[51CTO.com Comprehensive Report] On one side are demands from superiors, on the other is resistance from employees. Trying to “change the wheels while the car is still moving” feels like a real struggle. How can he solve the problem of operations management?
When “Southern Orange” Turns into “Northern Bitter Orange”
Director Wang heads the billing service center of a provincial telecom company. The center, with fifty to sixty staff, is responsible for building and running critical business systems such as province-wide billing and business analytics. Although the billing center has a fair number of people, each system is typically managed by only one or two individuals. Due to rapidly changing business needs and frequent system upgrades, these people’s main focus is on project construction and engineering implementation. Operations assurance work remains at a fairly basic, ad-hoc level: it’s primarily passive, firefighting-style responses, with almost no documentation or review of troubleshooting and system maintenance processes. Director Wang understands that ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) construction is a management project. The ITIL standard is indeed advanced, the consultants are absolutely right, and the expensive software from major vendors has many features. However, when applied to his department’s actual work, it always feels disconnected. Listening to experts and vendors, everything sounds perfectly logical鈥攂uy their products and services, and all ailments will be cured. But after spending a lot of money, it seems nothing has been cured, and yet you can’t quite pinpoint what’s wrong with their stuff. Is it that ITIL doesn’t adapt well to local conditions, or are the prescriptions from international big-name vendors simply not targeting the right illness? You can’t very well say your own illness is the wrong kind, can you?
The application of ITIL in this enterprise boils down to several main problems:
鈼?System construction consumes significant departmental resources, leaving none for operations assurance work;
鈼?Some employees are unwilling to accept the changes brought by ITIL;
鈼?The “one person, multiple roles” phenomenon is severe in processes, causing significant resistance at the execution level;
鈼?The usage of process tools is unsatisfactory, and the results of system construction are not significant enough.
Don’t Let ITIL Become the “Northern Bitter Orange”
80% of the problems encountered by enterprises during IT operations stem from management reasons, and management problems require management methods to solve them. This is one of the reasons why ITIL, as the best practice for IT management, is so highly regarded. However, even though ITIL has the “pure bloodline” of successful implementations in major foreign enterprises, just like the principle of “Southern Orange, Northern Bitter Orange,” simply transplanting others’ successes does not necessarily guarantee your own. According to our surveys of major domestic enterprises, quite a few have adopted ITIL, but very few can truly utilize it effectively and realize its value. The topic of discussion has gradually shifted from “What” to “How.” How to correctly implement ITIL within an organization, allowing the concepts and methods of its best practices to take root, sprout, and thrive in the soil of domestic IT, ultimately harvesting the desired fruits鈥攈ow to make the “Northern Bitter Orange” as sweet as the “Southern Orange,” or even surpass the “Southern Orange” to become a world-renowned “Northern Orange”鈥攈as become a severe and challenging practical problem.
How the North Can Harvest “Southern Oranges” – Monitoring Events Automatically Trigger Service Desk Requests
To facilitate easier troubleshooting, and because IT management requires recording and tracking all occurring faults without letting any slip through the net, important fault alarms generated by the monitoring system naturally cannot be easily ignored. If there were an automated fault event triggering strategy, where a fault event could not only trigger alarms in the conventional way but also trigger a predefined fault handling process for the administrator, achieving seamless integration of monitoring and operations, then this would solve the biggest problem of service desk request sources for IT fault management. The tight integration of the monitoring system with the service desk, from a configuration standpoint, is ideally as simple as possible. For example, the “four-step process” we discuss, where four steps can trigger the corresponding service desk request:
1.1 Select the IT resource for which an operations process needs to be generated
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