ITIL : 6 No 5 2005 SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT OF THE GERMAN….
Transport and Telecommunication Vol.6, No 5, 2005 SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT OF THE GERMAN AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE ITIL PROCESS LANDSCAPE Jörg Kundler DFS, Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH, Langen Am DFS-Campus 7, D-63225 Langen Tel.: +49 6103 707 2530; Fax: +49 6103 707 4596; e-mail: [email protected] Standard-based approaches to managing the complex IT environment have been rapidly embraced by the IT community.
The most popular framework being adopted is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Originally developed by the British government in the late 1980s, ITIL is comprised of a growing series of publications that outline a process-based set of best practices for IT service and systems management.
ITIL promotes a quality approach to achieving business efficiency and effectiveness in the use of information systems.
ITIL best practices are applicable to all IT organizations, no matter what their size or what technology they use.
Today, ITIL is the world’s most widely accepted approach to IT service management.
The distinction between business process and IT process needs to be well defined and communicated.
The Service Level Management (SLM) is one of the important and integral parts of the ITIL Standard.
The goal of the SLM is to create IT-service modules from the customer point of view.
The problem of System Management is that operations are only described from the technical or system point of view.
Often the customer view is lost.
This problem becomes obvious when dealing with such specific systems as Air Traffic Control (ATC) services.
One of the decision-making approaches is discussed in this paper as a case study for DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH, which is the legal private company for the German ATC and navigation services.
The progressive introduction of the IT-Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process for the IT-System Management, has been planned since 2001.
For the DFS it was important to describe end-to-end services.
As example the service chain “Representation of Radar Information”.
A major point is not only to create the complete chain, but also to define the right criteria and measurement methods.
The SLM is responsible for the standardization and controlling of IT-Services.
The services have to plan and to fix in a special IT-contract.
One-success criteria for Service Provider and Customer are a long-term win-win connection.
The SLM has to be arranging the permanent monitoring and reporting for the agreed Service Level.
The tasks and goals are as follows: – Management of Customer Requirements for IT-Services; – To create, plan and optimise customer oriented IT-Services; – To maintain Service Modules and Service Catalogues; – Standardization of Service Level and Services; – Contract-Management, monitoring and reporting of Service Level Agreements.
A successful SLM has to equally focus on economical, technical and organizational Customer Requirements.
The most important success criterion of SLM is standardization.
Keywords: IT Infrastructure Library – ITIL, Service Management, Service Level Agreements THE ACTUAL SITUATION OF IT Often IT and its organization is technical oriented or is focused only on the system point of view.
Especially IT-organizations are often structured in such a way that they reflect technical purposes and products.
Due to the fact that Companies today depend on the availability of their IT-Systems, IT has to support all business processes.
This means that IT is a critical factor of the company success and its role on the market.
IT became a completely new mission for high tech companies and the requirements regarding IT have to be changed. 4 Transport and Telecommunication Vol.6, No 5, 2005 Business IT has to be more flexible and customer oriented.
IT has to move from a technical point of view into a services and customer oriented service organization.
This is a complete change of business culture.
The customer today is not interested in an IT product.
The customer requires an overall measurable IT service, maybe a complete end-to-end service.
SHORT INTRODUCTION INTO THE IT-INFRASTRUCTURE LIBRARY (ITIL) ITIL is a quasi standard for IT-System Management Processes.
The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) set up ITIL.
The British Government set the task to create a new standard for public IT-departments.
ITIL is a protected label of the office of Government Commerce (OGC).
What is important is that ITIL is the Best Practice Standard, reflecting the experiences of IT System Management Processes.
ITIL is to be understood as an open guideline and a resource to arrange IT service processes, which are tailored for IT Service Management Processes.
ITIL is independent of Supplier or other industrial companies.
ITIL describes a common frame for all activities of an IT-organization.
These activities will be bundled into different processes.
Every process is responsible for a special task of the IT-organization.
This method for IT-management is independent from the structure of the IT-organization.
The main goal of ITL is to describe the ITService Processes and to set a standard in a systematic way.
The goals of ITIL are as follows: – Provision of a framework of best practices for the management of IT-services. – Implementation of methods for improvement of quality, performance and economy of ITorganizations. – To provide a higher degree of professionalism for employee and organization.
The use of the ITIL standard provides the IT-organization with the possibilities of automation and more flexible and customer oriented Services Processes.
ITIL is the basis for optimum and costefficiency. “ITIL has the goal to deliver IT-Services in a high quality”1.
Most IT-organization different ITIL processes can be found.
One goal of ITIL is to build a complete and integrated model of IT-processes, which are optimised and perfectly coordinated with each other.
All ITIL processes are in line.
The ITIL frame structure is shown in the following picture2: 1 2 It SMF page 37.
It SMF IT Service Management. 5 Transport and Telecommunication Vol.6, No 5, 2005 The ITIL Service Management Processes are divided into two core areas: – Service Support; – Service Delivery.
The Service Support processes concentrate on the support and realization of system management processes.
On this operational level, all processes for system operations are summarized.
The term Service Support describes the key practices of system management, like Service Desk, or Incident Management.
