What is Service Design?
Service Design covers the fundamentals of designing services and processes. It provides a holistic design approach to help an organization deliver better services.
Designing a service to meet an organization’s strategic and customer needs requires coordination and collaboration. Aim for high service maturity when designing services rather than the completion of an IT project. The higher the service maturity the higher customer and user satisfaction will be.
The five key aspects of Service Design are:
- Designing the service solution
- Management information systems and tools
- Technology
- Processes
- Measurements and metrics
Why Service Desing is Important?
- Allow the organization to understand the values of the IT services to the business outcome
- Consistently provide valuable services to the customers / users by understanding the intrinsic values
- Can respond to business change and give competitive capability to the organization
- Know how to prioritize the services requests to bring about maximum ROI
- Deliver services that are seen by the customers to be valuable (delivering business outcome and achieving business objectives)
Principles and Key terms
Design of a service has the following principles:
- Portfolio service project
- Business requirements
- Technological project
- Processes project
- Measurement project, including IT-KGI, KGI and KPI
Key terms to design a service include:
- Critical success factor: how to define that service providing succeeds.
- Downtime: one of the key terms for warranty, means how many times a service was unavailable for the client.
- KPI: to define Key Performance Indicators for the service.
- Maintainability: how easy is to maintain service.
- OLA/UC: service agreement with internal or external suppliers.
Four Ps
Four Ps for Service Design are:
- People
- Process
- Product/technology
- Partners/suppliers
Delivery model options
List of delivery model strategies are:
- Insource: when service uses internal resources for all service phases.
- Outsource: this model is set through a well defined portion of service-design. It may use the ASP model, defined below.
- Co-source: it’s a combination of insource and outsource.
- Partnership or multi-source: agreement between two or more organizations to work together providing service.
- Business Partner Outsourcing (BPO): relocates entire business function to an external organization that will provide and manage service. This model generally means a more operational partner, like accounting or call-center.
- Application Service Provider (ASP): through a formal agreement an organization provides computer-based software through a network. It is also know as on-demand software/applications.
- Knowledge Partner Outsourcing (KPO): service provided by a thinking partner, it is one step ahead of BPO. Generally provides a specific field expert-knowledge.
- Managed Service Provider (MSP): more broadly end-to-end service partner. This model is not defined in ITIL V3.
Partners agreement
Before closing an agreement with a customer, there is a need to close an agreement with partners. It is not possible to guarantee that a service will be able to return in one day, if that service requires an interaction with a supplier that needs two days.
ITIL defines two forms of agreement:
- Operational Level Agreement (OLA): an agreement between an IT service provider and an internal service provider (part of same the organization).
- Underpinning Contract (UC): an agreement between an IT service provider and an external service provider (outside of the organization).
Measurement
Design may measure a process service by:
- Progress: milestones & deliverables.
- Compliance: according to governance standards.
- Effectiveness: accuracy & correctness.
- Efficiency: optimized use of resources.
A service may be measured by three ways:
- Prerequisite For Success (PFS): an activity that needs to be completed. Generally a PFS is an input for another process.
- Critical Success Factor (CSF): what defines a service to achieve success[1].
- Key Performance Indicator (KPI): indicators to define that a service has achieved success.
Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) refers to developing independent usable services. SOA is defined by Organization for the Advancement of Information Structured (OASIS). SOA provides more flexibility through modularity.
Prerequisites for SOA approach
Here the prerequisites required for implementation of SOA approach:
- Definition of services
- Clarity regarding interfaces and dependencies between services
- The application of standards for the development and definition of services
- Use of broadly-based technologies and tools.
SOA Governance and Principles
SOA Governance is an extension of IT Governance that focus on Service Lifecycle Management (design, develop, deploy, operation till retirement), Service Policy Management, Service Consumption and Composition management. It involves defining and implementing policies that enforce chains, oversees compliance with policies (via metrics) and provides procedure on what to do with exceptions. SOA Governance also defines People’s roles and responsibilities, implements Processes and Technologies so that SOA are managed appropriately to deliver on the stated business goals.
