Those of you who read this blog know I've ranted about this before (see Give your ITSM implementation a kick in the SaaS). If you have not considered 'On-Demand' or 'Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)' as a viable tool to adopting IT Service Management, think again! For those of you not familiar with SaaS and are on the 'ITIL journey' then this is a must read.
What is SaaS?
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or On-Demand software, is NOT the same as a managed service (MSP, ASP, etc.). The key difference is that SaaS software is specifically web-native software designed with multi-tenant capability. This means that customers run the same software but cannot see other customers data.
Hosting a legacy or 'web-enabled' application and charging a monthly fee is NOT Software-as-a-Service, and neither is hosting and managing an application on behalf of a customer.
This post will discuss how MyServiceMonitor is using SaaS affiliate relationships to enhance and accelerate adoption of IT service management (ITIL). In the coming months, MyServiceMonitorNEWS will provide Case Studies of customer engagements that leveraged many of these tools.
Assessment & Audit
Customers often look to outside consultants for assistance in helping them answer the question, "Where Are We Now?" in relation to ITIL best practice. Through our affiliate relationship with Systems Thinking, MyServiceMonitor provides role-based Enhanced Assessment Services and (more importantly) knowledge transfer to empower your improvement teams with the ability to self-assess progress as your journey evolves.
The preparation for self-assessment workshop can be very beneficial to helping staff understand inter-process relationships, process maturity vs. compliance and the difference between managing the project and tracking the 600+ OGC best practice metrics (and that's just for ITIL V2, but don't worry! we have services for ISO 20K and CobiT too!).
By combining self-assessment with independent verification from MyserviceMonitor, and storing assessment data in the SaaS software, customers can now provide very high levels of audit support as well. This can save time and money, particularly for ISO 20000 requirements.
How to Create Your Service Catalog in 6 Weeks
MyServiceMonitor can facilitate Service Catalog Workshops, through an affiliate relationship with Service Ramp.
Customers face a dilemma when confronted with the challenge of defining and building the initial Service Catalog. Collecting data and getting everyone to agree on structure and service descriptions can result in 'spreadsheet hell', taking time away from other critical projects and/or grinding the improvement initiatives to a complete halt.
By bringing in a web-based catalog with pre-defined templates, customers can build out the initial catalog to gain consensus from critical stakeholders BEFORE investments in other tools and publication of the Catalog take place.
The end result is faster definition of services, a more accurate Service Catalog structure, and more effective automation decisions -- when YOU'RE ready.
Whether it's n-tier infrastructures, thin-client, or virtualized environments, customers often simply do not have the ability to understand the actual performance of a service end-to-end.
Service Operation said it well, "Remote monitoring, control and management equipment and systems will be essential to manage a virtualized environment, as many services will not be linked to any one specific piece of equipment." - ITIL© Service Operation, pg 101.
MyServiceMonitor has had a long-standing relationship with eG Innovations, who provides a subscription-based monitor that has the ability to monitor ANY n-tier infrastructure end-to-end, learn the norms of all collected metrics and automatically isolate which layer of which component is the source of an anomaly.
MyServiceMonitor provides Cross-Silo Baselines of service performance, providing IT staff with an ability to understand critical dependencies before committing to SLA targets. This proactively establishes an agreed basis for the Service Improvement Program, rather than after the fact finger-pointing.
Perhaps the best part of SaaS in this case was the speed in which the target services were instrumented; less than 2 weeks for multiple services over about 15 servers (a sampling of the total infrastructure sufficient to meet the baselining requirements).
Kick Some SaaS
These are a few examples of how SaaS can help improve your ITSM implementation efforts. The costs of each of the examples shown above were less than $20,000 (some much less) and fit nicely into the customer's engagement requirements. I've seen (unfortunately) $20,000 spent on far less.
While SaaS is not for everyone, and each provider must be evaluated (just like any other purchase), not including these alternatives in your 'tool bag' can be a mistake.
For more information on these and other SaaS products, contact MyServiceMonitor today!