銆?1CTO.com Comprehensive Report銆?. Introduction
With the proposal and continuous promotion of e-government, the construction of e-government network systems has achieved remarkable results, and the level of informatization has already reached a relatively high standard. The network scale is vast and complex, needing to cover various government business departments, connect all levels of government, and extend the network down to sub-districts and communities. The environment is complex; at both the application and network levels, it must cover all the above-mentioned business institutions and related departments, forming a complex management environment with multiple systems, databases, application platforms, multi-vendor network and system equipment, and multi-service applications. In recent years, to adapt operation and maintenance work to the evolving situation and keep pace with e-government construction, governments at all levels have begun to implement a series of operation and maintenance management systems, such as “Computer Room Security Regulations,” “Computer Room Management Regulations,” and “Computer Room Duty Responsibilities,” achieving certain results. However, operation and maintenance management work has mostly been partial and isolated, making it difficult to influence the overall situation and form a synergistic whole. Service delays caused by system and network failures due to various reasons occur from time to time. With the continuous construction of e-government, the impact of IT systems on business systems is growing, and the scope of IT system management is also expanding, including networks, servers, databases, application systems, desktop systems, etc. IT systems are also becoming increasingly specialized. How to ensure the stable, reliable, and secure operation of IT systems, how to bring IT work into an orderly and standardized level, and how to enable IT systems to better serve business systems, thereby improving overall operational efficiency, have become long-term goals for IT work. Based on these issues, many government departments are planning and systematically building unified operation management platforms, introducing centralized and unified monitoring platforms and intelligent operation and maintenance systems based on the ITIL concept. This enables centralized and unified management of critical network systems, application systems, and related resources, grasping the overall situation from a global perspective and maintaining a long-term safe, reliable, and continuously operating environment, thereby ensuring the normal operation of government department business.
2. The Concept and Development of ITIL
ITIL, which stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, originated in the late 1980s from a project called “Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management Methodology (GITMM)” hosted by the UK’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA, later merged into the Office of Government Commerce). The goal of this project was to develop a standardized, financially measurable method for IT resource usage for government departments. This method was intended to be vendor-independent and applicable to organizations of different sizes, technologies, and business needs. The result of this project was the ITIL V1 version.
In the 1990s, ITIL gradually expanded from V1 into a vast methodological knowledge system composed of 31 books. To better promote ITIL and to eliminate repetition and conflicts between the volumes, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) consolidated the original 31 books, forming two guides: “Service Support” and “Service Delivery.” Starting from 2000, the OGC organized forces to comprehensively revise these two guides and significantly expanded and refined ITIL, eventually forming the complete knowledge system of ITIL V2. In November 2000, BSI (British Standards Institution) published the first edition of the BS15000 service management standard based on ITIL, which was subsequently updated in November 2002. This article from the Project Manager Alliance provides an in-depth discussion. On May 17, 2005, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) passed a resolution to adopt BS15000 as an international standard via a “fast-track” process. On December 15 of the same year, the world’s first IT service management standard, ISO/IEC 20000, was officially released. The promulgation of this standard signified a major step forward in the international standardization process for IT Service Management (ITSM). On May 30, 2007, the OGC released the latest version of ITIL globally — ITIL V3.
3. Practice of ITIL in E-Government
From the perspective of the current status and development trends in the global e-government field, ITIL has become the primary standard and “best practice” reference for advancing operation and maintenance system construction and daily operations management. In 2008, the Olympic information security assurance tasks proposed by Beijing not only improved the information security assurance level of e-government but also promoted changes in the operation and maintenance of IT systems within e-government for responsible units. By combining with the actual characteristics of e-government systems and the current government work models, good results were achieved to a certain extent.
3.1 IT Service Awareness
The object of e-government is the business work of the government, and its IT services are also significantly influenced by the government work model. In 2006, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China explicitly proposed building a service-oriented government, strengthening social management and public service functions. In recent years, service awareness has been greatly promoted in e-government construction. E-government should serve government affairs, playing a facilitating role in the government’s management and service functions. The improvement in service awareness has greatly promoted the development and enhancement of e-government IT service work. Especially the requirements for Olympic information security assurance work in 2008 further increased the importance attached by various departments to operation and maintenance work.
3.2 Organizational Structure
E-government IT service work is usually undertaken by the information office or information center of various government departments. The information technology departments are typically divided into network departments, application departments, website departments, etc. In the traditional maintenance model, there was no unified incident aggregation point; instead, following the pattern of government organizational structure, incidents were handled separately by different departments based on their classification. Although this organizational structure improved work efficiency and service quality to a certain extent at a certain stage, with the continuous deepening of e-government work and the increasing depth of knowledge involved in various services, this model often leads to a lack of comprehensive analysis of problems due to communication barriers between departments, or buck-passing due to unclear incident categories.
To meet the demands of e-government for IT services in the new era, the organizational structure should break away from the original departmental division model and be built according to the lifecycle of information systems, separating construction and operation teams. The operation team should include relevant engineers for networks, systems, software, etc., capable of handling various issues. During the 2008 information security assurance work, to achieve the phased goal of fully ensuring Olympic information security, some e-government IT service departments learned from the organizational model of a command center, thus breaking down departmental boundaries. Personnel were drawn from various departments to form a core operation and maintenance team, structured into two tiers. This corresponded to the various support lines in the ITIL framework, representing a new attempt at a new operation and maintenance model.