In my first installment of ‘Why Is SLM So Difficult To Implement', I discussed 3 of the many challenges that IT organizations and Service Providers face when implementing Service Level Management. A colleague read this blog gave me encouragement for the blog (Thank you Amy J) and also challenged me to provide a solution to the issues posed in Part 1 (Again, thank you Amy J). I told Amy that I would address this challenge in my next blog, but that didn't happen. I will attempt to address the challenge in this installment.
I have been thinking about and discussing/arguing a solution for the challenges with implementing SLM for at least 3 years and unfortunately have not come up with a single solution. I have found that there are multiple solutions to successfully implementing SLM. From all of these conversations, I have found that the following activities are common to most of the solutions discussed.
- Embracing the cultural shift in IT and how IT interacts with the business – What I mean by this is that IT must accept that the culture of IT is changing and project an image, so to speak, of being a contributor to the profitability of the organization and its efficiencies. This can be done by working with their customers to understand how each side can optimally collaborate together to achieve identified corporate goals and strategies(For an anecdote on this process, check out this entry, ‘IT is From Mars and Business is from Venus – Use SLM to Help Improve Communication and Relations'). The outputs of this collaboration could be service offerings and processes that increase productivity and most importantly, a better understanding and agreement of the roles of IT and Business as they begin their renewed working relationship.
- IT creating stable and integrated processes for delivering value to the overall business – Like ERP implementations, successful implementation of ITIL processes and functions will be dependent upon IT reviewing their existing processes and functions and making adjustments and improvements to them. These adjustments and improvements will need to be done to improve efficiencies and integrations between and within the various ITIL processes. The following are examples of process integration:
- SLA warning or violations can create incidents in the corporate help desk system. These incidents could ultimately trigger activity in the Problem, and Change processes.
- When monitoring an enterprise system (SAP, email, etc) or customer facing subscription based system (an online trading system) SLA, the SLM tool needs to integrate with various systems and processes to activate the SLA monitoring process and to receive data for warning and violation analysis. These processes represent asset/configuration management, availability management, capacity management, incident management and their related systems.
- Performing impact analysis of RFCs on SLAs requires that the change, configuration and SLM processes are integrated.
Ultimately, the solution to successfully implementing SLM is directly related and dependent upon how the IT organization or Service Provider, MSP or Cloud Provider, on how they are focused and determined upon implementing ITIL as a whole in their organization.
These are my thoughts, what are yours?
