Experiences in managing IT services through Network Management

The IT department is of course a secondary business department, but this does not mean that the IT department can only act as a passive fireman. Standardized and well-managed IT services, allowing IT administrators to get rid of low-level labor such as simple machine repairs and email reception, and truly become a model of IT management services. This is the concept of IT service management.

In fact, IT service management is not difficult.

Xia is busy, 28 years old. In April 2004, he entered rolling into the trading company to take charge of it work. Rolling in to trading companies mainly engaged in import and export, the development has been particularly fast over the past few years, from dozens of people to more than 200 people now, and it is basically a human PC. Internet and email have gradually replaced the old telephone and fax services and become the latest office means.

There are three people in the IT department. In the summer, I found that these three people are not in their seats, because the company's more than 200 machines always report such problems. As a result, the summer rush quickly entered the first line of combat, machine repairs, email calls, and virus killing, and became the "Eight-catch fish" to be carried by the hacker ".

Busy at the end of every month, but when I entered the examination form at the end of every month, I couldn't remember what I did this month. It seems that I am not idle every day, and I am also a fireman every day. But let's see what progress this month has made? After several machine repairs, there will be no more records to be written.

He was most frustrated and wronged by the fact that, after a month of exhaustion, even though he was too busy, he was more criticized by the leaders because, although the problem was solved, but received more complaints: unable to find people, slow response speed, similar problems, no preventive measures ......

In short, summer is the most worrying thing every morning, whether a catastrophic event will happen today; at the end of every month, summer is busy worrying about another thing, this month, we complained about how much we were charged for our salary.

　　

1. One-stop service with less effort and more money

In August 31, 2004, after my salary was paid off, I found that I had been detained for a lot of money. The same was true for other colleagues in the IT department. Later, I learned that the main reason was that he was not in the seat when he helped everyone to repair the machine. When someone else had something to call, he could not find anyone. Naturally, I would like to give my opinion.

It has been half a year since we joined the company and we have been busy in the summer, because our staff are constantly increasing and the system is getting more and more busy. In addition, the recent virus and other "natural disasters" frequently visited our company, there are more and more things. Currently, there are only three people in the IT department, and there are too few people. Sometimes everyone calls for help, and Xia is busy to cope with things that should not be managed by themselves, during the busy summer, I always told the caller to look for Leo, but I had to say, "If you look for John, you will be held responsible by collective complaints.

There are also grievances in the summer, and one person is not busy, people in the business department of people must make a call to the front line, three people are put out, once the life is complex enough, it is common that no one answers the phone.

Beginning in middle August, xiabusy has been engaged in the "one-stop" service concept of IT service management. The so-called "one-stop" service means that business departments can obtain it hotline, it site, and other forms of IT services at one time to solve all daily office IT problems. The essence of the "one-stop" service is the IT service desk. The IT service desk is the central point of contact between users and IT service departments. Customers can obtain answers and help for IT problems through the IT service desk. During the busy summer, the IT service desk can be displayed in two forms: one is to apply for a service by phone. When a user's system encounters a problem, he can call the service desk, select different problem categories based on the voice prompts. Second, apply for the network service. In the IT network service, Xia busy established a simple unified portal based on the Web form. the business department can raise questions through the web form and automatically submit the questions to the corresponding IT engineers for answers, engineers can also transfer each other. As a good interactive service channel, it is a supplement to the telephone service.

After setting up the IT service desk, the three of them worked differently in summer, ruled out the phone call mess, and defined the first question Responsibility System: Which engineer was the first to receive a call from the business department, as the case owner, he needs to resolve and close the case by himself or coordinating with relevant personnel ". This also solves the problem of mutual Commission between engineers.

After the service center is established, it is not all that is done. We still feel that the call is convenient and on call. Xia busy had to apply to the boss to form a system for the new service methods of the IT department, so that everyone could learn and maintain them.

Machine and AI basically meet the rescue needs of colleagues.

TIPS:

The problem response method is important, but it is also a process to let everyone know and get used to it. For IT personnel, it is necessary to publicize the response methods so that the business department can actively use them, be willing to use them, and be satisfied with the use.

2. No penalty is imposed on the management of emergencies.

After the establishment of the service center management, xiabusy changed from the Octopus to the on-demand changes. Due to the timely response, I have not heard any complaints recently during my busy summer vacation.