So what are the key constitution parts of SOA Governance? Oracle has published their SOA Governance Framework as shown below:
The Open Group also published the SOA Governance Reference Model (SGRM) that comprises of the following constitution parts:
- SOA governance guiding principles
- SOA governing processes
- Governed SOA processes
- SOA governance process artifacts
- SOA governance roles and responsibilities
- SOA governance technology
For details on SGRM, please refers to The Open Group web site. There are a fair amount of consistency between Oracle and The Open Group SOA Governance Framework, you are free to pick the framework that best fits your needs.
SOA Governance Implementation Roadmap is the process to putting in-place a customized SOA Governance for an organization. One rule of thumb is the SOA Governance’s should be consistent with the organization’s existing IT Governance policies, IT Service Management procedures (e.g. ITIL based) and organization SOA Maturity. The Open Group has published the SOA Governance Vitality Method (SGVM) that details how to implement SOA Governance:
The SGVM phases involved are:
- Plan – Identify and analyze the core governance areas for improvement. Establish objectives/plan and specific measures for a proposed increment. Previously deployed increments are also evaluated for any necessary improvement.
- Define – Define the SOA Governance Model Transition Plans required to deliver the objectives defined in the Plan phase.
- Implement – Implement the Transition Plans including deployment of processes, organization, and technology aspects of the SOA Governance Model.
- Monitor – Monitor the effectiveness of the currently deployed SOA Governance Regimen and whether it is meeting its intended purpose. This phase may start another iteration of the SGVM.
Service Design Processes
Following table describes several processes in Service Design:
| S.N. | Process Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Design Coordination It deals with maintaining policies, guidelines, standards, budget for service design activity. | |
| 2. | Service Catalogue Management This process is responsible for designing service catalogue containing service specific to the customer for which they are willing to pay. | |
| 3. | Service Level Management The goal of this process is to ensure quality of the services meet provisioned quality agreements. | |
| 4. | Capacity Management Capacity Management ensures optimal and economic usage of existing resources and future capacity requirement planning. | |
| 5. | Availability Management Availability Management ensures the operative services meet all agreed availability goals. | |
| 6. | IT Service Continuity Management This process ensures continuity of IT services regardless of any disaster occurs. | |
| 7. | Information Security Management This process ensures confidentiality, integrity, availability of data. | |
| 8. | Supplier Management This process ensures supplier relationship & performance and also ensures management of right and relevant contracts with supplier. |
1 : Service Catalogue
Service Catalogue contains information of specific services for which customer are willing to pay. It is a knowledge management tool which allows employees and consultants to route their request for and about services.
Service catalogue is subset of service portfolio and contains presently active services in service operation phase.
Service Catalogue Composition
Each service in the catalogue contains the following elements:
- A identification label for the service
- Description of services
- Related service request types
- Any supporting or underpinning services
- Service categorization or type that allows it to be grouped with other similar services
- Interfaces and dependencies between all services, and supporting components and configuration items (CIs) within the service catalogue and the CMS
- Clear ownership of and accountability for the service
- Associated costs
- How to request the service and how its delivery is fulfilled
- Escalation points and key contracts
- Service level agreement (SLA) data
Service Catalogue Aspects
Service catalogue has two aspects:
Business Service Catalogue
It contains all the IT services delivered to the customer, together with their relationship to the business units and the business process that rely on the IT services.
Technical Service Catalogue
It contains all the IT services delivered to the customer, together with their relationship with supporting services, shared services, components, and CIs necessary to support the provision of the service to the business.
Service catalogue management process is responsible for providing information regarding all agreed services to all authorized persons. This process also takes care of creation and maintenance of service catalogue with correct and updated information.
Service Catalogue Manager is the process owner of this process.
Any change to service portfolio or service catalogue is subject to Change Management process.
SCM Activities
Here are the key activities included in Service Catalogue Management:
- Agreeing and documenting a service definition with all relevant parties
- Interfacing and Service Portfolio Management to agree the contents of the Service Portfolio Management to agree the contents of the Service Portfolio and Service catalogue
- Interfacing with the business and IT Service Continuity Management on the dependencies of business units and their business processes with the supporting IT services contained within the Business Service Catalogue
- Producing and maintaining a Service Catalogue and its contents, in conjunction with service portfolio
- Interfacing with Business Relationship Management and Service Level Management to ensure that the information is aligned to the business and business process.
