flow of
development, testing, deployment and support of these systems.
• Where project managers are looking after development of a project, they are
generally more concerned with high-level, grand design aspects of a project or
application.
 Release Management
• But release managers oversee the more technical or day-to-day aspects of the
development.
• Hence, they must have knowledge of every aspect of the Software
Development Lifecycle (SDLC), various applicable operating systems and
software application or platforms as well as various business functions and
perspectives.

Processes Involved in Release Management

• The objective of release management is to control the release of new
configuration items into live environment and protect them in that
environment.
• This applies to both software as well as hardware.
• The function of release management process is more than just creating a new
version or updating a program.
• Whenever a new release is needed, there are various steps to be followed.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
• The figure above provides overview of these steps and following discussion
elaborates them:
Release Planning
• The first step in the release management process is the preparation of a plan,
identifying the activities and the resources required to successfully deploy a
release into the production environment.
• During any project planning activity, it is required to determine the tasks that
are to be carried out, time needed to complete (i.e., timescale) and their
priorities in relation to other tasks.
• It is often seen that programs consists of many modules which are dependent
on each other.
• Changing one module affects the other. Hence, in order to develop an efficient
system, these dependencies should also be known in advance.
• Once these issues are fully understood and dependencies are known, Release
manager can draw a detailed plan of activities and assign appropriate resources
to the project.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
Release Building
• After obtaining the requirements, dependencies and planning, the building
process of the new release can begin.
• The first step of release building process is to design the new release.
• Design can be carried out with the help of various software development
techniques such as UML, etc.
• Once the design is ready, it can be converted into a program using a suitable
programming language such as C, C#, C++, Java, etc.
• The pieces of developed code, classes, etc are combined together compiled
into working subsections and finally put together in the form of a working
program.
• It is always advisable to develop standard procedures for designing, building
and configuring releases.
• A release may be based on sets of components developed in-house or
purchased from third parties and then configured. Instructions for installation
and configuration releases should also be treated as a part of the release under
the control of change management and configuration management.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
Release Building
• It is also advisable to set up and test all hardware and software in a 'laboratory'
before installing it on site.
Back-out Plan
• A back-out plan at the level of the entire release defines the activities required
to recover the service if something goes wrong with the release.
• Change management is responsible for ensuring that back-out plans are
created whereas release management should help in ensuring that the
back-out plans are practical.
Acceptance Testing
• The most common cause of unsatisfactory changes and releases is inadequate
testing.
• To prevent this kind of situation, before actual implementation, a release
should go through a functional test by representative of the users and an
operational test by IT Management personnel who considers the technical
operation, functions, performance and integration with the rest of the
infrastructure.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
Acceptance Testing
• The release should be reviewed to verify whether it works correctly and lives up
to the requirements and dependencies.
• The tests should also include the detailed installation scripts, proper back-out
procedures and any change in the management procedures.
• During the time of the test, the entire process is documented to serve as a
future knowledge base.
• The purpose of acceptance testing is the following:
- It is responsible for performing the key functionality user acceptance tests
aligned to the requirements of the change and release to ensure confidence in
the release.
- It evaluates testing results of acceptance to make a confident decision to
move towards release preparation.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
Release Preparation
• After getting a correct and verified release, it is prepared for release to the
production environment.
• For this, the release is packaged as a final product to be sent to customers.
• Packaging is supported by procedures, records and accompanying documents
(such as packing slips) so that it can provide reliable information to
configuration management.
• Software release can be made internet downloadable or packaged in a CD.
• It is advisable to use automated tools for software distribution and installation
where ever it is possible.
• This can reduce the time required for distribution and improve the quality while
requiring fewer resources.
• These tools often help in verification of a successful installation.
• Before undertaking any installation, it is advisable to check the environment to
ensure the release can fulfill the conditions such as sufficient disk space,
security, environmental controls or limitations such as air conditioning, floor
space, power backup, etc.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
Release Preparation
• After installation, the information in CMDB should be updated to facilitate
verification of any license agreements.
• A final step is to verify the package against the requirements, resulting in audit
reports.
• This is a last verification before the entire package is released.

Release Deployment
• The deployment of a release consists of two aspects - getting the release
version to the customer and then implementing it.
• In a production environment, the process of deployment depends on the type
and the nature of the release.
• The selected release mechanism also affects the deployment.
 Release Management
Processes Involved in Release Management
Release Deployment
• However, in all the cases, in order to facilitate the deployment, release
manager should be provided with the status reports and also the tools and
technologies that can enable the tracking and monitoring the progress of
deployment, wherever it is appropriate.
• As changes are made to IT components during deployment, corresponding
changes must reflect in the configuration items and their interrelationship in
the CMDB.
• After the deployment of the release, the release manager should confirm that it
is working perfectly before proceeding for further deployments.
 Release Management
Advantages of Release Management
• Together with effective configuration management and change management,
release management helps to ensure the following:
Minimized Errors and Risks
• The risk of errors in software and hardware combination or release of an
incorrect version is minimized.
• The risk of incidents and the occurrence of known errors can be reduced by
testing and controlling implementation.
• Testing before rollout minimizes incidents affecting users and requires less
reactive support.
Involvement of Users in Testing
• Release management ensures the involvement of users during the testing of a
release.
• This helps in providing a better release to users since it assists the developers in
testing the release as per users' requirement.
 Release Management
Advantages of Release Management
• Together with effective configuration management and change management,
release management helps to ensure the following:
Ensures High Quality of Releases
• Software and hardware in live use are of high quality because they are
developed and tested under quality control before being released.
• Release management also provides a structured approach for rolling out all
new software or hardware which is efficient and effective.
Puts checks on Illegal Software Usage
• The risk of illegal software is reduced as well as the risk of incidents and
problems due to introduction of the wrong or infected software or hardware
versions into the live environment.
• Unauthorized copies and incorrect versions are more easily detected.
Helps in Better Planning
• Release management provides an opportunity to plan expenditure and
resource requirements in advance.
 Release Management
Advantages of Release Management
• Together with effective configuration management and change management,
release management helps to ensure the following:
Helps in Tracking Changes
• Changes in software are bundled together for one release.
• This minimizes the impact of changes on users.

Cost of Release Management

• Release management is an important part of service support process.
• Its implementation costs includes following main components:
• Personnel Costs - This is the cost incurred for the staff used in the
implementation of release management.
• Storage Cost - Storage cost includes cost for the DSL (Definitive Software
Library) and DHS (Definitive Hardware Store), building and testing and
distribution environments.
• Tools Cost - It includes the cost of software tools and required hardware.
 Release Management
Relationship with Other Processes
• Release management is closely related to service level, change and
configuration management.
• The figure below provides an overview of these relationships. More details are
as follows:
Service Level Management
• It provides the infrastructure hardware together with standard software
developed in-house.
• Release management is responsible for making hardware and software
available and for managing it.
Configuration Management
• It is responsible for recording the available software and hardware version in
the CMDB as basic configuration.
• The software added to the DSL and hardware for the DHS is recorded in the
CMDB at an agreed level of detail.
 Release Management
Relationship with other Processes
Relationship of capacity management with other processes is pictorially shown
 Release Management
Relationship with Other Processes
Change Management
• It is responsible for ensuring that there is adequate testing of the release.
• It decides about version changes in a release.
• Change management describes the procedures to ensure that changes are
authorized, including the impact analysis and analysis of the required
resources.
 References

• P. Gupta, “IT Infrastructure and Its Management”, 2nd Reprint, 2010, Tata
McGraw Hill, ISBN: 978-0070699793
THANK YOU