One day, the computer prompts you to receive an event alert email. At the same time, the other three event alert emails are also sent to the mailbox in the busy summer. The phone numbers on the desk were harsh, and the other two colleagues were talking one after another.

Colleagues in the Sales Department reported that they could not receive emails. Xia busy just rushed to the sales department to check the problem. In a short time, the Personnel Team also looked for Xia busy. The PC system of the personnel department collapsed. Xia busy commanded his colleagues to go to the personnel department to handle the problem. The incident was still being processed, and suddenly an alarm was reported, saying that the financial machine could not access the internet. Now it is the end of the month that tax return is required, and the incident is urgent. So the last person in the IT department went to the finance department. There was a big sweat in Xia's busy schedule. He didn't know what to do if there was another emergency. At this time, some people have been looking for summer busy, some machines are poisoned, some machines are blue screens, and so on. Xia was so busy that he kept saying, "Wait a moment, wait a moment." A impatient colleague was impatient. "I was anxious to ask for a piece of data, but the hard disk was broken, can you show me first?"

"There is something urgent at hand that cannot be done ."

"You should set a priority ." When Xia was busy, he felt rational. The endless emergence of technical faults made it departments exhausted and became a "Fire Rescue Team ". The status cannot be so persistent, and a set of processes and methods are required for orderly processing. After he decided to finish his work, he thought about it.

After intense troubleshooting, Xia busy concluded that a switch in the network center had a fault and quickly contacted the network center and enabled the standby switch. After 20 minutes, the network becomes normal.

Taking the dust for a moment, I am busy in summer to quickly turn over the information, which can give a solution to the unordered busy state. He found that the most important thing for emergencies is to avoid business interruptions. In this regard, we must first determine the incident management process, and ensure the effective execution of the process by distinguishing the priority of emergencies. Obviously, everyone will think that their fault is the most urgent, so it is necessary to clarify whether it is urgent or conventional chronic disease.

The faulty vswitch in the network center connects the company's sales department email server, inventory database server, and Human Resources server, this accident will directly affect the normal production of key departments in the company. It should be an emergency level. If it is not handled as soon as possible, a first-level production accident will occur, while an emergency employee's incident is a general level. Therefore, it is right to handle the network center switch problem first.

However, I did not have enough time to handle emergencies. I used about three work hours to handle switch problems. What should I do if I cannot solve or fail to solve an emergency within the specified time? Generally, if you cannot solve the problem within the specified time, You need to hand over the task to more experienced support personnel. This is an emergency upgrade. there are usually two methods: 1. Function upgrade, more experts are arranged or more privileges are granted to solve the accident; 2. level upgrade, when the required permissions and resources are insufficient.

Incident Management can help IT departments handle emergencies more systematically and quickly, but it only standardizes the handling process to restore faults as soon as possible. It is like an emergency rescue.

To improve emergency management and cure the problem, a practical and effective method is the problem management process.

　　

TIPS:

When the IT service center must handle several emergencies at the same time and cannot be implemented due to time, resource, and manpower constraints, it is necessary to first sort the Handling order and process the events with different priorities.

To determine the priority of emergency handling, the impact, urgency, size, scope, complexity, and current available resources of the emergency need to be taken into account comprehensively. 3. Proactive problem management to prevent risks

Solved the emergency and caught up with the 11th holiday. In the summer, I went to Huashan and had a complete rest.

In the early morning of June October 8, busy summer calls kept ringing. It's no wonder that at work, everyone is busy receiving emails and accumulating emails for a few days slows down the server. Many customers who have already made an appointment before the festival need to contact us as soon as possible, the email can be sent once, but cannot be sent out. The Internet does not know what the problem is, and many machines do not go to the Internet ...... during the whole day, I was busy in summer and ran to solve the problem. In the face of complaints, I didn't even have time to explain it.

At 10 o'clock in the evening, I had a clue. When I sat down in the summer, I remembered that I had not eaten or drank water for almost a day. As you can imagine, the first day after each long holiday is black for IT staff, which has become a convention like a holiday.

I drank a cup of water, had some bread, and had a cigarette. I was busy remembering what I did this day. After a long holiday, there will be a network jam during the mail receiving peak, and the humid and sultry weather in the South will also cause contact problems for servers in the equipment room that were originally in poor conditions.