Service Level Management (SLM)
deals with negotiating, agreeing and documenting existing services with some level of policies.
Service Level Manager is the process owner of this process.
SLM deals with following two kinds of agreements:
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Operational Level Agreement (OLA)
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
It is agreed document assuring the warranty with regard to level of service quality delivered by the service provider. It is between service provider and the customer.
Operational Level Agreement (OLA)
Unlike SLA it is agreement within the organization.
SLM Activities
The following diagram describes activities involved in SLM process:
Service Level Requirement (SLR) is one of the earliest activities in Service design of Service Lifecycle. SLR needs to be drafted, once the service catalogue has been produced and SLA structure has been agreed
Objectives
Here are the objectives of SLM:
| S.N. | Objectives |
|---|---|
| 1. | Define, document, agree, monitor, measure, report, and review the level of IT service provided. |
| 2. | Provide and improve the relationship and communication with the business and customers. |
| 3. | Ensure that specific and measurable targets are developed for all IT services. |
| 4. | Monitor and improve customer satisfaction with the quality of service delivered |
| 5. | Ensure that IT and customers have a clear and unambiguous expectation of the level of service to be delivered |
2 : Capacity Management
ensures proper utilization of available resources and makes future capacity requirement available in cost-effective and timely manner. Capacity Management is considered during Service Strategy and Service Design phases.
It also ensures that IT is sized in optimum and cost-effective manner by producing and regularly upgrading capacity plan.
Capacity Manager is the process owner of this process.
Capacity Management Activities
The following table describes several activities involved in Capacity Management Process:
| S.N. | Capacity Management Activities |
|---|---|
| 1. | Producing capacity plans, enabling service provider to continue to provide services of quality defined in SLA. |
| 2. | Assistance with identification and resolution of any incident associated with any service or component performance. |
| 3. | Understanding customer’s current and future demands for IT resources and producing forecasts for future requirements |
| 4. | Monitoring Pattern of Business activity and service level plans through performance, utilization and throughput of IT services and the supporting infrastructure, environmental, data and applications components. |
| 5. | Influencing demand management in conjunction with Financial Management |
| 6. | Undertaking tuning activities to make the most efficient use of existing IT resources. |
| 7. | Proactive improvement of service or component performance |
Objectives
Here are the several objectives of Capacity Management:
| S.N. | Objectives |
|---|---|
| 1. | Produce and maintain an appropriate up-to-date capacity plan reflecting the current and future needs of the business. |
| 2. | Provide advice and guidance to all other areas of the business and IT on all capacity and performance related issues. |
| 3. | To manage performance and capacity of both services and resources. |
| 4. | Assisting with diagnosis and resolution of performance and capacity related incidents and problems. |
| 5. | Assess the impact of all changes on the capacity plan, and the performance and capacity of services and resources. |
| 6. | Ensure that proactive measures to improve the performance of services are implemented wherever it is cost justifiable to do so. |
Capacity Management Elements
Capacity Management broadly includes three components: Business capacity management, Service capacity management, and Component capacity management as shown in the following diagram:
Business Capacity Management
This sub-process deals with forecasting and developing plans for future business needs. It is done by using existing data on current resource utilization by various services.
Service Capacity Management
This sub-process deals with understanding the functioning of IT service, resource usage and variation to ensure that appropriate service agreement can be designed.
Component Capacity Management
This sub-process ensures optimizing use of current IT resource components such as network capacity, bandwidth etc.
Capacity Management Information System (CMIS)
CMIS maintains updated database of resources, commodities etc. which is used by all sub-processes within Capacity management.
3 : Availability Management (AM)
ensures that IT services meet agreed availability goals. It also ensures new or changed service meet availability goals and doesn’t affect the existing services.
Availability is expressed as:
(Agreed service time – Down time)/Agreed Service Time
Availability Manager is the process owner of this process.
Objectives
Here are the objectives of Availability Management:
Availability Management Process
Availability Management process is comprises of following key elements:
- Reactive activities
- Proactive activities
Reactive activities
Activities that are involved in operational roles are known as reactive activities. Activities such as monitoring, measuring, analysis and management of all events, incidents and problem involving unavailability come under reactive activities.
