In my last blog post I discussed three of the most important parts of the “ITIL® Service Transition” book. In this post, I will give the same treatment to the “ITIL Service Operation” book.
Achieving Balance
The “ITIL Service Operation” book discusses various balancing acts that all service providers face. The balancing acts are:
- Internal View vs. External View of IT
- Stability vs. Responsiveness
- Quality vs. Cost
- Reactive vs. Proactive
ITIL does not prescribe the specific choices that an organization should make with respect to these balancing acts. What the best practices does is says that service providers must be aware of where they stand with respect to these balancing acts, because the choices that are made will impact how services are delivered.
The Event Management Process
I’ve spent quite a bit of my career working in operational IT organizations that are focused on monitoring the IT environment, in an effort to detect potential interruptions to services ideally before customers and users experience an interruption in service.
Some organizations spend significant amounts of money attempting to understand the various things that can happen in their IT environment, what those things means and what they mean when they occur simultaneously. When I’ve been involved in this kind of work in the past, rarely did we have any kind of unifying concept of guiding process to help us understand what we were doing and why we were doing it.
The event management process provides a good way of getting in touch with the various things that can occur in an organization, determining what they mean and then deciding what to do about them when they occur.
Operational Involvement in Other Lifecycle Stages
Operations staff are often left out of significant happening throughout the organization. They are often the last to know about something significant being implemented, and their perspective is often not included throughout strategy, design and transition.
The “ITIL Service Operation” book gives clear guidance on why the operational perspective is important, and how it can be engaged in other lifecycle stages. Many organizations could benefit significantly from applying these approaches and getting their operational people involved in other things that are happening in the organization. This tends to make implementation as well as initial support and training easier, more cost-effective and higher quality.
There are many things that are useful and important about the “ITIL Service Operation” book. This post discussed achieving balance, the event management process and operational involvement in other lifecycle stages, which are three of the most important concept discussed in the “ITIL Service Operation” book.
Related Courses
ITIL Foundation
ITIL Awareness