During the time of complaints, the network administrators held a small meeting and learned the summer rush of IT service management for a few days. As a matter of fact, many of his work with two other colleagues is repetitive today, business and other departments have almost the same IT problems. Since there are regular patterns that can be followed, is there a way to strengthen prevention?

Xia was busy with remembering the ITSM training that he had done a few days ago. One of them was about problem management. To put it bluntly, it was about "Back to the pile and then classify" and asked to build a knowledge base, summarize the many problems that have occurred before, find out the regular number pair, and sum up the rich experience.

Everyone will talk about the truth, but I still don't quite understand Xia busy. Every day, we record the problems that occurred, and summarize and classify them in the next time. This is a lot of trouble! It would have been a huge workload. How can I write logs? Because of this idea, xi'busy 'has never been taken seriously. However, today it seems that such a knowledge base will not be so embarrassing.

In fact, no matter what company, employees have certain requirements for it. It can only be repetitive if it is not analyzed, summarized, or improved. However, by introducing problem management and establishing a knowledge base, we can sum up a large number of problems, find out the rules, and strengthen prevention, which not only improves the efficiency, to a certain extent, "do less.

The more I thought about Xia, the more interesting I felt. So I called Jiang Deming, the last time I gave a lecture to him. In the face of the busy summer, the teacher made a few analogy: accident management is "Fire Fighting", problem management is "Fire Fighting", and accident management is disease treatment, problem management is prevention and health care. Specifically, Alibaba Cloud's trading company's IT management only addresses how to eliminate accidents in a standardized manner, rather than finding out the cause of the accident and completely solving the problem.

Teacher Jiang also said that in reality, problems cannot be avoided. There are many reasons such as technical architecture, product defects, and Operation errors. Summer is busy and a headache. How can we classify these reasons?

Instructor Jiang continued, the classification of problems directly determines the effectiveness of problem management. The problem classification involves five aspects: determining the areas associated with the problem, such as hardware and software; influence degree, the degree of impact of the problem on the business process; the degree of urgency to which the problem needs to be resolved; priority, the order of priority after considering the degree of impact, urgency, risk and available resources; status, describes the current situation of an accident.

In addition, it is to find the cause, including the actual cause and potential cause. When a better or new emergency measures are found, the problem management should also update it in the record for accident control and use.

Since then, a folder has been added to the public folder of the company's IT department. The network administrators record the symptom, cause, and solution details of each problem.

Over a month, I have accumulated more than 300 problems, divided into 16 categories, and more than 700 reasons. Looking at the current achievements, Xia is busy.

With this innovative "Knowledge Base", Xia's busy work entered the fast lane and the "active Governance" phase. Since then, we have received favorable comments from the IT department where xiabusy is located, with fewer opinions.

　　

TIPS:

At first glance, problem management is a time-consuming task for IT staff, but it does not cut back on firewood. With this accumulation, coupled with classification, analysis, prevention, and other work, the efficiency is significantly improved. For IT personnel, the key is to eliminate resistance and embarrassment.

　　

How to Improve IT service efficiency

How to Improve IT service efficiency, improve IT resource utilization, maximize the efficiency of IT resources, reduce IT service costs, and quantify it output has always been a challenge for IT managers.

IT service management (ITSM) is known as the ERP solution of IT management ". IT service management is used to improve IT service efficiency, coordinate internal operations of IT service departments, improve communication between IT service departments and business departments, and help enterprises effectively manage information system planning, implementation, and operations. IT service management integrates the characteristics of the enterprise's environment, organizational structure, IT resources, and management process to plan the IT structure of the enterprise from three aspects: process, personnel, and technology. It emphasizes that the enterprise's operation objectives, enterprise needs, and IT service delivery are consistent.

From the perspective of the organization, it converts the IT department of an enterprise from the cost center to the service center or profit center. From the perspective of specific operations, it changes the traditional IT management mode centered on functions and technologies, processes as the center, sorts out the core processes from complicated IT management activities, and standardizes these processes, define the objectives and scope, costs and benefits, operation steps, key success factors and performance indicators of each process, and the relationship between each process to achieve the transition from traditional technology management to process management, switch to service management. 4. The change management personnel are "Buried" and will not be difficult

On July 6, the general manager convened a meeting for various business departments. This was a critical meeting. The general manager was dissatisfied with the performance of all departments in July, especially the Sales Department. He praised the IT department only, this makes summer busy a little relief.

