IT Service Management for Campus Environment-Practical Concerns in Implementation

Stewart H. C. WanProjects and Facilities Division

Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks CorporationHong Kong

Abstract- Adequate definition and adoption of standardizedmanagement processes form the foundation to enhance ITService Management (ITSM) especially in tally with thearrangement of outsourcing operation management andcontracting project development. With the establishment ofdefacto standard IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for ITSMimplementation in these days, management software tools areavailable in the market. However, proper service managementprocesses shall be developed to align with the existing dailyoperations workflow, model around ITIL framework, ratherthan compromising commercial product standard template. Thispaper first evaluates the effect of ITSM tools in practicaladoption in supporting various types of service category incampus environment of technology industries. Experiencesharing to address specific concerns in developing customizedmanagement process modules for the campus with serviceoutsourcing will be discussed afterwards. Finally, a future workon proactive service impact analysis framework is defined.

Keywords- ITSM, ITIL, outsourcing, campus

I. INTRODUCTIONHistorically, IT support plays as a best effort role to help

business function in an organization. Service level agreementand its management are luxury in nature. This mindset andpractice have significantly changed over the last decade withthe introduction of service outsourcing and servicemanagement frameworks like ITIL [1]. A campus built as ahub for technology companies emphasizes the role of IT inenabling and delivering better service to tenant for innovationand technology development in the focused clusters and theupgrading ofmanufacturing and service industry capabilities.

The intrusion of IT into the building operation has causedsubstantial change from traditional manual processes inmanaging campus environment into an era where the businessoperations are IT-enabled. In this paper, we first took a realcampus site in technology industries as a case study to presentthe effect of adopting ITSM process tools in supportingvarious service categories in campus environment. In view ofthe increased trend in outsourcing service management in thecommercial market, we then share the experience and discussthe specific concerns in developing management processmodules under the service outsourcing model.

Yuk-Hee ChanDepartment of Electronics and Information Engineering

Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHong Kong

II. RELATED WORKSTo our knowledge, no approach can be found in the

literature that addresses an overall process frameworkcompletely suitable for the campus operations environmentwith the consideration of outsourcing implication. Most of therelated works were done individually in the entire ITSMprocesses. In [2] the aim is a better incident prioritization, [3]addresses automating Change Management activities.Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) [4], a businessprocess framework outlines by Telemanagement Forum (TMForum) to guide the development and management of keyprocesses within a telecommunications service provider.eTOM lacks more useful information than ITIL regardingeach specific service management sub-process includingbenefits and best practices. [5] presents a service-orientedarchitecture approach to integrate service managementapplication, but was without ITIL processes modeling.

III. THE CAMPUSWe took a real case to illustrate the effects and concerns

of ITSM processes implementation in a campus environmentwith outsourcing IT services support. The campus is locatedin Hong Kong which provides rentable floor space forresearch and development (R&D) offices and laboratories withsupporting facilities for tenants in innovation and technologyclusters of IT and telecommunications, Electronics,Biotechnology, and Precision engineering. It is a non-labor-intensive campus for research and development industrieswhich comprises 3 development phases. Phase 1 wascompleted in 2002; there are 10 buildings with occupancy of153 companies and over 4,500 employees as ofthe submissiondate of this paper.

The campus IT service support was outsourced by thecampus management to a technology service operator whilethe building operation support was outsourced to anotherfacility management service operator. The daily IT servicesupport includes all aspects in Information andCommunications Technology (ICT) infrastructure which weregrouped into 10 categories:

* Server farm* Office Automation (OA) and Desktop applications

This paper was written with the support offered by the Hong Kong Scienceand Technology Parks Corporation, Hong Kong.

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Public facilities - Kiosks and DisplaysCampus networkWeb portal and User applicationsMain IT room / control centreWireless communicationsCampus cablingIT securityTelephony and Unified messaging system (UMS)

Compare with the average enterprise with satellite offices orsubsidiary companies, the distinct features in campus IToperations are the ad-hoc and daily service offerings fortenants, visitors and the public, such as ad-hoc VLAN setupfor tenants and conference events, publicly accessible wirelessnetwork services, real-time multimedia event broadcast andguidance information. The operations' knowledgemanagement in handling different setup environment in eachtenant office is another key issue in campus operations.

IV. IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROCESSESITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent and coherent

set of best practices for IT service management processes,promoting a quality approach to achieving businesseffectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems[1]. It is not a process model but a description of activities,documents, roles, success factors, key performance indicators(KPI), etc. [6]. In the ITSM hierarchy, Service support andService delivery form the bases for service management.Service support aims to deal with day-to-day operationalsupport of IT services while Service delivery provides longterm planning and improvement of IT service provision.

The adoption of ITIL process elements and its

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Figure 1 Campus ITSM Solution

downstream components would depend on the organization'sbusiness needs and resources allocation. In practice, not all ofthe process activities in Service support and Service deliverycould be automated or aided by software management toolsbut require manual process in administrative determinationsinstead to bridge over the other process activities. Once anorganization understood the required process activities,relevant process modules would be formed accordingly as aset of standardized framework for ITSM.