Proactive activities
Activities that are involved in design and planning roles are known as proactive activities. Activities such as proactive planning, design & improvement of availability come under proactive activities.
Availability Management process is completed at following two interconnected levels:
- Service availability
- Component availability
Service availability
It deals with availability and unavailability of service and also the impact of component availability and unavailability on service availability.
Component availability
It deals with component availability and unavailability.
Availability Management sub-processes
The following diagram shows sub-processes involved in Availability Management process:
Identifying vital business function (VBF)
VBF refers to business-critical elements that are supported by an IT service. It is important to document all VBFs to provide better business alignment and focus.
Designing for availability
Although additional costs are incurred in providing high availability solution to meet stringent high availability needs yet it is necessary to provide high availability of those services supporting to more critical VBFs.
Service Failure Analysis (SFA)
Service Failure Analysis is designed to:
- Provide structured approach to identifying causes of service interruption to the user.
- Assess where and why shortfalls in availability are occurring.
- Improve overall availability of IT services by producing a set of improvement for implementation or input to Activity Plan.
4 : Service Continuity Management
ITSCM ensures continuity of IT service in time of any disaster. It also evaluates the level of insurance we need to protect service assets and a manuscript to recover from a disaster.
IT Service Continuity Manager is the process owner of this process.
Objective
The following diagram shows the several objectives of ITSCM:
ITSCM Process
ITSCM process comprises of four stages: Initiation, Requirements & strategy, Implementation, and Ongoing operation.
Initiation
It includes policy setting defining scope and terms of reference, project planning and resource allocation.
Requirements and strategy
It includes business impact analysis, risk assessment.
Implementation
It includes executing risk reduction measures, recovery option arrangements, testing and plans.
Ongoing operation
It includes education and awareness, change control of ITSCM plans, ongoing testing.
5 : Information Security Management
Information Security Management (ISM) ensures confidentiality, authenticity, non-repudiation, integrity, and availability of organization data and IT services. It also ensures reasonable use of organization’s information resources and appropriate management of information security risks.
Information Security Manager is the process owner of this process.
Information security is considered to be met when:
- Information is observed or disclosed on only authorized persons
- Information is complete, accurate and protected against unauthorized access (integrity)
- Information is available and usable when required, and the systems providing the information resist attack and recover from or prevent failures (availability)
- Business transaction as well information exchanges between enterprises, or with partners, can be trusted (authenticity and non-repudiation)
ISM Security Policy
It is required for ISM security policies cover all areas of security, be appropriate, meet the needs of business and should include the policies shown in the following diagram:
ISM Framework
ISM Process
The following diagram shows the entire process of Information Security Management (ISM):
Key elements in ISM Framework
ISM framework involves the following key elements:
CONTROL
The objective of Control element is to:
- Establish an organization structure to prepare, approve and implement the information security policy
- Allocate responsibilities
- Establish and control documentation
PLAN
The purpose of this element is to devise and recommend the appropriate security measures, based on an understanding of the requirements of the organization.
IMPLEMENT
This key element ensures that appropriate procedures, tools and controls are in place to underpin the security policy.
EVALUATION
The objective of Evaluation element is to:
- Carry out regular audits of the technical security of IT systems
- Supervise and check compliance with security policy and security requirements in SLAs and OLAs
MAINTAIN
The objective of Maintain element is to:
- Improve on security agreements as specified in, for example, SLAs and OLAs
- Improve the implementation of security measures and controls
PREVENTIVE
This key element ensures prevention from security incidents to occur. Measures such as control of access rights, authorization, identification, and authentication and access control are required for this preventive security measures to be effective.
REDUCTIVE
It deals with minimizing any possible damage that may occur.
DETECTIVE
It is important to detect any security incident as soon as possible.
REPRESSIVE
This measure is used to counteract any repetition of security incident.
CORRECTIVE
This measure ensures damage is repaired as far as possible.
6 : Supplier Management
The term supply management describes the methods and processes of modern corporate or institutional buying. This may be for the purchasing of supplies for internal use referred to as indirect goods and services, purchasing raw materials for the consumption during the manufacturing process, or for the purchasing of goods for inventory to be resold as products in the distribution and retail process.