The next day. it's hard to easily get busy late in the summer and arrive at the company for a while. When I receive a phone call from the company halfway, it's said that a very important email has never been accepted; well, I 'd like to send a quotation to an important customer, but I cannot do it now ......

It turns out that there is a problem with the company's email server. However, when I got off work yesterday, the email server was still good. Xia was busy and quickly gave a call to the rotating Leo and asked him what he did last night.

After the general manager's instruction, the sales manager immediately convened a meeting for the Sales Department staff. To change the current state, the sales department will discuss the result of changing the existing workflow. After the new process was confirmed at the end of the overtime work last night, the sales manager asked Leo to make some changes to the system along with the new process. Therefore, Mr. ou changed several parameters based on the requirements of the sales manager. "After the change, I checked it carefully and found no problems. Who will think of problems in the mail system ?" Leo is also aggrieved.

After understanding what happened, I quickly went to the server to restore the original parameters and let the mail server work properly first. He did not do anything this summer. He spent a whole day processing the requirements submitted by the sales manager. I found that the sales manager's demands were unreasonable. As a result, Xia busy again to find the sales manager "theory ". The two analyzed the solution for half a day before they discussed the solution that both parties were satisfied.

This is enough. However, since the IT department was busy installing a new system in September, it had no time to discuss the problem with the entire IT department.

After hearing a general manager talk this month, all departments are actively innovating their business processes. Procurement department, Personnel Department, Finance Department ...... In those days, I came to the IT department to change the process and parameters. This is terrible, and almost every change has encountered a problem. Several days later, I was busy and busy, and solved the problems after the change.

When I was busy in summer, I thought for myself: this is not good. The general manager encountered so many problems after training once. In case of another training, it would not have been over again, even if the general manager does not speak, the business department will often ask questions about System Configuration modification. After all, "change" is a good thing for the business department. If the changes are as casual as they were in the past, the IT department will be overwhelmed by the numerous "changes" sooner or later.

Xia busy thought, it is better to take this opportunity to establish a change management mechanism. In this way, once the business department has a new business, a new change, and a new process, IT department can know in advance when it needs to change according to the new situation.

Then, Xia was able to read many professional books on the change management issue, and asked his colleagues modestly. After being busy for half a month, Xia busy finally designed his own change management process.

Xia was busy with making a clear demand change table for the IT department. The user must follow the procedure when there is a change in demand. After obtaining the demand table, IT personnel cannot modify the program immediately, but should judge whether the requirement is reasonable and whether it will affect the previous system and other systems, if necessary, hold a special seminar with the business department to discuss specific changes. At the same time, the IT service column on the internal website publishes it job announcements. If the relevant departments disagree, they can report back within the feedback period.

If it passes the judgment, it will not be changed at will. Instead, it will put forward a clear timetable, modification methods, and opinions. After obtaining the consent of the business department, it will be completed on time and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

After the implementation of the change, we also need to summarize and evaluate the implementation of the change: whether the change is successfully implemented, whether the business department is satisfied, and whether there are any legacy problems and side effects of the change.

"Although the general manager's speech has made me so bitter, after improving the change management process with this opportunity, I will not be afraid of other changes, which is nothing to worry about ." For this month's work, summer is still very fulfilling.

　　

TIPS:

There are two important elements in implementing the change management process.

First, we need to change the concept and behavior of IT engineers. The implementation of the change management process is a constraint on the behavior of IT engineers at the beginning. Engineers must apply for and apply for an ICP filing in the Change Management System for any modifications or adjustments to the system. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the propaganda and requirements for IT engineers and change their ideas so that they can accept and get used to them.

Second, clarify responsibilities. The change management includes many procedures and personnel from different departments and positions. Therefore, it is necessary to define the responsibilities of all personnel. Such as the responsibilities of the change management manager and the responsibilities of relevant department personnel. The change management process can be effectively implemented only when the responsibilities are clear and all responsibilities are in place. 5. Service Level Management

Prioritize Management

The IT department, which has been eye-catching for the past few months, has recently become a good boss. The employees have complained about it and have made several breakthrough changes to give it a new look. The year was approaching, and during the summer, they almost saw a considerable wave of year-end red packets.

On this day, the summer rush, which should have been proud of, sighed: "Alas !" Others asked, "What happened to you in summer? Change management, incident management ...... These headaches can be solved, but will you be overwhelmed ?" Xia was so busy that he sighed again and said, "You may not know. The long journey has just taken a few small steps. Although the work in the past few months has been very fruitful, it is simply a little dumb compared with what we will face in the next month. Accidentally, I am afraid the duck red envelopes cooked by all our colleagues will fly ."

