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Wondering how you’re going to successfully implement an ITIL project? Don't fret. Follow these five steps to service optimization nirvana with IT Service Optimization (ITSO). ITSO is a logical, best practices process supported by tools aimed at optimizing the planning and delivery of IT services and complements ITIL.

With the ongoing realities in the data center, IT is looking for ways to deal with higher costs and lower service qualities that impact business operations and margins.

ITSO delivers the following benefits:

• Reduced total cost of ownership
• Greater return on IT investment
• Consistent IT service delivery
• Improved asset utilization
• Enterprise view of IT
• Business and IT alignment
• Proactive adjustment to business changes

Understand Business Objectives
The first step is to fully understand the business requirements by discovering what the business is trying to accomplish. Understanding the priority of business goals enables IT to align with those priorities and determine where time and resources are best focused.

Taking into account the business goals of the organization, it is important to review processes to be sure that they accomplish meaningful work in a sensible and efficient manner. This analysis should be conducted prior to automating a process. In other words, it does no good to automate an inefficient process. For example, a major computer vendor implemented a Sales Force Automation (SFA) system. After spending $8 million on implementation, the company saw a decline in sales. It turns out they had automated a bad process and were making mistakes more efficiently.

Prioritize Services and Assess Risk Levels
Prioritizing IT services helps IT focus attention and resources where they are most needed in order to generate business value.

It is very important to understand the relative importance of different IT services and prioritize them so that resources are allocated appropriately. Determine which services are aligned with critical business objectives. Such business-critical services should receive more attention and more planning to minimize risks and ensure consistent delivery of those services.

Establish Service Levels
IT and the business units must agree upon service-level objectives. A good service definition aids communication and ensures that expectations are in line with reality.

Service level requirements are generally documented in a service catalog, which contains definitions for every service provided for the business by the IT organization. Sometimes a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is also negotiated and agreed upon by both the IT organization and the business, but isn’t necessary. Required service levels should be achievable and not so detailed as to introduce unnecessary overhead and complexity to the management of the IT service. A good service definition aids communication with business unit clients and ensures that expectations are in line with reality. Ideally, required service levels are expressed in business terms meaningful to clients.

Plan and Provision Services
Applications must do more than simply fulfill functional requirements. Proper planning, testing and provisioning ensure optimal performance once the service is launched, while controlling costs through optimized resource utilization. Pre-deployment scalability testing is important to understanding how services will perform under varying demands.

The process for preparing critical applications for production should include steps for determining the optimal configuration for systems that will host the new applications, taking data center architectural policies into account. Especially when rolling out new applications, a load-testing tool to simulate transactions coming from end users or other systems can be used to benchmark applications on test systems to be certain they can support required service levels.

For most systems, time and cost considerations make it prohibitive to conduct such tests on the actual hardware using production-level workloads. Full-sized machines and software are too costly to dedicate for testing purposes, and finding the optimal configuration through empirical testing can take a long time. Instead, smaller, but representative loads can be applied to a scaled-down set of test servers and software while performance analysis software takes a baseline reading of performance.

Manage Service Performance
As a follow-up to establishing service level requirements, it is necessary to monitor and report how well IT is meeting those requirements. Monitoring allows IT to react when problems are threatening to impact the business, and also for client business units to know whether they are getting their money’s worth from IT services. Ideally, proactive performance management practices such as capacity planning are used to ensure problems are addressed before service level requirements are jeopardized.

Performance issues can never be avoided completely because circumstances are constantly changing. Business plans, forecasts and technologies change, and unpredicted events occur. That is why ITSO, like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, or the Service Level Management sub-process of ITIL, calls for continuous analysis and adjustment. Problems are continually detected and remedied by making adjustments or changes to correct those problems.