Service Level Management and SOA. more confusion?

Service Level management in an ITSM context

Everyone into ITSM may use the Service Level Management process to maintain and improve IT Service quality through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting to meet the customer’s business objectives.

Service Level Management is the name given to the processes of planning, coordinating, drafting, agreeing, monitoring and reporting on SLAs, and on the on-going review of service achievements to ensure that the required and cost-justifiable service quality is maintained and gradually improved.

One of the activities related to that process, is the creation of a Service Catalogue which was subject to another post: “Service Catalog, what do you exactly mean?” where I tried to distinguish the different types of catalogues when we refer to either an ITSM or an SOA environment.

Most of the time companies which have implemented a service desk have a SLM module which allows defining different kinds of level agreements:

• Service Level Agreement (SLA): Which are written agreement between an IT service provider and the IT customer. SLAs are normally used for internal customers
  
• Operational Level Agreement (OLA): Which are agreement between two internal IT areas/departments e.g. Network Management and Operations
  
• Underpinning contract: Which are contract between an external supplier providing services to an IT department
  

Many vendors have dedicated modules which manage the SLM lifecycle with requirements collections, monitoring, escalation, and various dashboards. These modules are obviously linked to other ITIL processes and information is kept in the CMDB. Among various solutions we have different SLM modules from HP-Mercury, HP-Peregrine ServiceCenter, CA Unicenter Service Assure, BMC Service Level Management, Assyst for Service Level management, Expertdesk.

These solutions allow managing the end to end SLM process in an efficient manner through an ITSM view and sometimes the content is routed to a Business Service Management solution or specific modules managing SLAs in dedicated dashboards such as Tivoli Service Level Advisor among other system management solutions.

Service Level management in a SOA context

In a previous post I was referring to one of the intersection between ITSM and SOA. “Amberpoint proposes a module to manage web services, their performance and availability. It can monitor failures, send alerts, display useful information related to problematic web services, automate performance and so on.

HP Mercury Systinet 2 has a module title Contract/Consumer Management which promotes trust between consumers and providers by facilitating service-level agreements and other terms and conditions that bind these two key stakeholders.

Progress Actional Looking Glass provides dashboard and reports which define, sort and prioritize by business or IT metrics (customer, transaction or service type). SLAs are also monitored, managed, measured and alerts are generated. We can also easily monitor and report on SLA's for a specific customer or class of customer such as gold, silver, etc.

For some consistency we should differentiates SLAs in an ITSM framework from SLAs in a SOA. For these reasons a good thing would be to create a new acronym: WSLA for Web Service Level Agreement!!

A WSLA could either be attached to a specific service or to a composite service. WSLAs should then be linked to SLAs. An end user does not have to know what the underlying architecture of his applications is. The Service Level Manager (if such a position exists…) has to negotiate with the customer SLAs. If an IT service is based on various technologies including SOA, he should take into considerations OLAs, Underpinning contracts and WSLAs!!!

WSLAs could also be attached to Underpinning Contracts is web services are either 2rd party services or hosted externally.

Most of the SLM activities remain the same however some of them may differ:

The Service Level Requirement activity will have to be taken into consideration the definition of the WSLAs. It will not be necessary to specify to the customer the underlying technology.

The building of the Web Service Catalogue is different from the Service Catalogue and probably the responsibility should be shared between the SLM manager and the SOA experts.

The SLAs creation and review taking into consideration OLAs and UCs should also consider WSLAs. If possible a hierarchy should be built.

Monitoring should be done at two levels:

• At the SOA level (eventually in SOA center of excellence or an operation dedicated team


• At the ITSM Level (the Service Manager should have a global view on all IT services)

Coming back to Service Level Management and solutions available in the Service Desk arena, companies should be able to only deliver one and only one SLA per service and monitor it. IT and business dashboards should aggregate all underlying categories of SLAs. In other words SOA Governance vendors should be able to provides APIs to upload data related to WSLAs into any IT Service Desk/System Management solution covering the SLM process.

Service Catalog, what do you exactly mean?

These days everybody is referring to a Service Catalog whatever that means. Unfortunately there is some misunderstanding between people as sometimes they are referring to SOA and sometimes to IT Service Management.

An ITSM Service Catalog describes all services that are offered by a service provider. In some cases, all services offered by the IT department of a company. The Service Catalog is part of the entire Service Level Management process. The Service Catalog describes the standard services offered, based on which agreements are made with clients. These agreements are subsequently covered in Service Level Agreements. It also becomes the basis for documenting procedures and processes in an IT organization.

