Exercises & Solutions

ICT Service Management

Lecture 6
Chapters 17, 18 and 19
Chapter 17: Quality Management
Service level definitions
3

Are the following service levels acceptable? Correct the definition when
necessary:

○ Measured over one month, Toledo will be available 24/d 7d/week for 99.5% of the time.
OK
○ The login time to the Intranet will be as short as possible.
Not OK: “Measured over one month, the login time to the Intranet will in 95% of the cases be
shorter than 10 secs”
○ Measured per week, the central network router will have a latency of less than 0.02 secs for 90%
of the transmitted IP packets.
Not OK: this is a technical parameter, not a services parameter. Suggestion: replace by network
response time
○ When incidents with PCs are reported to the service desk, intervention will always start within 2
hours (reported per month).
OK
Service level definitions
4

Are the following service levels acceptable? Correct the definition when
necessary:

○ 99% of the creations or modifications to user data will be done within two days of
requesting them.
Not fully OK: add measuring period (e.g. one year)
○ The Internet connection has a maximum upload bandwidth of 3 MB/s (measured over one
month)
Not OK: it is not a minimum quality requirement
Define service levels
5

Define an acceptable service level for each of these situations:

○ The availability of the e-mail service

The e-mail service is available 99.5% of the time (round the clock, measured over one month)

○ The resolution of reported errors (bugs) in the financial application

All reported bugs will be assessed within one week and solved within two weeks (measurement
period: one month)

○ The availability of the KU Leuven Internet connection

The Internet will be available 99.9% of the time (measured over one month)

○ The network storage capacity for each student

Each student will have a minimum storage capacity on the network of 100 GByte (measured over
one academic year)

○ The development (analysis, coding) of an application

Planned tasks in application analysis and coding will always be completed at a rate of one day per
estimated function point
Availability of composite systems
6

A storage cabinet contains 250 high-end hard disk units.

Estimate the MTBF.
If repair takes an average of 2 hours, what is the availability?

The estimated MTBF is 1 200 000 / 250 = 4800 hours (200 days, 6.6 months)

The estimated unavailability is 2/4800 = 1/2400 = 0.04%

The estimated availability is 99.96%
Availability of composite systems
7

An information system is composed of three parts (‘tiers’): a

presentation tier, an application tier and a database tier. Each Database tier
tier consists of server hardware (CPU, memory, storage) and the
appropriate software. Application
The availability of each separate tier is: tier
Database tier: 99.5%
Application tier: 98.0% Presentation
Presentation tier: 97.3% tier
What is the availability of the complete information system?
If we provide a hot stand-by for the Database tier
application tier, what is then the
availability of the complete
Application Application
information system?
tier tier
Presentation
tier
Availability of composite systems
8

● Availability of the three-tier system

All three components need to be available in order for the system to be available:

𝛽S = 𝛽DB × 𝛽App × 𝛽Pres = 99.5% × 98.0% × 97.3% = 94.9%

● When the hot stand-by is introduced:

○ Availability of the Application tier:
The tier is available when at least one of the two components is available. In this case, the
unavailability of the tier is the product of the unavailabilities of the two components:

(1 – 𝛽App, Hstb) = (1 – 𝛽App) × (1 – 𝛽App)

= (1 – 98.0%) × (1 – 98.0%) = 0.04%
𝛽App, Hstb = 99.96%

○ Availability of the complete system:

𝛽S = 𝛽DB × 𝛽App, Hstb × 𝛽Pres = 99.5% × 99.96% × 97.3% = 96.8%

Availability improvements
9

A server running a financial application currently has an availability of 99.9%.

Give recommendations to improve the availability to 99.95% and to improve the
availability to 99.99%.

