SON SON
I.T issues affect everyone. Whether it’s a mix up at a government department delaying the payment of benefits/rebates or an air traffic control systems crash which causes inbound and outbound flights to be suspended at the nation’s airports, IT errors can have significant consequences. Even when the results of such failures aren’t life threatening they can have a massive financial impact upon the organisations concerned. Millions of dollars a year are lost due to IT problems. These losses accrue from waste, fines/penalties, decreases in productivity, the need to redo work that is lost and missed sales opportunities to name but a few.
Consider your daily routine – You’re forced to skip breakfast because your ‘Wheaties’ flakes weren’t delivered with your online grocery order as the order picking printout at the central depot got jammed in a printer. Your commute into work was even more hellish than normal due to a failure within the traffic signal control system. According to the news, the problem is due to the unexpected load the system is experiencing during rush hour. You arrive late, stressed and grumpy (probably due to hunger); this is compounded by having to walk up twelve flights of stairs to your desk because the main elevator control system needed a reboot. Out of breath, you attempt to begin your daily routine; unfortunately you are unable to check your email because a worm virus has infected your corporate email system causing it to melt down.
The virus found its way into the network because a planned operating system patch was misapplied to one of the servers in the DMZ (whatever that is). Undeterred, you drag your aging underpowered laptop to the board room and plug in the LCD projector. For some inexplicable reason nothing happens. After several minutes plugging and unplugging the projector you scream for someone to get help. Several minutes (or maybe hours) later a man with a replacement bulb arrives and restores calm. The calm is short lived as some bright spark points out that the figures you ran for your important management meeting are wrong because the exchange rate metadata in the sales automation tool hasn’t been updated.
This problem soon becomes irrelevant as the video conference link with your remote sites is painfully slow due to network issues. It isn’t even 10am and already IT has conspired to ruin your day, your career and your life. Why oh why can’t IT just work? To the best of your knowledge, these IT people get paid handsomely and yet they seem incapable of preventing even the most fundamental of issues. Surely they have systems in place to do this stuff for them? Operations, Sales or Manufacturing wouldn’t be allowed to continue in such a shoddy manner! Something must be done! You’re not exactly sure what that something is, but hey that’s not your problem.
Put simply, IT Service Management (ITSM) is the group of processes and functions that oil the wheels of the IT machine. Without ITSM, every IT project and system would deteriorate over time until they fail. ITIL is the recognized best practice standard for ITSM. ITIL has been around since the late 1980s. And yet, many of today’s IT problems have been around for just as long. Clearly to manage IT effectively organizations must go beyond the ITIL framework – This book is a practical guide to delivering and managing IT services in an effective and efficient manner by extending the ITIL approach to deliver proactive and pragmatic IT Service Management.
By Rob Addy
Springer | English | 364 pages | PDF | 5.336 KB | Download | Password : it