Easing the transition to service-oriented mgmt. |
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EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Brian Connell
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QUESTION POSED ON: 13 August 2003
Why is the transition to service-oriented management so difficult for businesses? What can companies do to make it easier?
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It is true that for many businesses, transitioning to service-oriented management (SOM) is regarded as a difficult process. There are many reasons for this, but we have found some recurring themes for most of the problematic transitions. The following 5 tips should greatly ease the transition to service-oriented management for any business.
1. Clearly identify deliverable services.
Granularity is important: a hierarchy of services might exist where fine-grained technical services are orchestrated and encapsulated into coarse-grained business services. IT and business must define the levels of visibility of services that make sense, and define what these services are. Every enterprise will typically end up with different types of services, but in the main there are two important types: there are services that form the main interface between IT and business in terms of deliverables, and services that are not visible externally but are vital for the proper functioning of visible services.
2. Create Service Topology Map.
IT must understand the relationships between coarse-grained business services and fine-grained technical services. Understanding inter-dependencies is vital for system monitoring, fault detection, and fault resolution.
3. Assign Responsibility.
Every service should be assigned an owner. The owner is responsible for the delivery of the service, and their success is measured on the success of delivering the service for which they have responsibility.
4. Promise to Deliver.
At it simplest level, this means defining a level of service quality applicable to each service. More advanced SOM may define different levels of service depending on the context of the business consumer, thereby providing differentiated levels of service depending on business requirements. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) may be used to define the terms and conditions of service use and delivery.
5. Fault management.
When a fault occurs, there must be clear escalation and notification procedures. These procuedures must be designed to prioritise IT activities to remedy the business situation as quickly as possible.
These tips should form the backbone of any service-oriented management strategy, and are proven to greatly minimize the difficulties associated with a transition to SOM.
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