V. IMPLEMENTATION IN PRACTICETo avoid chaos operations management and achieve

systematic process instead, ITSM workflow processes wereadopted in stages for the IT operation team since the campuswas put into operation in 2002. Figure 1 illustrates themapping of ITIL activities to campus ITSM solution. Theprocess modules combined some of the activities in ITIL forbetter efficiency in workflow arrangement in practicaladoption. In which the Service Helpdesk and IncidentManagement were aided by proprietary management softwaretools in 2005. The software tools were customized accordingto the management workflow with knowledge repository tohandle requests and incidents efficiently.

A. Outsourcing Model Implications

In service outsourcing model, the service operator isselected either through strategic partnership or competitivetender bidding. Unlike the management of direct staffemployment, the relationship between the company and theemployer organization is built on the contract itself. Someimplications were observed during the stages in planning,design and implementation ofITSM for campus environment.

1) Conflict ofInterestThe financial element in ITSM brought to the concerns of

conflict-of-interest. It is especially a sensitive subject forgovernment and public agencies that require serious attention.Unless there are plenty supply of vendor-neutral serviceprovider companies in the regional market, which is actuallynot the case in reality, the procurement of new equipment inorder to satisfy user request shall be done by a third party so asto get rid of conflict-of-interest during the course of equipmentvendor selection. The service providers in IT and buildingfacility management are therefore required to take up the assetmanagement and financial control respectively in order tomatch with the financial management activity in ITIL.

2) Standardizaton ofProcesses

Implementation of ITSM with KPI and service levelagreement (SLA) measures is crucial in service outsourcingenvironment for achieving success in service support anddelivery. Standardization of process activities, documents,procedures, roles, etc. are the native elements with theestablishment of ITSM. With the knowledge-base processesbuilt in the management tools, it could minimize the serviceimpact of human resource turnover or skill transfer due to thechange of service provider contract.

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3) Owner ofthe Tools

Although the ITSM tools could be included bysubscription under the service outsourcing contract, inpractical operations, it is recommended that the employerorganization builds his own ITSM tools. Such arrangementensures transit seamlessly the know-how from existing serviceoperator to its successor; minimizes data conversion from onetool to another. All relevant historical intelligences couldtherefore be retrievable.

B. Performance Monitoring and Measurement

Performance monitoring and measurement service modulecaptures and provides historical and real-time performance dataduring end-user simulation, which quantifies the specifics inservice level, capacity, and availability. It works together withreporting tools in user reporting service module and leveragedata from asset management module to facilitate an operationteam to ensure business demand is met by adequate capacity.

The metrics used for evaluating ITSM comprise five KPIsin helpdesk services, problem management and bug fixing,change request / enhancement, system monitoring andoptimization, and production support and request. In which theindicator of helpdesk services is derived from the performanceattainment in SLA. The products of SLA, KPI criteria,contingency planning, etc., once administratively developed,will be put under a knowledge-base to interact with the realtime measurement in system and the incident event records toprovide useful results for service management. However, someof the activities in ITSM in respect of the human processes inservice management and availability management, like servicelevel improvement plan, availability improvement plan, etc. arecrucial yet and cannot be replaced by functions provided bythis service module.

C. User Reporting

This module is the underlying service which could not beomitted in the entire ITSM solution. It is not a servicemanagement process but offers effective means to facilitatedocumentation. By sharing the backend database andcorresponding data stored, user reporting service integrateswith other ITSM modules for report generation. Authorizeduser could generate management report according to theselected information from the captured data.

VI. RESULTSWe collected data in two stages: the 1st stage before

deployment of management software tools from January 2004to January 2005 and; the 2nd stage after deployment fromFebruary 2005 to December 2006.

1) Service Target Improvement

Level of achieving predetermined service target is one ofthe primary concerns in service-oriented IT support. It isespecially important when the service is provided throughoutsourcing. In this campus environment, there are four pre-defined severity levels for incident / problem cases in IToperation. Performance target in terms of the relevant service

+Without Management Tools (Period: January 2004 to January 2 05)With Management Tools (Perio: February 2005 to Deember 2QQ6)

2004 2006Month J Year

Figure 2 Service Target Improvement

level requirements for each severity level are also defined,ranging from low impact of 48 hours recovery period to veryhigh impact of 2 hours recovery period. Incident case cannotbe resolved according to the SLA; would be classified as non-compliant case. Therefore, service performance in response toincidents = 1 - (non-complaint cases / total no. of cases) x1000o.

Figure 2 illustrates the service performance before and afterthe deployment ofmanagement tools by comparing 36 months'figures. The data showed that the service target had beenimproved by 13.4% in average and 25% at maximum. Morestable performance was observed after 12 months usage inwhich 95% was attained. The performance result providesproven records demonstrating the following observations:

a) Better communications and transparencyStandardized workflow-oriented communications betweenusers and service support team, openly web accessible bycampus management at anytime;

b) Accountability - Traceable details for event and itsrespective handling operator;

c) Efficient event resolution - Utilizes historicalknowledge-base track records to shorten response andturnaround time for similar event.

