Comparison with industry norms

ITIL is itself an industry-recognized best practice, which is a growing standard for service management worldwide. The ITIL core publications provide documented guidance on detailed process assessment and service benchmarking that can be used as checklists and templates for organizations doing their own service reviews and benchmarks. Additionally, many IT service organizations around the world provide consulting and professional expertise in the process of conducting service management benchmarks and assessments to compare the current processes with published best practices and the ITIL recommendations. It may be worthwhile to investigate using these services if the scope of an assessment is very large or complex.

Process maturity comparison

Conducting a process maturity assessment is one way to identify service management improvement opportunities. Often when an organization conducts a maturity assessment they want to know how they compare to the other organizations. Figure 5.4 reflects average maturity scores for over 100 separate organizations that went through a maturity assessment.

Figure 5.4 Cumulative results of over 100 process assessments before improvement

0. Non-Existent	Nothing present
1. Initial	Concrete evidence of development
2. Repeatable	Some process documentation but some error s likely
3. Defined	Standardized and documented
4. Managed	Monitored for compliance
5. Optimize d	Processes are considered best practices through improvement

Table 5.3 CMMI maturity model

As you can see Service Level Management which is a key process in support of CSI is at a fairly low maturity level in the organizations used in the above example. The lack of a mature SLM process that provides for identification of new business requirement s, monitoring and reporting of results can make it difficult to identify service improvement opportunities. A prime target for improvements in this example would be first to mature the SLM practice to help achieve measurable targets to improve services going forward.

Total cost of ownership

The total cost of ownership (TCO), developed by Gartner, has become a key measurement of the effectiveness and the efficiency of services. TCO is defined as all the cost s involved in the design, introduction, operation and improvement of services within an organization from its inception until retirement. Often, TCO is measured relating to hardware component s. The TCO of an IT service is even more meaningful. CSI needs to take the TCO into perspective when looking at service improvement plan s.

TCO is often used to benchmark specific services in IT against other organizations, i.e. managed service provider s.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02