For the record, those IT services won't document themselves!

Written by Caroline Houlden | Feb 15, 2019 3:24:46 PM

Most organisations spend a lot of money buying the right IT tools and services to support their business but how visible is the investment?

Can you easily supply a list of all the IT services your organisation supplies to your internal customers?
Do you understand how much they cost per user?
Do you know what service improvements need to be made and when key products supporting the services will go End of Life?

If the answers to any of these questions is no, then it is time that you created an IT Portfolio. It’s one of those housekeeping jobs that will make your life easier and ITIL, COBIT and ISO 20000 all concur that it’s best practice to fully document your IT services in this way.

You can go into as much detail as you like, but the aim is to create:

A single source of all existing IT assets including infrastructure and applications as well as equipment
A list of existing IT projects and initiatives
The associated value of services/assets to the organisation
A schedule for forthcoming service improvements and/or the replacement and retirement of EOL services.

When documented this information will make the IT decision making process easier by providing transparency on the full catalogue of services supplied and their relative value and risk (should they fail) to the organisation. It will help you to highlight the gaps where funding is needed for service improvement. It can also help to ensure consistency, avoid duplication of work unnecessarily by encouraging a process of standardisation in terms of technologies, software, process and skills.

A well-managed portfolio should enable the organisation to prioritise budgets and investment effectively and manage risk by pro-actively replacing or retiring services or applications and equipment that are failing or are end of life.

Building your IT Service Portfolio

This defines the actual services that your IT department provides to external departments.

You can build a list of Service Categories and develop a service catalogue according to all the functions performed for the business

Application Services
Business Services
Communication Services
Hardware Services
Hosting Services
Infrastructure Services
Security Services

Your portfolio should contain any contractual commitments, new services being developed, service being retired and third party infrastructure services which are integral to the business.

Service Name	Name of the Service - e.g CRM System
Service Description	Information on the lifecycle status of this service A description of what it does for whom and information on the business processes and activities supported
Features	All the features of the service · E.g. server, cloud platform · Disaster recovery mechanism
Package	Pricing and any variations used within the organisation.
Service Category	What sort of service is it? E.g. Application
Service Type	Is it customer facing or internal only
Service Owner	The name of the person who provisions the service
Business Owner	Name of the person who owns the relationship within your organisation
Business Units/Customers	e.g. Sales, Marketing, Customer support and Accounts – is it everyone within these departments or just named individuals
Business impact	Description of who will be affected in the event of a failure. May link to more detailed documents
Business Priority	Critical
SLA	Link to SLA documents
Service Hours	Hours and availability
Escalation Contacts	Who to contact in the event of an emergency
Service Reports	Links to all the information related to the service health You could rate red, amber green as a visual aid - Availability - Capacity - Security - Compliance
Service Reviews	How often the service is reviewed e.g. monthly where what days
Security Rating	Low, Medium or High
Request procedures	What elements users can ask to change and how and who to ask for the change
Pricing and chargeback	Explanation of how costs are calculated
Policies	Link to contract
Required Infrastructure	The other services on which this service depends
Services Supported	Can be none if no services depend on this service, otherwise list the service this service supports
Configuration Information	Any major configuration information items which the service requires– can link to further documents
Planned changes	Links to reference any plans, business cases /cost benefits, priority, schedule and status etc

You may not have all of this information to hand to begin with. The aim is to start the process and record the key details and the maintain and update this as your central record for the systems you run.

Cataloguing this information will help you to:

Identify and eliminate any redundant services
Quantify the condition of services in terms of stability, quality and maintainability
Allocate resources in relation to the services condition and importance in the context of business priorities.

You will most likely want to review the ROI, Value added and total cost of ownership for each of these services. This will help you to manage the risk versus reward when you come to plan your annual IT budget. If a process is struggling then you may choose to cancel or defer a project to allow you to make better use of resources. Having all the information to hand helps to ensure that decisions are made strategically rather than piece meal on a subset of information.

If you are looking to review your IT strategy or are looking at how to implement service improvement Fordway offer Early Stage Options Analysis.

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