Complement ITSO & ITIL
with TeamQuest Solutions

IT professionals should make an adjustment and view infrastructure as a way to meet service levels and align IT with business objectives. The business cares about the achievement of specific objectives via IT, not about bits and bytes. Business units prefer to view IT as a series of services. This article highlights the importance of a process such as ITIL.

It makes sense, then, that Service Support and Service Delivery represent the core of ITIL as they are carried out daily to support users while also being strategic elements. Within them are many more modules. Configuration management, for instance, is one of the more difficult modules due to the relationships that exist between hardware, software and databases. Service level management is also vital as this is where you define the services and their requirements. If you are missing this function, it is like having a restaurant (IT Provider) with no menu (Service Catalog). Service level management lays out what you can deliver.

Capacity management, though, is probably one of the most encompassing elements within ITIL. It plays an integral role in several other aspects of ITIL such as service continuity management. Having the right capacity - at the right time and at the right cost - can deliver huge cost savings that can fund your other ITIL initiatives. But capacity management, or any other aspect of ITIL for that matter, cannot only be about tools. Even with the right tools in place, if you don't have the proper processes, you remain in a reactive mode.

ITIL Version 3 addressed this by providing excellent processes and better workflows than the previous version. However, ITIL is not a magic bullet. It is really all about continuous improvement. Once you achieve a result in its implementation, it is time to apply its many facets to further upgrade the IT environment and its alignment with business goals.

Comparing TeamQuest ITSO to ITIL
IT Service Optimization (ITSO) is a TeamQuest framework. It helps you optimize the planning and delivery of IT services, and consistently meet IT service levels while minimizing infrastructure costs and mitigating risks. Its processes are preventative, proactive, continuous, and cost effective. They also can be used effectively at both the IT-oriented and business-centric service levels.

The elements of ITSO include:

• Understanding services levels
• Prioritizing services and assess risk levels
• Establishing service levels
• Planning and provision services
• Managing service performance

How does ITSO compare to ITIL?
ITIL V3 is strategic and tactical while ITSO has more of a tactical focus. As a result, ITIL is all encompassing whereas ITSO takes a more finite view. In terms of focus, ITIL stresses provisioning services while ITSO places more emphasis on optimization. Both methodologies incorporate Plan-Build-Run and both have continuous service improvement

While ITIL attempts to totally transform an entire organization from top to bottom, ITSO's less encompassing view makes it much easier to harness for a rapid return on investment. As such, it is far simpler to implement and less impactful to the organization as a whole.

Take the case of the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC). LSAC implemented ITSO in 2007 in order to fully align services with business needs. Prior to implementing TeamQuest software, the organization experienced significant bottlenecks which culminated in an interruption in service. LSAC brought in TeamQuest software and ITSO experts to assist in the implementation of ITSO best practices to manage risks. The project finished ahead of time, under budget and generated a marked increase in service levels and reliability. In the disaster recovery arena, for example, LSAC beat its Recovery Time Objective goal by 12 hours and its Recovery Point Objective by 3.5 hours.

Jerry Goldman, Director of Technical Services at LSAC commented that ITSO made it possible to achieve rapid gain within the organization.

"Had we attempted a full-scale ITIL implementation, the results would have been delayed a number of years," he said. "But ITSO focused attention on specific goals and made it possible to resolve immediate challenges."

The point here is not to attempt to convince people of the merits of ITSO over ITIL. While there are differences between the two, ITSO is best viewed as a complement to ITIL.

How Best Practices Can Help
Best practices such as ITIL and ITSO can assist organizations in numerous ways. They formalize and simplify the process of defining goals, services, metrics, roles and responsibilities. In addition, they provide tools and processes to optimize any environment while minimizing costs.

So how should you get started on an ITSO/ITIL project? The first question to ask is what is the goal of the business? With that in the forefront, then look at the services you offer and customer expectations. This factor of expectation is a vital element of success. Take the case of the many MP3 players that entered the market a decade ago. The earliest ones failed to meet customer expectations. Was the iPod any better? Not really. Basically they do the same thing: play MP3s. The iPod succeeded due to the fact that Apple connected users with the content needed by the users in an easy and affordable manner. As a result, it has become the leading force in that industry.

In IT, though, you cannot adequately assess corporate goals and user expectations by sitting at a desk or reading a few documents posted on the "About Us" section of your website. You have to go meet with the business unit heads, discover their actual goals and ask enough questions to fully understand their needs. A capacity planner utilizing ITSO/ITIL, therefore, is really someone who translates business goals into IT results.

How? Based upon an understanding of what the organization intends to accomplish, move on to the next phase: check your service inventory, understand the service components available and set service levels. This later step, though, must be done by meeting with the business heads once again and reaching agreement on service levels.

TeamQuest and IT Maturity
TeamQuest software facilitates ITIL by going well beyond the bounds of traditional capacity management and into the realms of problem management, service level management and incident management. Further, it dovetails perfectly with ITSO to provide a framework for IT maturity as highlighted by Gartner Inc.

At Level 0, the user calls you and tells you that something is wrong. In this chaotic state, IT has no idea about problems before they are impacting users. Level 1 is reactive - the company is throwing in money and resources to fight fires. Tools may be in use for problem management and alerts but the "wait and then react" mentality continues to prevail. Level 2 is proactive where monitoring of performance takes place along with analysis of trends, some automation and the beginning stages of process establishment. Level 3 deals with defining services, guaranteeing SLAs and using capacity planning for current and future needs. A fully mature organization is at Level 4. It is only here where IT and the business are fully aligned. TeamQuest software in tandem with ITSO helps an organization arrive at Level 4.

TeamQuest provides monitoring tools to remain proactive at all times by providing Incident Information instantly so that services can be restored quickly. Its problem management capabilities make it simple to perform accurate Root Cause Analyses so you zero in on the right issues. Its service level management functions help you understand service level requirements, measure service levels and predict if future service level agreements will be met. Through service level views and service level reports, TeamQuest helps IT to fully define services. And of course, its capacity planning features assist you to understand future requirements, justify capacity cost decisions and provide the exact recommendations based on time, cost and capacity.

Other benefits of TeamQuest software include first-class reporting tools that automate the report generation process and place these documents in the hands of executives in formats they can understand at a glance, where and when they need them. It also supplies valuable assistance in understanding overall costs through the ability to track services as workloads and support input to the chargeback process.

TeamQuest solutions should play an integral role in any best practice implementation. They can help any ITSO or ITIL project by ensuring optimal use of IT, improving the availability and reliability of critical systems, providing cost analysis decisions you can depend on and supporting the delivery of business plans such as a capacity plan, an availability plan and service level agreements.

Those who use TeamQuest software uniformly state that it decreases time to incident resolution and accelerates root cause analysis. By providing accurate measurement for decision making purposes, the organization gains a valuable tool in achieving greater ROI.