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Service Level ManagementService Level Management is perhaps the most central practice to control and steer continuous IT services. It interfaces to virtually everything, and it must be resourced with people having a mandate to make decisions. It is the tactical and operations level instrument to implement the governance model of continuous services.A key part of service level management is to "translate" IT reports and other information to the language the management and the business stakeholders understand. The other way round, it is about translating the business-related requirements and constraints to IT targets and actions. Lue lisää... |
SIAMThe term SIAM, Service Integration and Management, has at least as many interpretations as there are interpreters. Usually, it is about hiding the complexity of multi-vendor service management from the business units. At some point in the value chain, there is a function that takes over the management and control of the vendors.SIAM is not a silver bullet that will remove all complexity from the world. Instead, it centralizes the management of complexity on fewer people and often into more capable hands. Everyone has seen vendors playing ticket ping-pong. There are a lot of things to consider when implementing the SIAM model. SIAM is not an off-the-shelf product that you can buy and go.
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Wanna Get Penalty Money or Service?Usually, the service provider must pay penalties (or service credits in Newspeak) if the achieved service level does not meet the targets.Are you a tough customer if you can get as much penalty money as possible to your company? An outsourcing deal is like a marriage: It works fine only if both parties feel good. If the relationship is based largely due to the digging of mistakes, the divorce is approaching sooner or later. A penalty driven vendor management is a common practice, and it may lead to good results. Still, it has drawbacks to consider.
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Hop, the Ticket!The tickets for the Incident Management and Service Request Management practices may be transferred from one team to another one for several times during their lifecycle. Such a hopping is normal, because there may be several teams involved.However, ticket hopping shall be monitored and controlled. An extra effort is needed if the tickets hop across companies. How much time is given to each body to handle the ticket is a generally unsolved question.
If the target time-to-resolve for the ticket is say eight hours, every team must complete their work much faster.
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Cheap as CloudThe cloud services are currently being presented as a silver bullet to any issue.The "term" cloud is defined in quite a loose way. Fortunately, things have changed since the peak of the hype, when everything related to networking was cloud. The cloud vendors have succeeded in what many have tried: They run wholesales for the retail prices. That is why every customer shall be careful.
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Sharing and Multi-Vendor DeliveryCustomers are often interested in their information stored in the data repositories of the service providers. The interest often concerns the ticketing system or the configuration database, or both of them. A common request is to have access to those repositories.The most common answer is a polite no. Obstacles are usually confidentiality and intellectual property rights.
No matter how close the customer-supplier relationship is,
you don't want to share all the information with your friend.
In the real world, the cases usually are complex:
A single vendor may have contracts with competing customers and the customer may purchase services from competing vendors.
No one wants to appear as the body through which trade secrets are leaked.
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