Infrastructure management is undergoing a transformation. ITIL can help manage conflicting demands like – “low cost but high service quality”, “ubiquitous access but enhanced security”?

« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 »

November 15, 2007

Defining the Service Owner role - Part 2

In part 1 of my post – “Defining the Service owner role”, I penned about the need for service centric roles in IT organizations and some of the common misconceptions with respect to the service owner role. The reasons for these misconceptions need to be looked into.

Why there are misconceptions?

Why is it so painful to determine Service owner for a Service? Here are couple of reasons I could think of:

a)  This role has been largely missed in the ITIL literature to date. No guidelines were available on choosing a service stakeholder as a service owner.
b)  Services are being viewed as IT systems or at component level (applications, Server, Network, etc) that definitely have owners associated with it. Many IT centric organizations have application owner and asset owners in place.
c) The service owner role cannot be hard-coded as there are no pre-defined rules for selecting a service owner based on some set of activities he is responsible for. The level of ownership varies based on scenarios.What is right?
Following are my viewpoints around choosing service roles based on specific pattern of activities performed by these roles: Business Customer: Purchases the service for consumption by End-users. They often need service offerings (e.g. Service Catalog) from the IT to choose the right level of service they need.Business Relationship (Engagement) manager: Liaise with business & technology to translate strategic objectives to project and support requirements & vice-versa. Obtain funding and alignment from business on key IT initiatives and projects. This role is actively involved in defining IT strategy inline with the Business strategy. 

Service owner: Accountable for delivering the service consistently in accordance with the business requirements and the service design. Service owner role is not directly responsible for people or Budget. Service Owner owns a portfolio of services and manages them throughout their entire lifecycle – service inception to service retirement. Service owners should have the visibility on service pipeline (services that are being planned and built) & services in production.

Service ownership can be defined at a lower atomic level (e.g. Server, application, etc.) or a higher bundle level (e.g. Data center, Production support, etc.) At higher level, various types of atomic services interact together to form a Service bundle (or portfolio) aligned to customer’s business needs. The service owner role that owns a super set of services from a strategic perspective can be called as Service Manager.

 Service owners do not represent the provider side of Service delivery, but are more aligned to the customer / business side of delivery. Service owners work with atomic service owners and service delivery managers (see below) to standardize and productize services and catalog the service offering.


Once the service offering is cataloged, they work with the Relationship mangers to “expose” the services to business customers and help them choose the right level of service they want. In this role service owner act more both like a product manager as well as a marketing manager. Once the service views are exposed to customers, the service owners work with delivery managers and SLAs managers to ensure the quality of services delivered to the customers.


The service owner role that owns a super set of services from a strategic perspective can be called as Service Manager. For example, the head of Datacenter operations can be a Service Manager to whom the individual service owners (eg: Server management, Application management, etc.) report to.

 

Service Delivery managers: Mostly represent the provider side of the service. Delivery management includes organization, administration, and supervision of the people, processes, and technologies to provide and maintain the business and technical functions needed to successfully achieve business needs.

SLA Manager: Ensures that the agreement between Service owner and business is maintained and improved through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting


The Service owner roles have a global scope and have end to end Service accountability for specific internal services. This role has both tactical and strategic elements to it. Tactical – to ensure the service continues to perform within defined service levels. Strategic – to input to and ensure delivery of Service Improvement Plans.

 

A good service owner is the owner who maintains a balance between the strategic & tactical elements, without putting their hands deep into either of them.

The Service owner is a conductor. A good conductor cannot play all the instruments but must understand how they all work and how to blend them to achieve perfect sounds. The owner has the responsibility to blend the team to achieve a perfect business.

Do we really need all these roles ? Can we "orchestrate" these roles? More on this in my next blog.

Posted by Guest Author at 03:20 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

November 06, 2007

Defining the Service Owner role - Part 1

With V3.0 shifting the focus of ITIL from its traditional process centric approach towards a service lifecycle approach, there is an increased need for defining service centric roles within IT organizations. This paradigm shift of focus from IT systems & processes view to IT services view, which drive creation of values and influence positive outcomes to the customers, have made services the most dynamic “asset” with in an IT organization. As organizations progress towards the “Service-centric” model, the question of "who owns a Service" is being asked within an organization perpetually at various levels and at various times.

In setting a context for the service owner role, it is worth seeing the definition of a service itself. “Service” is defined in ITIL V3 as - “Services are means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks”. The service owner plays a key role in maintaining the dynamicity of a service through out its lifecycle in delivering value to its customers.

Why & when do we need a service owner?

IT organizations are keen in driving towards the Business-IT alignment by adopting guidelines and processes outlined in ITIL. In this effort, they had defined process centric roles like Service Level Manager, Availability Manager, Service delivery manager, etc. These roles worked more closely with specific IT domains and processes and were aligned towards enhancing technology aspects of delivery, resulting in IT losing the business focus. This coupled with the new service-centric approach, outlined in ITIL V3.0, have prompted the need for roles that work more closely with business customers and help “integrate” technology delivery with service demand from business customers.

With Services also becoming agnostic to organization charts, it requires a great deal of enterprise accountability and oversight to manage it in its life cycle. The Service owner is one key role that organization can look into in enabling the accountability and deriving value out of services. Truly, some misconceptions exist with respect to this role and there need to be discussions around defining the scope of this role.

What are the misconceptions? 

As part of working with some major customers in Service related projects (Service Catalog, Service Level Management, etc …) I had encountered some scenarios where I had to ask the same question – “Who is the Service owner for this Service?” This is how service stakeholders typically respond to this question:

Support team1 (3rd-party): "We report to our Delivery Manager. He manages the delivery and he is the Service Owner".

Service Delivery Manager: "I only manage the delivery of Service. We deliver the Service to the Customer XX and they are the owners"

Support team2 (internal): "We do not know what service you are talking about. We only support the application. May be, you can check with our PM"

Support PM: "We are supporting only applications. The infrastructure is supported being by XXX. We do not own this service. You may check with the SLA manager as he is setting SLAs and reviewing it with all service stakeholders"

SLA Manager: "Well, I am managing relationship between Technology & Business by ensuring that the providers adhere to SLAs and services are monitored, measured and reported to validate the service performance"… But, I am not the service owner.

Business group: “I pay for the service and it should be owned by technology and shouldn’t they own the responsibility to provide value to what I am paying for"

From the above conversations, it is evident that no one really wants to own a service as a coherent whole, but is rather happy to handle it in “pieces”. Surely, this is the situation that many of us might have gone through when trying to identify the person accountable for services.

Are there any other roles / views? more on this in my next post

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Guest Author at 12:30 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 05, 2007

The Service Conundrum ... Introducing Renjith Sreekumar

Service Lifecycle, Service Portfolio, Service Catalog, Service Asset, oh dear. It goes on. And ITIL V3 just exponentially increased the IT vocabulary around the Service front, it seems.

So, how does someone navigate through this Service Conundrum? Well, here's introducing Renjith Sreekumar -

Through these blogs, I have requested Renjith to share his experience of designing and managing Service centric processes. Renjith is a consultant with the IT Service Management Process Consulting Group of Infosys. Over the past few years, he has helped several ITIL driven process engagements with clients including global fortune 500 companies.

Over to you, Renjith.

Posted by Arvind Raman at 09:31 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Subscribe to this blog's feed

Blogger Profiles

Recent Posts

Categories

Infosys on Twitter


Archives