On the tactical level the Service Delivery processes describe the long-range planning and improvement processes of IT-Service performance.
They ensure that customer oriented service processes are fulfilled in detail and are executed in a structured way. Service Support Service Desk3 Incident Management Problem Management Configuration Management Change Management Release Management Service Delivery Service Level Management Finance Management Capacity Management Continuity Management Availability Management SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT AS A PART OF SERVICE DELIVERY The main goal of Service Level Management (SLM) is to make IT performance measurable.
Today it is important that the customer is able to measure the achieved Service Level and to assess the service quality in relation to the customer requirements.
Basically the SLM and the customer use agreed metrics for this task.
Due to the fact that the IT services have a direct impact on the success of business processes, the IT services have carefully to create, to plan, to operate and to monitor.
In this way the SLM is a central and strategic task of IT Management.
The SLM as a part of Service Management is the central interface between the customer requirements and the IT Service Operation.
The benefits of Service Level Management are the following: – The Service Level Management will increase the service quality and economy of service support. – The services shall fulfil in the customer requirements in a better way and so increase customer satisfaction. – The Service Level Agreements contain clear requirements from a quantity and quality point of view.
Thus there will be a common understanding of the tasks, competence and responsibilities of the customer and the IT-service organization. – With the help of a permanent service monitor it is possible to react in a timely and cost effective manner to service quality violations. 3 Service Desk is not a process, but is a special function. 6 — the input port of the radar data and flight plan processing system. This picture shows the complete service chain for the distribution of radar data.
Main metrics for this service are: – Servic availability 99,98% p.a. – Processing time from radar source to reprensentation <2000 msec. 13 Transport and Telecommunication Vol.6, No 5, 2005 TOOL SUPPORT To establish service management processes based on the ITIL standard it is necessary to have tool support.
The DFS divides the tool platform in two different kinds of tools.
From the technical point of view it is necessary for automation to use a system management tool to report and monitor failures and to perform switch over between cluster systems.
The tool resource is for the employee of the system operation (Service Level 1) and System Management (System Level 2).
The DFS uses the tool “BMC Partol” for the Business Support System.
The different services and systems have their own system management and monitoring tools and different databases.
Therefore it is important to define and to realize special adapters between the system management tool and the service level management tool.
The tool platform describes and supports the complete service process.
It is necessary that all service providers establish the data and information and define the rules and logic for calculation of the service level metrics.
In that way it is possible to integrate the SLA directly in the SLA tool, to combine the different SLA to an end-to-end service.
It is necessary to investigate a lot of time and resources to integrate the SLA in the tool and additionally to define the calculation rules, metrics and rules for reporting and alarms.
Based on these standards it is simpler to integrate a high number of SLAs in the tool.
The SLM tool has to support the following elements. A second important aspect is that the SLM tool and the system management tool have to work together.
The databases from the system management tools are the central input for technical information of SLM tool.
Based on the integrated Service Level Agreements and calculation rules the SLM tool reports on different levels.
Recommend reporting for the High Level Management (Managing Director) via dashboard, for the Service Level Manager and customer via metric reports and for the system operation via detailed technical metric and alarm reports. 14 Transport and Telecommunication Vol.6, No 5, 2005 CONCLUSION Today the most critical factor for IT-organization or service provider is the “full-life-support” of the business processes.
The ITIL standard is best practice method for reorganization into a customer oriented service provider.
It is recommend realizing the ITIL processes via organization project.
There for it is necessary to work out a detail project plan.
The implementation time for the ITIL processes dependents on the complexity of IT-organization and on the ITIL process it self.
The experience for complex companies shows the following time periods.
Incident Management 6-18 months, Configuration Management 3-9 months, Problem Management 5-8 months, Change Management 3-4 months, Release Management 2-3 months, Availability Management 4-8 months, Financial Management 6-12 months, Service Level Management 6-9 months.
After the implementation of ITIL it is necessary to define the services and service modules of the IT-organization; to describe them in detail and to calculate the costs and prices for every service as well as to provide the service via Service Level Agreements.
The DFS is now gaining its first experience with the definition of service chains and service management and monitoring of end-to-end services.
The first prototype will be completed by end of this year.
However, it has become apparent that a complete service orientation and customer satisfaction can only be achieved through end-to-end management of services and via complete transparency of cost and service quality.
A high level of automation is required based on standard system management and SLM tools.
From an organizational point of view it is very important to provide visible results for the management (dash board) and practical acceptance from the system management organization. 15 Transport and Telecommunication Vol.6, No 5, 2005 References [1] Product Information Guarantee, Company Oblicore. [2] Bernhard M.G., Mann H., Lewandowski W., Schrey J.
Praxishandbuch Service-Level-Management, Die IT als Dienstleistung organisieren. 2003. [3] Service Organisation Development; IT Service Management Pocket Cards IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Basel. [4] Reiman W.
Service Level Management, Flexibilität ist Trumpf.networkcomputing, 2004. [5] Fit for Benefit.
IT Services Kundenorientiert Planen und Steuern / Walter Vogt.
Perseo Consult AG, 2002. [6] IT Service Management.
Eine Einführung.
Van Haren Publishing, 2002. 16
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