As a business, you should not have to waste your time worrying about matters such as availability and stability of your IT systems or performing day to day maintenance related activities for that matter. We believe that IT should be a business enabler, not an overhead.

In order to help you focus on your core competencies as a business, while making the most efficient use of IT to enable better business, Excelory offers IT Service Management (ITSM) services that not only keep your existing web applications and IT systems running smoothly, but also reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of IT, through efficient use of systems, staff, processes, product, suppliers, talent and technology.

In offering our ITSM services, we follow ISO/IEC 20000 (previously BS15000), which is the International Service Management Standard for IT service management, and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which outlines the best set of globally recognized ITSM practices.

Our ITSM service offering can be summarized as follows. Each of these areas are an important and integral part of IT Service Management, which makes it imperative to offer them as a set. Depending on the maturity of your business and your specific requirements, however, we can tailor this service and the depth of its offering to provide you with what best fits your organization. Having said that, here is an overall list of services the for a part of our ITSM offering:

Service Support & Maintenance

Every IT-enabled business requires appropriate IT services to support its users. Business users need a mechanism to ask for clarifications and/or help when faced with difficulties, receive prompt support when IT systems have problems, request for changes as and when situation demands, and be notified of any IT changes that could have a potential impact on business operations. Our Service Support and Maintenance offering addresses this need, and mainly consists of the following functions/activities:

• IT Service Desk is a function that provides a single point of contact for business users. In case of any IT related concerns, they just contact the service desk, which provides the required solution instantly whenever possible, or initiates processes that involve other groups/levels that can resolve the matter. Either way, the IT Service Desk continues to be the interface with the users, saving them from the burden of having to coordinate with various IT groups and enabling them to focus better on business operations. (more)
• Service Catalogue Management involves the provision and maintenance of a mechanism for managing the list of specific services being offerred to the users, with details of each service like description, cost, timelines, how to avail of it, how it will be fulfilled, applicable workflows and procedures, dependancies, constraints, etc. (more)
• IT Asset Management in its simple form involves the tracking of inventory and its usage, maintenance of license compliance, and the maintenance of standard policies and procedures surrounding the definition, deployment, configuration, use, and retirement of IT assets. (more)
• IT Infrastructure Management involves the management of hardware, software, networks, etc. required for the development, testing, delivering, monitoring, controling or supporting IT services. (more)
• Routine Maintenance consists of pre-planned or condition-based maintenance of applications, infrastructure, or other service elements as governed by procedures and policies. Routine maintenance is preventive in nature, and does not include corrective maintenance activities that result from unexpected events, incidents and/or problems. (more)
• Service Request Fulfillment involves catering to a request from an user for information, or advice, or for a standard change, or for access to a particular IT service, usually from within the list of services published in the Service Catalogue. For example, a service request may be to reset a forgotten password, or to provide standard IT services for a new employee. (more)
• Event Management is the process of monitoring, tracking and/or processing events that occur through the IT infrastructure, including the occurrence of warnings, exceptions, or informational events. While some events serve as notifications and may need no corresponding action, others may lead to initiation of an incident and even result in a change to fix the corresponding problem. Events can help in early detection of incidents, thereby reducing downtime, and can also be used to automate routine activities. (more)
• Incident Management involves the management of events that are not part of the standard operation of a service and which cause, or may cause, an interruption to or a reduction in the quality of that service. The objective of incident management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price. (more)
• Problem Management involves the process of preventing incidents from happening, eliminating recurring incidents, and minimizing of impact from incidents that cannot be prevented. It also consists of activities required to diagnose the root cause of incidents and to determine the resolution to those problems. (more)

Service Enhancement Support

This service offering relates to the delivery of enhancements into the live/operational environment, and is closely associated with the “Project” side of IT rather than Business As Usual (BAU). While the actual work of implementing any change, even one that is initiated for fixing problems, is usually performed through projects, the Service Enhancement Support function acts as the link between Project Execution and Support and Maintenance by helping transition the changes into the support function.

• Configuration Management is the basis by which changes to any part of an information system are identified, documented, and later tracked through design, development, testing, and final delivery. It involves the management of Configuration Items (CIs), and evaluation of all change requests for the purpose of controlling modifications to the system’s design, hardware, firmware, software, and documentation in a structured manner so as to establish and maintain consistency. (more)
• Change Management is a process used for managing the deployment of alterations to Configuration Items efficiently using standardised methods and procedures. It consists of raising and recording changes, assessing the impact, cost, benefit and risk of proposed changes, developing business justification and obtaining approval, managing and co-ordinating change implementation, monitoring and reporting on implementation, and reviewing and closing change requests. (more)
• Change Evaluation is a relatively new best practice process that is meant for the evaluation of Major Changes. Change Evaluation is called upon by the Change Management process at various points in a change’s lifecycle to perform an assessment of the change. The evaluation takes place at mainly four points, viz. before authorizing the change planning phase, before authorizing the change build phase, before authorizing the change deployment phase, and, finally, after the change has been implemented, to verify if the change has met its objectives and to identify any lessons to be learned. (more)
• Transition Planning & Support is akin to the application of the Project Management practice to the management of the service transition process, and aims at planning and coordinating the resources to deploy a major release within the predicted cost, time and quality estimates. This component was earlier considered to be a part of Release and Deployment Management, but was introduced as a separate process in ITIL V3 and covered in more detail therein. (more)
• Release and Deployment Management deals with the coordinated promotion of new functionality into existing production environments, but goes much beyond that and involves strategically establishing periodic release windows, optimizing test environment usage, prioritising the contents of each release, understanding complex dependencies, reviewing and identifying possible problems beforehand, consolidating multiple releases from possibly different teams into a release window, understanding what goes where and why, dealing with unexpected circumstances during or after the release, engaging stakeholders, etc.(more)
• Service Validation and Testing in service enhancement/transition support is a best practice process that is separate from the testing phases in the development project, newly introduced for ensuring that deployed releases and the resulting services meet customer expectations, and also for verifying that IT operations are able to support the new service. This involves sub-processes necessary for planning how the release procedure will be tested, the aquisition of release components and their initial assessment, the testing of all release components and all tools and mechanisms required for deployment, migration and back out, the verification of whether all conditions are met for the new service to be activated, and the obtaining of consent from the customer that the new service fulfills the agreed service level requirements. (more)

