Speakers
Impact
The end result of this session should be that participants are not only aware that ITSM is an important issue with a potential impact on their work and its sustainability, but have an idea of how to approach the problem.
This should help make ITSM more accessible in general. One major issue with ITSM for those in academia has been that it seems too different, and too much a total change to consider, whatever the benefits. The gSLM Maturity Model, being designed for Grid and e-Infrastructure and stressing an incremental approach, should show that the benefits of ITSM can be accessed for a reasonable cost.
Participants will also leave with an understanding that gSLM's model, like the ITIL framework or other ITSM systems, is a set of suggestions ort general ideas rather than a specific solution, be it managerial or technical. By understanding that ITSM frameworks require interpretation in light of specific circumstances, and are not highly proscriptive, they should appear more interesting and relevant to e-Infrastructure providers.
At the end of the session, participants should be able top use or adapt the maturity model to their own organisation, and so be abel to benefit from it.
URL
gSLM project: www.gslm.eu. Page for the workshop would be set up on acceptance.
Description of the Work
This workshop will build on the gSLM workshop and ITSM tutorial run by the gSLM project at the EGI Technical Forum 2011 to further assist the EGI community in increasing their awareness and expertise int he area of IT Service Management (ITSM) and in particular, Service Level Management (SLM).
This workshop will briefly introduce the concept of ITSM as practiced in the commercial sector, providing valeu through servies, that are made up of a certain utility and certain warranty. It will also touch on major ITSM approaches such as the ITIL best practice framework and the ISO/IEC 20000 standard.
Having given this context, the workshop will introduce the gSLM Maturity Model, based on the COBIT maturity model from the traditional ITSM sector. It is an assessment tool that describes six levels of maturity in general, across aspects of an organisation and across a set of Grid Computing use cases.
It can act as an education and awareness tool to show the lack of or uneven service management maturity in an e-Infrastructure provider. It can also be used to show where service management can be improved by providing concrete items or structures that must be in place to allow improvement, through a related requirements catalogue that gives the requirements for each maturity level across a set of use cases. Finally it can be used to demonstrate improvement.
Participants will be introduced to the tool and through examples understand its operation and benefits.
Conclusions
This session introduces IT Service Management concepts and offers a practical tool to let people look at the state of their service management. It will show them not only strengths and weaknesses, but how they can improve their situation to improve the quality of the services they provide.
Through this, the session will help EGI and NGIs to provide services in the manner and quality expected in the commercial sector. It will allow e-Infrastructure providers to leverage the decades of knowledge in traditional, commercial ITSM in an accessible manner. This will help ensure the sustainability of the EGI community and the European investment in e-Infrastructure.
Overview (For the conference guide)
This workshop will introduce community members to methods for assessment of the maturity of their service management practices. Effective service management is a key factor in sustainability and competitiveness of e-Infrastructure services, allowing them to compete with HPC and commercial cloud services.
By understanding maturity through use of maturity models, e-Infrastructure providers can demonstrate not only the need for improvement but also concrete steps that can be taken to make these improvements.
This session build on earlier workshops and tutorials run at the EGI Technical Forum 2011, which introduced both the gSLM project's mission to bring traditional ITSM to the Grid, and also introduced the main ITSM frameworks and standards such as ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000 to the EGI community.