Depending on the purpose the organization hopes to achieve, the service catalog may be rich in detail or simply provide a top level explanation of services. An IT department manages, maintains and supports part of the IT infrastructure of the Organization. This infrastructure consists of a large quantity of products with which services can be provided.

These services are described in the Service Catalog.

To first identify services, we have to work from the perspective of the core business purposes. Then, look at what IT offerings support those services. After the core purposes, we have to move into those supporting areas that IT also serves, such as administrative or general organizational support. The entire Service Catalog should be viewed from the customer’s perspective. Some services can be further broken down into sub services as well.

For every service a clear description and all relevant characteristics are included. Based on this a client can assess the business application and the usefulness of a service for their own organization.

After looking at services from the business perspective, we start to define each service with the following information:

-Service Name (a simple description, preferably the same name the customer would use)
-Service Description (high-level description of the service written in language customers can understand)
-Support Contact Point (Where should the customer begin an inquiry or report problems regarding the service?)
-Responsible Manager (Contact person responsible for the service)
-Customers/Users (What set of customers (specific or general) utilizes this service?)
-Detailed Specifications (Some items may not require all of these elements, but possible elements to include in specifications are):

• Inputs (hardware, software, infrastructure, customer inputs, etc.)
• Outputs (final products viewed from a customer perspective)
• Default items always included
• Optional items the customer may request or pay extra for
• Excluded items which are never included
• Service hours of availability
• Up-time and service availability goals
• Support provided
• Performance standards for the service
• Customer procedures for starting, changing or ending the service
• Charges (if appropriate)
• Disaster/recovery
• Data Integrity
• Security
• Training
• Etc.

A Service Catalog is intended for all clients of an IT department, in other words, the business unit managers and/or their representatives that want to be extensively informed about the services offered by the IT department of his company.

An SOA Service Catalog has another goal: to manage, organise and reuse services. One of the key promises of SOA is reuse on a much more granular level than one could ever hope to achieve with pure object oriented techniques, but reuse isn't something that we get for free. Particularly, reuse problems arise when others within a teamdepartmententerprise don't realise that we have already defined and/or built a particular service that they could reuse.

To achieve in some way that objective, a SOA Service Catalog needs to exist and document the basis of each service. To build such a Service Catalog is not an easy task as you will need to first define the granularity of your services (please refer to my previous post: What is a Service?) which decribes the differences between an SOA Service and an ITSM Service).

As for an ITSM Service Catalog, information has also to be identified and captured:

• Service name
• Description
• Type of service (e.g. business, application specific, data, etc)
• Service level agreements and other quality of service characteristics (e.g. performance, scalability, security, availability, etc)
• For each service operation
• Operation name
• Description
• Request/response messages input/output parameters and possible errors
• Pre-conditions
• Post-conditions
• Whether the operation is idempotent

SOA Service catalogs leverage both Web services (application services (provided by reusable software components) that are typically found further down around the middle of the IT stack) and BPM to eliminate an expensive burden on business. To be effective, that service catalog must contain services in the language of the customer, must be transactional and finally flexible.

For sure both Catalogs relate one to the other but what is contained inside is quite different. The SOA Service Catalog should be considered as a Service Registry. The future will tell us how to link both catalogs once synergies between ITSM and SOA will be better documented and companies will have reach an upper level of maturity in these two domains.

Is IT Service Management an emerging component of Enterprise Architecture?

There is a high level of correlation between success at Enterprise Architecture and commitment to ITIL. ITIL is a standardized approach and series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management. This customizable framework defines how ITSM is applied within an organization, covering processes such as service desk management, incident management, problem management, configuration management, change management, and release management among others.

Enterprise architecture consists of the vision, principles, standards and processes that guide the purchase, design and deployment of technology within an enterprise. It describes the interrelationships between business processes, information, applications and underlying infrastructure for that enterprise. Processes such as availability management, change management or release management are just business processes that are particular to IT. So we can think of IT service management as another use case or usage scenario for Enterprise Architecture.

Many frameworks such as FEAF, DODAF, Zachman and TOGAF among others do not yet consider the relationship to Service Management. Any component of architecture has to change, solves a problem, or relates to a set of software and infrastructure. Business Architecture is all about documenting, changing, viewing specific business processe and makes them more efficient. Business Architecture also allows to understand the business impacts of new products introductions or modifications. Products should be delivered as services and be manages by Service Level agreements.

New products also have to consider its availability and its capacity to perform, based on user requirements.

This demonstrates that running an Enterprise Architecture program, has a lot to do with Service Management! Service Management also has a lot to learm from Enterprise Architecture… As an example, the definition of EA Technical Services can help to build departmental IT Service Catalogues related to Customers Service Catalogues.