Gillian Law from the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network provides her account of a presentation by Kevin Holland Programme Lead for Service Quality Improvement withing the NHS Connecting for Health team, on why IT service management is his specialism...
“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now...”
Kevin Holland is a great one for the cheesy quote, often punctuating his presentations with humorous connections to make people laugh and remember the key points.
But Holland, Programme Lead for Service Quality Improvement within the NHS Connecting for Health team, and chair of the service management architecture domain for the UK Public Sector, cracks his jokes while making some serious points about how IT Service Management really needs to get its act together and think about how to manage the latest technology paradigms.
“IT service management is my specialism – I’m a bit of a visionary, and have a reputation for making people think!” Holland says.
“And what I’m trying to do is open people’s eyes to what’s going to be involved as we start to use cloud computing. In particular, the reasons why you can’t afford to leave service management involvement until just before things are about to go live, as so often happens.”
The service management team really needs to be involved from very early on in any project, when the service is being designed. If you leave the involvement until final testing, then it will be too late to change anything that needs changing for a quality live service.
“You need to think about how you’ll run and manage it right from the start. CIOs tend to think service management just runs the helpdesk. And to be honest, that’s because that’s all a lot of service management teams do. But there is so much more to IT service management. The other issue here is that service management don’t sell themselves well and don’t insist on getting involved early,” Holland says.
Without good management, a “technological marvel can turn into a service disaster – just look at the Hadron Collider! Recently they had a major cooling plant outage, and it turned out to have been caused by a bit of crusty bread supposedly dropped by a passing bird. Now, the technology designers designed a nice technical design, but it turned out not to be fit for live service. If you’d asked service management, by their very nature they would consider risks to service, and think, ‘hmm, what could go wrong here? Let’s cover the open power rail, just in case.’ It’s really about common sense, and focusing on maintaining service, rather than just focusing on the technology itself,” he says.
One challenge that cloud computing highlights is how to achieve homogenous service management for the end-to-end service, recognising that the service management teams of suppliers and customers have different roles.
Each supplier’s service management team needs to know about every single piece of hardware and software that makes up their service, with tools to track what’s being used, where is it, what versions of software are on which machines. They also need tools to perform housekeeping and manage upgrades consistently across their distributed environment whilst maintaining service.
“Also, what levels of service can you really, actually achieve with your cloud? What are you selling to customers? Do you offer any guarantees – and if so, can you actually meet them?"
“In this distributed environment, how will you find faults, how will you manage your capacity - you will need to invest in diagnostic tools. You also have to design resilience in and test that it works – don’t assume it’s there just because the technicians say so.”
From the customer’s perspective, service management needs to think in terms of buying and managing services rather than technology: that’s a huge shift, Holland says.
“They shouldn’t have to know about the technology at all. That’s a huge cultural change and it needs to be addressed if cloud’s going to take off. You don’t quiz the power company about the spec of the capacitors in their power plants, you just want to know about the service they’ll provide. Service management’s job is to manage the supplier to provide the services that have been bought."
Service management teams will need to work with the business to develop strategies for buying services. Which services are suitable for the cloud, and which aren’t? Email? Storage? What level of risk is your organisation prepared to take? And do you really know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from?
“This is where service management can play very strongly,” Holland says. “Matching service level requirements to service capabilities, being very specific about what’s wanted and all the important details: for example, who does a user call when it breaks – Google?! That’s not going to work for either the customer of the supplier.”
“Cloud is also the biggest threat to the future of service management – if your business users can buy services straight out of the cloud from their desktop, then why do they need to engage IT, or service management, at all? They DO need to, but unless service management make the required change in mindset and culture, they will get bypassed and die.”
“For all this to work”, Holland says, “we need a ‘toolset integration standard’ for service management – a standard way of specifying and reporting incidents and making routine requests between organisations. There isn’t such a standard at the moment, but complex clouds will not be able to operate effectively without one.”
“I’d also like to see a comparison engine for accredited services, to allow companies to choose wisely. It should offer capabilities, ratings, and prices. And to do that, you need to describe services in a standard way. Cloud brings this more to the fore because all the services are being offered ‘as is’, rather than specified by each customer."
“If service management teams step up to the mark on this, they’ll prove their worth. Otherwise, they’ll be seen as no use to ‘man nor beast’. And I can predict now that there’ll be some spectacular failures, where customers buy something that doesn’t work as expected. The supplier will go bust, they won’t be able to get their data... it’s bound to happen,” he says. “I also predict we will see some sharp selling practices for cloud services; ‘65% off all storage, offer ends Thursday…."
“Hence you need to go into the cloud marketplace with eyes open, and brain engaged!”
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