In many organizations, acquisition or buying of services is called contracting, while that of goods is called purchasing or procurement. The supply management function of an organization is responsible for various aspects of these acquisitions:
- Working with business leaders who have identified a business need or requirement to identify, source, contract, and procure the needed good or service from qualified suppliers
- Managing supplier performance
- Implementing technologies, processes, policies, and procedures to support the purchasing process (Supplier Relationship Management).
- The supplier relationship management process: a process for providing the structure for how relationships with suppliers will be developed and maintained.[1]
- Economic theories of supply and demand
Supply management is generally regarded as a systematic business process that includes more functions than traditional buying, such as coordinating inbound and internal pre-production logistics and managing inventory.
Supply management deals primarily with the oversight and management of materials and services inputs, management of the suppliers who provide those inputs, and support of the process of acquiring those inputs. The performance of supply management departments and supply management professionals is commonly measured in terms of amount of money saved for the organization. However, managing risk is one of the other critical aspects of supply management; especially the risk of non-availability at the required time of quality goods and services critical for an organization's survival and growth.
Groups and certifications
The importance of supply management in global business has prompted the formation of professional organizations to address the need for higher levels of supply management skill and expertise. One of the largest of these is the Institute for Supply Management, a United States not-for-profit association that includes more than 40,000 members. It is affiliated with the International Federation of Purchasing and Supply Management, a union of local and national purchasing associations with approximately 200,000 members.
For companies seeking to fulfill diversity supplier spend commitments, the National Minority Supplier Development Council with 37 affiliated regional councils, was established in 1972 to assist in promoting supplier development of Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American-owned businesses, and providing management training and capacity-building to minority business enterprises and corporate program staff.
Many certification programs are relevant to the supply management profession. Some are offered through non-profit associations, such as the Certified Professional in Supply Management (CPSM) through the Institute for Supply Management. There are also for-profit companies who offer certification programs, such as Next Level Purchasing Association, who offers the Senior Professional in Supply Management® (SPSM®) Certification.[2]
Supply management is different from supply chain management, though it can be considered a component of supply chain management. Conversely, where the supply management function is established as a C-level strategic effort, supply chain management is but one component of an overall strategic supply management approach. Supply management is a complementary discipline that encompasses the alignment of organizations, processes, and systems for strategic sourcing, contract management, supplier management, spend analysis to continuously improve global supply for best-value performance in support of the strategic objectives of the business.
Supply Management Software
One report that focuses on a sub-set of the space is a Gartner research report:[3] "Sourcing applications provide a systematic and scalable means for organizations to manage the full sourcing process, including finalizing purchase specifications, selecting suppliers and negotiating prices....Most sourcing solution vendors bundle spend analysis, contract management and supplier performance management tools into their suites." The Gartner report summarizes, "Best-of-breed providers with suites delivered via software as a service dominate the strategic sourcing application market, while ERP companies with integrated offerings are gaining traction by providing tactical sourcing support." Gartner estimates the sourcing software market at close to a half-billion dollars in 2007 with an annual growth rate of 5%. According to Gartner, the research firm, leading providers of supply and contract management software include SAP, Ariba, Zycus, GEP, BravoSolution, Ivalua, AECsoft, Rosslyn Analytics and Emptoris.[3]Supply Management software comprises all of the different solutions which automate the source-to-settle process and include Spend Analysis, eSourcing, Contracts, Supply Base Management, eProcurement,eCatalogs (for Supplier Enablement), and Accounts Payable or ePayables solutions. Software which helps automate the management of complex services like business travel and temporary labor are also included in this software segment
Metadata
Objectives
The following diagram shows several objectives of supplier management:
Supplier Management Process
The following diagram shows several activities included in Supplier Management:
Here are the activities involved in Supplier Management Process:
- Implantation and enforcement of the supplier policy
- Maintenance of an SCD
- Supplier and contract evaluation and selection
- Supplier and contract categorization and risk assessment
- Contract review, renewal and termination
- Development, negotiation and agreement of contracts
- Maintenance of standard contracts, terms and conditions
- Management of contractual dispute resolution
- Management of sub-contracted suppliers
- Agreement and implementation of service and supplier improvement plans
References