This is not a big problem in summer. What makes him a headache is the service level management (SLA), which is the biggest difficulty in IT service management ).

In this regard, busy summer may have a pain point. My colleagues confirmed that the IT department was more diligent, but sometimes I picked sesame seeds and lost watermelon-once, when he spent half an hour repairing the printer, the server was paralyzed for 20 minutes due to virus intrusion! The company's online transactions also paused for half a day, and the boss's thunder took 90 minutes.

What is service level management? To put it simply, to establish a set of rules, when there are multiple different requirements in an enterprise that occur at the same time, we should first respond to who is responsible, and how long should we allocate for different needs.

"Service level management is not good !" Xia busy sighs. "Our IT department should have a clear list of what services we can provide and define the levels of services required by various business departments. Which level is high, which level is low, the priority response of the level is high, and the level is low; specify the response time limit of the problem, which problem can be waited for 2 hours, or 4 hours, which one second cannot wait ......"

It sounds good, but to do a good job in service level management, it is not just the IT department to close the door to set a set of rules. The reason why Xia busy talks about "service level management" is that he knows: the greatest difficulty of service level management lies in the definition of various service levels, and the differences between different enterprises.

Therefore, IT service level establishment must be the result of joint communication between the business department and IT department-service level agreement. When designing a service level for IT infrastructure, IT service departments must fully investigate and understand actual business needs. Xia busy spent a lot of time communicating with the business department.

He not only investigates the business department's current service-level experience, but also helps them analyze and sort out the business needs that actually exist but are not yet clear.

In order to avoid repeating the mistakes of other companies in implementing service level management, Xia busy summarized several "golden rules": 1. Learn the daily terms that business departments do not understand in service level agreements. 2. Grasp the key business processes, regularly monitor and review, and appropriately simplify the service level management process. 3. comprehensively consider the resource level and cost to avoid unrealistic commitments to the service level; 4. IT and business departments continue to share process experience and make continuous improvements.

In short, the task of SLM is to find the most favorable balance between IT service quality, customer relationship, and IT service costs.

TIPS:

In actual operation, service level management is a dynamic process and can be adjusted. You can first make a simple setting and then adjust it according to the actual situation.

After half a year of busy work, he blinks to the end of the year, and the year-end red packets of summer busy are quite rich. He also grew from a PC repairer to a system administrator, and "Summer busy" became "Summer Work ", machine repairs, complaints, and complaints are getting farther and farther away from the busy summer. Instead, it planning and new system development and data mining are replaced.

In fact, Xia busy knows that there are still many ways to go from true IT service management, such as rationally planning current system resources and developing new applications, such as Enterprise Asset Management, for example, how can we make it build bridges for management.

This is the way from busy IT network management in summer to qualified it planners and the flexible use of IT service management.

　　

Prepare three psychological preparations

IT service management is not an IT task, because it ultimately serves as a management service. It should be said that the business department should also be involved in IT service management. Therefore, there are three psychological preparations for IT department and Business Department to perform IT service management.

First, we need to prepare for changing working methods and rules. Both the IT department and the business department have a habitual way of working. They will continue to adopt the original process and practice, and even refuse to accept new work processes and methods. Therefore, in order to ensure the implementation effect, we need to fully communicate the implementation results of IT service management with IT staff and business staff, so that they can fully understand the impact and benefits of the implementation of IT service management, and know how to do it to meet the requirements of IT service management.

Second, do not rush. IT service management is introduced from outside China, which is different from the IT management method in China. In addition to the difficulty of habit change mentioned above, it can be said that IT service management should have a transitional period, which is also a gradual process, the process of spiraling. It is the right way to prepare for a protracted war, make constant adjustments and progress during the expiration period.

Third, fully absorb the comments and suggestions of the business department. Although the business department does not understand it or even has the suspicion of disorderly command, the ultimate goal of IT service management is to improve it operation efficiency, meet the business needs for it, and achieve business goals. In IT service management, interaction between it and business departments is everywhere, meeting the IT needs of businesses and involving business department personnel. This will greatly promote IT personnel to the it itself, as well as a comprehensive understanding of the business, constantly improve it value, meet business needs for it, and achieve business goals.