Operational Monitoring and Continual Service Improvement

This section has focused on Operational Monitoring and Reporting, but monitoring also forms the starting point for Continual Service Improvement. This is covered in the Continual Service Improvement publication, but key differences are outlined here.

Quality is the key objective of monitoring for Continual Service Improvement (CSI). Monitoring will therefore focus on the effectiveness of a service, process, tool, organization or CI. The emphasis is not on assuring real-time service performance; rather it is on identifying where improvements can be made to the existing level of service, or IT performance.

Monitoring for CSI will therefore tend to focus on detecting exceptions and resolutions. For example, CSI is not as interested in whether an incident was resolved, but whether it was resolved within the agreed time and whether future incidents can be prevented.

CSI is not only interested in exceptions, though. If an SLA is consistently met over time, CSI will also be interested in determining whether that level of performance can be sustained at a lower cost or whether it needs to be upgraded to an even better level of performance. CSI may therefore also need access to regular performance reports.

However, since CSI is unlikely to need, or be able to cope with, the vast quantities of data that are produced by all monitoring activity, they will most likely focus on a specific subset of monitoring at any given time. This could be determined by input from the business or improvements to technology.

This has two main implications:

• Monitoring for CSI will change over time. They may be interested in monitoring the e-mail service one quarter and then move on to look at HR systems in the next quarter.
• This means that Service Operation and CSI need to build a process which will help them to agree on what areas need to be monitored and for what purpose.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 949