An availability of 99.9% corresponds to one hour unavailability per 1000 hours (42 days).
An availability of 99.95% corresponds to one hour unavailability each 2000 hours (83
days). Possible measures are:
○ Virtualizing the server platform over at least two hardware servers

○ Mirroring disks or implementing RAID 5

An availability of 99.99% corresponds to one hour each 10000 hours (417 days). Such a
high availability would require
○ Virtualizing the server platform over several locations, including remote mirroring

○ Moving to a mainframe platform with two clustered mainframes at several locations

Chapter 18: Supplier Management
Classify suppliers
11

Classify these suppliers of the IT department:

○ The mainframe server supplier (IBM)

Strategic
○ The toner supplier
Commodity
○ Network equipment supplier (Cisco)
Tactical / Strategic
○ An independent JAVA programmer
Operational
○ Microsoft
Strategic (/ Tactical)
Chapter 19: HR Management
Assign processes to (sub)departments
13

Assign these IT management processes to a subdepartment of the IT department:

○ Change handling
○ Resources tracking
○ Financial management
○ Supplier management & Procurement
○ HR management
○ Event handling
○ Incident handling
○ Problem handling
○ Request handling
○ Service level agreements (definition, management)
○ Service planning
Assign processes to (sub)departments
14

Request
External to IT HR handling
department management Incident
two alternatives handling
Financial Management & Event
management Staff functions handling

Strategy and Operations and

Development
Planning Support

Change Strategy & Development

Service handling Service desk
Architecture team
planning
Resources Coordination Daily Development
tracking & Planning operations team
Supplier Customer
management, Support ...
management
procurement
Service level Request Problem
agreements handling handling
p. 121
Role definition
15

Define a role (‘job title’) for the responsible of each of these processes or activities. Briefly describe the
responsibilities and the required skills:
○ Change handling
Change manager
■ Responsibilities
● Coordinates changes
● Communicates with users and engineers
● Prepares and presides Change Committee meetings
■ Skills
● Advanced planning skills (skillful planner, planning software)
● Communication and motivation
○ Service desk staffing
Service desk staff member
■ Responsibilities
● Accepting calls and mails, communication to users and engineers
● Incident resolution: first attempt at solving incidents
● Reporting (service desk statistics)
■ Skills
● Overall technical IT knowledge
● Advanced communication skills (communication in stress situations)
Role definition
16

Define a role (‘job title’) for the responsible of each of these processes or activities:
○ IT project management
Project manager
■ Responsibilities
● Initiating, leading and closing of projects
● Management reporting of project status
■ Skills
● Project management techniques and frameworks
● Human management and coaching
○ Overall modeling of new business IT systems, including business processes, data, applications and infrastructure
Enterprise architect
■ Responsibilities
● Create and maintain model of complete enterprise
● Supervise implementation of (parts) of enterprise architecture
■ Skills
● Both analytic and synthetic skills
● Modeling languages and tools
Role definition
17

Define a role (‘job title’) for the responsible of each of these processes or activities:
○ Overall responsibility for services delivery
Services delivery manager
■ Responsibilities
● Monitor services delivery, handle delivery problems, ensure services quality and handle complex services requests
● Determine and negotiate service levels
● Manage services delivery coordination team
■ Skills
● Communication and negotiation skills
● People management
○ Planning of scheduled job execution, batch processing and back-up scheduling
Operations planner
■ Responsibilities
● Establishment and management of job execution plan
● Monitoring of job execution, taking action in case of problems
■ Skills
● Technical planning skills
Role definition
18

Define a role (‘job title’) for the responsible of each of these processes or activities:
○ ABAP programming
Programmer
■ Responsibilities
● Development and initial testing of modules in SAP ABAP
■ Skills
● Modeling tools, programming languages, SAP
○ Modeling business processes and customizing SAP
Business analyst
■ Responsibilities
● Structure, document and model business activities
● Adapt SAP transactions to support business activities
■ Skills
● Understanding of business processes and activities
● Analytic skills
● Communication skills
● Business modeling techniques and tools
● SAP
Role definition
19

Define a role (‘job title’) for the responsible of each of these processes or activities:
○ Budgeting IT and following up IT expenses
Financial manager
■ Responsibilities
● Create, present and negotiate IT budget
● Create and maintain IT services cost model
● Follow-up IT actual spending
● Report to management
■ Skills
● Analytic skills
● Costing and budgeting
○ Responsibility for a group of 20 analysts and programmers
Team leader
■ Responsibilities
● Lead and coach team of technical specialists
● Plan and organize daily work
■ Skills
● People management
● Planning skills
Role definition
20

Define a role (‘job title’) for the responsible of each of these processes or
activities:
○ Overall management responsibility for the IT department
Chief Information Officer
■ Responsibilities
● Management of IT department
● Final responsibility and accountability for IT services and cost of IT
■ Skills
● Senior management skills
● Knowledge of IT, IT services and IT services management