IT Service Continuity Management

Financial Management for IT services

Knowledge Management

It is vitally important that all data and information that can be useful for future Service Operation activities are properly gathered, stored and assessed. Relevant data, metric s and information should be passed up on the management chain and to other Service Lifecycle phases so that it can feed into the knowledge and wisdom layers of the organization ’s Service Knowledge Management System, the structures of which have to be defined in Service Strategy and Service Design and refined in Continual Service Improvement (see other ITIL publications in this series).

Key repositories of Service Operation, which have been frequently mentioned elsewhere, are the CMS and the KEDB, but this must be widened out to include all of the Service Operation teams’ and departments’ documentation, such as operation s manuals, procedure s manuals, work instruction s, etc.

Service Operation staff must participate in and support the overall IT budgeting and accounting system – and may be actively involved in any charging system that may be in place.

Proper planning is necessary so that capital expenditure (Capex) and operational expenditure (Opex) budget estimates can be prepared and agreed in good time to meet the budgetary cycles.

The Service Operation Manager must also be involved in regular, at least monthly, review s of expenditure against budgets – as part of the ongoing IT budgeting and accounting process. Any discrepancies must be identified and necessary adjustments made. All committed expenditure must go through the organization’s purchase order system so that commitments can be accrued and proper checks must be made on all goods received so that invoices and payments can be correctly authorized – or discrepancies investigated and rectified.

It should be noted that some proposed cost reductions by the business may actually increase IT costs, or at least unit cost s. Care should therefore be taken to ensure that IT is involved in discussing all cost-saving measures and contribute to overall decisions. Financial Management is covered in detail in the Service Strategy publication.

Service Operation functions are responsible for the testing and execution of system and service recovery plan s as determined in the IT Service Continuity Plan s for the organization. In addition, managers of all Service Operation functions must be on the Business Continuity Central Coordination team.

This is discussed in detail in Service Strategy and Service Design and will not be repeated here, except to indicate that it is important that Service Operation function s must be involved in the following areas:

• Risk assessment, using its knowledge of the infrastructure and techniques such as CFIA and access to information in the CMS to identify single points of failure or other high- risk situations
• Execution of any Risk Management measures that are agreed, e.g. implementation of countermeasure s, or increased resilience to component s of the infrastructures, etc.
• Assistance in writing the actual recovery plan s for system s and services under its control
• Participation in testing of the plans (such as involvement in off-site testing, simulations etc) on an ongoing basis under the direction of the IT Service Continuity Manager (ITSCM)
• Ongoing maintenance of the plans under the control of ITSCM and Change Management
• Participation in training and awareness campaigns to ensure that they are able to execute the plans and understand their role s in a disaster
• The Service Desk will play a key role in communicating with staff, customer s and user s during an actual disaster

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23