Check out the post by Luiz Carlos Mesquita Scheid, addressing the topic “Market standards in IT services”, encompassing subjects such as ITIL, CobiT, and CMMI”.
The establishment of market standards, such as ITIL, CMMI, and CobiT, along with tools like OTRS, has made integrated architecture management viable for the provision of IT services.
To present how these models work, we will revisit their conceptual definitions here. First (according to ITIL), an IT Service “is a service provided to one or more customers by a service provider, which supports the business processes of this/these customer(s), is made of a combination of people, processes, and technology, and must be defined by service level agreements”.
Meanwhile, ITIL is published in a series of five books, each covering an IT management topic. They provide a description of an important number of IT best practices, with definitions of processes, roles, and execution guides, which can be adapted by any organization interested in improving the efficiency of its IT services.
CMMI
CMMI uses a process improvement approach and has essential elements that, according to the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, help the organization “integrate traditionally separate organizational functions into sets of process improvement goals and priorities, providing a guide for process quality, and providing a benchmark for process evaluation”. CMMI was developed to support three areas of interest – acquisition, services, and software development – and has guides for each process area (which varies depending on the area of interest) and maturity level. Finally, CobiT is a best practice framework for IT governance.
CobiT provides corporate IT managers, external auditors, and users with a relevant set of processes, metrics, and indicators to facilitate alignment with business objectives, control (compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley or Euro SOX requirements), and the proper use of resources allocated to IT.
Considering the roles played by organizational IT managers and their IT service providers, several challenges and opportunities may emerge with the integration of the standards presented here. Starting from the four domains of CobiT – plan and organize, acquire and implement, deliver and support, monitor and evaluate – we can assume the following:
On the IT service provider side, the Service Desk is a key function playing a central role in IT service management.
It provides a “single point of contact” for interaction between IT service users and the service provider. The processes of the service desk and ICT infrastructure management are based on the CMMI for Services model, which adopts all existing recommendations in ITIL, and both support the deliver and support domain of the service consumer. Still on the IT service provider side, application management processes, infrastructure design, and software development are based on CMMI for Development and support the acquire and implement domain of the service consumer.
The dashboard is a tool designed to support IT managers in decision-making. It must provide information on contracts, the status of each service, indicators, and service level agreements. It is the basis for the plan and organize and monitor and evaluate domains.
The growing complexity and dependence on IT, coupled with increasing budget pressures, dictate that the industry adopt internal and external practices to achieve its objectives.
