Ashley Neu
ITIL Service Strategy can be broken down into three intermediate level ITIL subsections:
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
Service operation can be broken down into two main categories; Principles and Processes. Today we will be specifically talking about Service Operation Principles – what they are, and why they are important.
ITIL Service Operation: Principles
Service Operation Principles are meant to make your life easier. By creating standard principles that can be followed throughout many different departments of your company, issues are solved quicker, communication and feedback are regularly available, and costs decrease while increasing efficiency.
Service Operation principles are centered around balance. In order to achieve a goal, you need to have the right mixture of team members, information and guidelines. With that being said, here are the principles that Service Operation focuses on.
Internal IT View vs External Business View
The view of IT as a set of technology components is an internal IT view. While the view of IT as a set of IT services is an external business view. If a company has an extreme internal focus, then the company may be in danger of not meeting business goals. On the other hand, if a company has an extreme external focus, they may be in danger of under delivering on promises to businesses.
Stability vs Responsiveness
Service Operations should ensure IT infrastructure is stable and available. It should also recognize that business and IT requirements change.
This balance is necessary. If you are always responding to needs and issues you never have to time to plan for the future You may over spend due to the strict time restrictions and may make your own mistakes under pressure that will just dig a bigger whole.
If you company always makes sure they are in line with everything, then you run the risk of missing ever changing business requirements. You cannot expect to always be perfectly stable in every aspect of your business. Things change, trends end, and at some point you will need to account for this or be left behind.
Quality of Service vs Cost of Service
Service Operation is consistently required to deliver the agreed level of IT service to its customers and users while keeping costs and resource utilization at an optimal level. This can be achieved via Service Level Requirements (SLRs). They help avoid over sizing and under sizing the service.
Reactive vs Proactive
Similar to Stability vs Responsiveness, a reactive organization does not act unless it is prompted by an external driver and a proactive organization always looks for ways to improve the current situation. To keep a balance, you should have formal problem and incident management processes integrated between service operation and control service improvement.
More on Service Operation Principles
This was just a general and short overview of Service Operation Principles. If you are interested in a free mini lesson click below to download a free Service Operation Principles slide deck. You can also click below if you are interested in learning more about Service Operation or any other ITIL course/track.