Service Sustainability Management

Any IT-enabled business needs assurance of business continuity, security, and other matters related to the smooth functioning of the supporting systems. Working closely with Service Support & Maintenance and Service Enhancement Support, Service Sustainability Management focuses on service design and delivery matters that are important for the continual improvement of service support maturity as well as future stability and continuity.

• Service Level Management provides for continual identification, monitoring and review of the levels of IT services specified in the Service-level agreements (SLAs). It ensures that arrangements are in place with internal IT support-providers and external suppliers in the form of Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and Underpinning Contracts (UCs), respectively. It is also the process for establishment of metrics and monitoring those metrics against respective benchmarks. (more)
• Knowledge Management aims to gather, analyze, store and share knowledge and information within an organization. Knowledge Management is dealt with in many of the other Service Management Processes, while the Knowledge Management Process itself ensures that all information used within Service Management is consistent and readily available. The Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS), a central repository of the data, information and knowledge that the IT organization needs to manage the lifecycle of its services, stores, analyzes and presents the service provider’s data, information and knowledge. The primary purpose of Knowledge Management is to improve efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge. (more)
• Risk Management helps identify, assess and control risks. This includes analyzing the value of assets to the business, identifying threats to those assets, and evaluating how vulnerable each asset is to those threats. Rism Management involves activities like Business Impact and Risk Analysis, which produces a Risk Register, which is a prioritized list of risks that must be subsequently addressed, Risk Mitigation, which is the process of dealing with the risks, Risk Monitoring, which is the process of tracking he risks and their mitigation plans. (more)
• Capacity Management supports the optimum and cost-effective provision of IT services by helping organisations match their IT resources to business demands. It includes planning, sizing, and controlling the capacity of IT services and the IT infrastructure for short term, medium term and long term needs, to satisfy user demand within the performance levels set forth in the SLA. This requires the collection of information about usage scenarios, patterns, and peak load characteristics of the service solution, as well as stated performance requirements. (more)
• Availability Management aims to ensure that the IT services are available to users when they need them. Availability is calculated and reported as percentage of the agreed service hours for which the service was available. It works with other sustainability processes closely, in order to improve the reliability, maintainability, serviceability, resilience and security aspect of the service. (more)
• Service Continuity Management (ITSCM), also known as contingency management, focuses on minimizing the disruptions to business caused by the failure of mission-critical systems. It also provides guidance on safeguarding the existing systems by the development and introduction of proactive and reactive countermeasures. ITSCM involves prioritising the activities to be recovered by conducting a business impact analysis (BIA), evaluating the options for recovery, producing contingency plan(s), and testing, reviewing, and revising the plan on a regular basis. (more)
• IT Security Management aims to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of an organization’s information, data and IT services. Security Management here usually forms part of the broader approach to security management as outlined by the organization’s Information Security Management System (ISMS). (more)
• Compliance Management aims to ensure that IT services, processes and systems comply with enterprise policies and legal regulations. This includes the usage of tools like the Compliance Register for maintaining an overview of all compliance requirements and the measures applied to ensure their enforcement. It also involves compliance reviews and the documentation of assessment results. (more)
• IT Architecture Management aims to define a blueprint for the future development of the technological landscape, taking into account the service strategy and newly available technologies. A well-structured and up-to-date Enterprise Architecture is regarded as a key element for successfully managing organizations, and covers Business, Information, Applications as well as Technology areas. It includes the use of application frameworks to promote the re-use of components and the standardizing of technologies on which applications are based, and the initiation of changes to the architecture when the introduction or modification of a service is not possible within the constraints of the existing application, infrastructure and information/ data architectures. (more)
• Supplier Management is a set of activities for ensuring that all contracts with suppliers support the needs of the business, and that all suppliers meet their contractual commitments. This involves the provision of guidance and standards for the procurement of services and products, including the provision of the Supplier Strategy and the preparation of standard Terms and Conditions, the evaluation of prospective suppliers in accordance with the Supplier Strategy, and selection of the most suitable supplier(s), the negotiation and signing of binding contract(s) with supplier(s), the processing of orders for products and services, the verification of whether the contractually agreed performance is actually delivered, and the periodic renewal or termination of contracts after assessing their continued relevance. (more)

Our ITSM offering follows best practices that can help your organization realize the much sought after goals of

• Aligning IT services with business needs,
• Providing quality IT services that are continually improving, and
• Reducing the cost of providing IT services.

Contact us for a free consultation on how our ITSM services can help your IT-enabled business get the best in class support while at the same time lowering IT spend.