Scenario
A company provides an internet-based gift delivery service which is highly dependent upon IT services provided by the internal IT organization. A year ago the customer payments service that supports the gift ordering website regularly experienced poor availability. The organization hired a service management consultant to assess why the IT services were performing poorly and to rectify the situation.
As part of the solution, the consultant implemented service level management and adopted the role of interim service level manager. Service level agreements were negotiated with the business and agreed. The necessary underpinning agreements were negotiated and put in place. Regular monitoring and reporting was implemented. Monthly service review meetings with the business unit managers were established to discuss IT service performance and any issues and improvements. Within a year of the start of the initiative the gift ordering website IT service was performing at 98.7% availability, a significant improvement.
This month's service review meeting was attended by the chief executive officer (CEO) after concerns were expressed about the most recent availability figure for the customer payments service, which was 94%. This covered the period which included one of the traditionally most popular gift ordering times. The consultant stated that the poor availability was almost entirely due to an incident that occurred during one of the busiest periods and. as a result, the overall monthly availability percentage was low. Initial investigation has shown that the service desk used the SLA to designate the incident as a 'Priority 2'. This was however lower than the 'Priority 1" the business believed the incident should have been. The subsequent delay in restoration of the service meant some customer orders were lost.
The CEO reminded the consultant that a repeat of such an incident would not only have a major effect on monthly revenues but also seriously affect the company's reputation. The consultant agreed that this was unacceptable and committed to review this issue and report back to the CEO.
Refer to Scenario
Scenario
An IT security company provides secure data services to many large financial organizations in several countries. The company has an administrative headquarters in its home country and a data centre in each country of operation.
Each data centre obtains support for services from third-party contracts provided by a number of suppliers. All supporting services are scoped and documented, and are aligned to the corporate strategy and the regulations in force in each country. The security services company maintains and regularly reviews a preferred supplier list from which suppliers are selected as required.
A service desk function is provided by one of the suppliers. Over the last 10 years, a strong relationship has been built up with the supplier based on the high-quality, consistent service they have provided. The nature of the financial business requires the service desk contract to contain severe penalty clauses that can be enforced if the agreed service levels are not maintained, although these have never been required.
A number of complaints have been received from a new banking customer highlighting that, over the previous three months, the level of service provided by the service desk in the management and handling of incidents has been inconsistent, and many incidents have not been resolved in line with agreed targets.
The IT security company has a service level manager who has performed the role for many years. Recently, a new supplier management process was implemented and a supplier manager appointed. Some confusion has arisen over how, and by whom, the recent complaints should be dealt with.
Refer to the Scenario.
You have been asked to resolve the confusion over the service level manager and supplier manager roles. Which one of the following options BEST represents the correct division of responsibilities and will also address the current complaints regarding the service desk supplier?
Scenario
A retail company has enjoyed significant growth in profit over the past year due to negotiating lower buying costs from its suppliers. The organization wishes to reinvest some of this profit to fund a program of change to optimize the use of IT services. They hope this will support revenue growth in the next financial year whilst maintaining profitability.
The program consists of two main initiatives:
* An expansion of the on-line retailing services to offer more functionality
* Enhancement of the marketing service to allow greater targeting of promotional offers.
There are various options for providing these services that involve use of the current infrastructure or the new virtualization technology, which is slowly being deployed across the organization. The board of directors wishes to conduct a financial review over the next 3 months to compare the cost of providing each service. Projected business revenues will allow the return on investment (ROI) of each option to be calculated. This review will provide an input to the IT organization's service portfolio management process, allowing the various investment options to be considered and an informed decision to be made.
The organization has a good appreciation of its IT costs along with a mature service catalogue and configuration management system (CMS).
Refer to the Scenario.
Which one of the following options would be the BEST approach to providing the information for the financial review of the service options?
Scenario
A flower delivery company introduced ITIL-based service management processes 12 months ago.
One major benefit of the associated service improvement initiatives was that the service availability of the business critical on-line flower ordering IT service increased from 97% to 98.9% over the last quarter. This exceeds the service availability target of 98.5%. Last month, reports were circulated showing the availability improvement.
The service level manager is chairing a service review meeting to review the progress and report upon this achievement. The customer managers acknowledge the improvement but despite the reports of improved service availability, a major service outage occurred during the busiest week of the year when over 25% of the annual business revenue is normally earned. Although IT dealt with the outage satisfactorily, the loss of revenue and credibility in this mission critical, high-visibility trading period are serious concerns. The customer managers are concerned that the reporting does not seem to reflect this or their actual perception of the service.
Agreement is reached at the meeting to address two primary concerns:
1. Service availability targets for the mission critical periods are to be revised.
2. Amended and more representative business reports are to be produced.
Refer to the Scenario.
Which one of the following options will BEST ensure that the primary concerns related to the revision and reporting of targets are addressed?
Scenario
A travel company specializes in providing complete holiday packages to meet customer requirements. There have been instances over the past year where the business has been unable to process holiday bookings due to failure of the IT services. Sales have been lost and the failure has been raised at board level. The IT director has assured the board that the situation will be rectified.
Most holiday bookings are made either by telephone via the company's call centre or through a dedicated website. Both interface with the same back-end booking-processing service. Apart from the call centre and website, the main business services map onto organizational departments and cover: marketing, finance, business operations and central administration.
After some initial investigation within the IT organization, it is clear that the intermittent failures, which were related to a lack of capacity, have occurred during exceptional peak holiday booking periods. The IT organization is not certain when or if these are going to occur in the future. Some booking periods are predictable, such as those associated with promotional offers. Other patterns are totally unpredictable as they often coincide with bad weather being experienced where customers live.
You have been asked how the activities of demand management, based on ITIL practices, can be used to address this issue.
Refer to Scenario
Which one of the following options is the BEST set of actions required to resolve the issue?