2) The Most Requested Users

Knowing the most requested users in the campus could helpthe management to understand the current situations andprovide forward planning in supporting these users. We madeuse of the aggregated system logged data in Service Helpdeskand identified the most requested user groups in the campus,namely campus facility management; campus helpdesk; tenants;and remote operation centre.

Considering the business nature and operation model of thecampus, we have the following interpretation. There is astringent leasing requirement for the campus that an eligiblecompany must satisfy the condition of having not less than400O activities in R&D for its business. In this connection,tenants are technology companies with internal IT servicessupport. The IT problems in their daily business are mainlytackled by their internal support rather than the campus ITsupport. The service requests to campus IT support, however,

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are mainly the support of Internet connectivity, Intranet, andpublic facilities which made low participation (30/O) in thedirect service request to the campus IT supports. Conversely,the most requested user, campus facility management whichoccupied 71% of user requests, is an outsourced serviceprovider which provides manpower resources to manage thecampus facilities excluding IT facilities. This service supportoutsourcing structure makes them use extensively the campusIT service support for the business aligned operations.Moreover, together with the second large user, campushelpdesk (25%), some of the visitors and new tenants wouldput in IT service request via campus facility management andcampus helpdesk to realize the concept of one-stop-shopservice.

3) The Most Requested Services

Similarly, we make use of the aggregated system loggeddata in Service Helpdesk to understand the top three mostrequested service categories. The two most requested serviceswere Server farm (27.8%) and OA & desktop applications(26%) categories. We are not surprising to obtain this result incampus environment as most of the users require accessing tocampus systems, PC applications, email and files services, etc.The moderate turnover rate of staff in outsourced serviceoperator in facility management and the continuous move-intenants to new buildings also impose service requests tosuspend and create user accounts as well as proportioned PCservice supports.

Unlike the IT service environment in average enterprisecompanies, there are considerable public facilities (the 3rd:16.9%) in this campus environment for visitors and tour guidesin technology clusters. Public facilities involve the multimediacontent scheduling and publishing to interactive kiosks andlarge-formatted display panels. Information such as latest newsfeed, weather report, video content of event marketing andadvertisement would be put up to public display screen whilenavigation of the in-campus information would be supportedby interactive kiosk.

VII. SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORKITSM is a tool to facilitate the achievement of service-

oriented IT management goals. Implementing ITSM is not ashort-term strategy for an organization. The transformationmight even take years for a single process in order to obtainthe support from employee and management. In this paper, itdemonstrates that the ITIL principles should be adoptedaccording to the operations requirements and should beapplied selectively. The experience obtained in this R&Dcampus environment could serve as a reference for similaroperation entity. As mentioned previously, the servicehelpdesk and incident management processes were aided bysoftware tools in 2005. While executing the ITSM process inhybrid model, i.e. manual plus automated processes, the othersoftware tools were being developed in stages to furtherautomate ITSM and tailor with the campus operationsenvironment.

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Operating IT services is dynamic in nature which emphasiscontinuous performance monitoring in ITSM to check againstits validity to suit changes so arisen. It is especially true inoperating a campus where most of the users' platform setupsare different from each other. To minimize the disturbance tousers on the service offerings, we are undergoing a furtherwork on the performance monitoring and measurementmodule in ITSM architecture, namely campus service impactanalysis (CSIA) to proactively respond to fault/incident alerts.It serves as detective measure which ties up businesscontinuity plan (BCP) administrative-wise with configurationmanagement database (CMDB) system-wise under aknowledge-base framework, as illustrated in Figure 3. Furtheranalysis work on these results would be taken place toevaluate its performance and practical concerns in operationalenvironment.

REFERENCES[1] Office of Government Commerce (OGC), "IT Infrastructure Library

(ITIL) - Service support (ISBN 0113300158)", 2000.[2] C. Bartolini and M. Salle, "Business driven prioritization of service

incidents", in Proceedings of the 15th IFIP/IEE International Workshopon Distributed Systems: Operations and Management (DSOM 2004),IFIP/IEEE, Nov. 2004

[3] A. Keller, "Automating the change management process with electroniccontracts", in Proceeding of the Seventh IEEE International Conferenceon E-Commerce Technology Workshops (CECW 05), pp.99, 2005.

[4] Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), Telemanagement-Forum.www.tmforum.org

[5] C. Mayerl, T. Vogel, S. Abeck, "SOA-based integration of IT servicemanagement applications", Proceedings of the IEEE InternationalConference on Web Services (ICWS'05), pp. 785-786, July 2005.

[6] A. Hochstein, R. Zarnekow, W. Brenner, "Evaluation of Service-Oriented IT management in practice", Proceedings of the InternationalConference on Services Systems and Services Management, IEEE, vol.1, pp.80-84, June 2005.

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