Book Image

A Practical Guide to Service Management

By : Keith D. Sutherland, Lawrence J. "Butch" Sheets
4 (1)
Book Image

A Practical Guide to Service Management

4 (1)
By: Keith D. Sutherland, Lawrence J. "Butch" Sheets

Overview of this book

Many organizations struggle to find practical guidance that can help them to not only understand but also apply service management best practices. Packed with expert guidance and comprehensive coverage of the essential frameworks, methods, and techniques, this book will enable you to elevate your organization’s service management capability. You’ll start by exploring the fundamentals of service management and the role of a service provider. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with the different service management frameworks used by IT and enterprises. You'll use system thinking and design thinking approaches to learn to design, implement, and optimize services catering to diverse customer needs. This book will familiarize you with the essential process capabilities required for an efficient service management practice, followed by the elements key to its practical implementation, customized to the organization’s business needs in a sustainable and repeatable manner. You’ll also discover the critical success factors that will enhance your organization’s ability to successfully implement and sustain a service management practice. By the end of this handy guide, you’ll have a solid grasp of service management concepts, making this a valuable resource for on-the-job reference.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Importance of Service Management
6
Part 2: Essential Process Capabilities for Effective Service Management
18
Part 3: How to Apply a Pragmatic, Customized Service Management Capability
Appendix B: SLR Template

Purpose and objectives

Configuration management is the process responsible for maintaining the single source of information about all components and their relationships, used to deliver services to customers, users, and other stakeholders. It is the single safe source of information about service components and their relationships with each other and the services they support. It provides access to information about the components and how they are used in IT service provision. Configuration Management maintains these relationships and configurations so that you can be more effective in understanding how components are organized to deliver and support IT services.

Configuration management is responsible for ensuring that components, also defined as configuration items (CIs), are identified, recorded, and managed throughout their life cycle. It will maintain a record of these CIs from the time they enter the IT environment until they are retired and disposed of.

A CI is a resource...