At the time of the case study below I was a permanent employee of the Financial Services Company, hence the references to we (meaning IS Operations).   Financial Services Company - Potential Outsource of IT Operations   A) Scene   It was the early…

Establishing effective Service Level Management (SLM) requires Service Level Agreements (SLA) to be defined and agreed with the Business or Customer community. The contents of the SLA should be clear and concise, objective and measureable. Having agreed the SLA the next stage is to report against the SLA.…

Background   The points that will be covering include a background on the LAS which covers the LAS work and how the IM&T Directorate previously operated. IM&T stands for Information Management & Technology and is often used in the NHS, as it includes a combination of…

Some believe that the fundamental discipline that underpins almost all the ITIL disciplines is Configuration Management and the Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB). The CMDB can comprise of a multitude of different types of Configuration Items (CIs), each containing various attributes. When deciding what level of attribute to record it is…

More often than not an ITIL implementation can comprise of more than one discipline being implemented in parallel. On occasions they may be run as separate projects, ideally they should be run together under a ‘Program’. An example of such an implementation would be the introduction of ITIL…

The following points have been extracted from an article entitled 'Selecting an ITIL Service Management Toolset'.   1.      Select a toolset that fits your organization not the other way round.  Processes come first not the tool.  Be clear on what you want the toolset to do…

By Hank Marquis, www.itsmsolutions.com   The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) refers to Service or Systems Outage Analysis (SOA) as a method to improve availability. Unfortunately, the ITIL does not indicate how one actually performs SOA! This article explains the benefits of SOA, and gives you a 7-step guide…

ITIL Service Level Agreements or SLAs are recognized as an essential requirement to delivering consistent IT services to the customer community, irrespective if they are internal or external customers of the organization. What is often neglected when considering the establishment of the SLA is the corresponding necessity for…

Ask many IT Managers what Patch Management is about and they'll respond that it is mostly the deployment of Service Packs and patches required to keep worms and viruses at bay. As IT infrastructure becomes more complex and businesses demand reduced downtime; coupled with the increasing anxiety around governance and…

An IT partnership with 'the Business' is now found to be a fundamental requirement of most medium to large organizations today. The knowledge of IT has grown within the user / customer base to the extent that the 'mystic of IT' does not wash so well as it…