Showing posts with label Service Management. Show all posts

Monday, 5 May 2014

Understanding ITIL Qualification Paths

Understanding the ITIL Qualification

by: Simon Buehring

ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely recognised IT Service Management qualification in use at the moment. It is accredited by the APMG (the same organisation that administers PRINCE2 and MSP), and is assessed through similar objective-testing examinations.

There are four levels to the ITIL V3 qualification, each of which is attained by the completion of a certain number of modules or credits. Once a student has earned 22 credits, the ITIL V3 Diploma (or “ITIL Expert in IT Service Management”) is awarded. The ultimate tier of the qualification is ITIL Master, which is assessed through peer review, written examinations and case studies/simulations. This level requires substantial practical experience of IT Service Management.

Foundation

The Foundation module is standard and requisite for all ITIL V3 students. It is worth 2 credits, which are gained by passing the ITIL Foundation level examination. It is aimed at anybody who needs to have a basic awareness of what ITIL is, or who needs to gain a higher-level ITIL qualification – for example, individuals working within or alongside an IT Service Management environment.

The ITIL Foundation module covers the following areas:

• Service Management as a practice

• The Service Lifecycle

• Key principles and concepts of ITIL

• Important models and terminology used within ITIL

• Selected processes, roles and functions important to ITIL

• Technology and architecture (awareness only)

The Foundation exam contains 40 multiple choice questions, each offering the candidate four choices, only one of which is correct. The exam lasts for 60 minutes and is closed-book, so no course notes, manuals or other revision guides may be used. The candidate must score 26 correct answers (65%) in order to pass the exam.

Intermediate

There are nine Intermediate level modules, each worth between 3 and 4 credits. A total of 15 credits must be earned in order to be eligible for the ITIL V3 Diploma. These credits may be earned through modules taken from either one of the main modular streams (the Service Lifecycle Series and the Service Capabilities Series), or through a combination of the two.

There are five Service Lifecycle modules, each of which focuses on one stage of the Service Lifecycle (Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, and Continual Service Improvement). The Service Capabilities Series contains four modules, each of which examines a cluster of role-based processes (for example: processes associated with Operational Support and Analysis).

All credits are earned through attendance of approved training courses and passing the ITIL modular exams. All Intermediate level exams are 90 minutes long and consist of multiple choice questions divided into 8 main sections and based on Service Management scenarios. The pass mark for these exams is 70%, and answers are marked using gradient scoring (i.e. a = 2 marks, b = 1 mark, c = 0.5 marks, d = 0 marks).

The Intermediate-level certificates are independent qualifications and are aimed at individuals who wish to deepen their understanding of particular elements within ITIL Service Management, or who need to gain the ITIL V3 Diploma. It is recommended, although not required, that a student has 2 years of related work experience and basic exposure to IT concepts before attempting the Intermediate-level courses.

ITIL V3 Diploma/ITIL Expert

Once a student has gained 2 Foundation level credits and at least 15 Intermediate level credits, one final synoptic or normalizing module is compulsory in order to gain the ITIL V3 Diploma (or ‘ITIL Expert’). This module is worth 5 credits and is called ‘Managing Across the Lifecycle’.

Managing Across the Lifecycle is designed to complement the Intermediate modules previously studied by each candidate, by providing the ancillary knowledge necessary for practical implementation of the Service Management theory within a business context.

The examination for Managing Across the Lifecycle follows the same format as the other Intermediate level exams.

ITIL Master

The ultimate tier of the ITIL Service Management qualification depends much more than the earlier layers on practical experience and individual expertise. Eligibility is assessed through peer evaluation, written exams, case studies and simulations. ITIL recommends that at least eight years experience in IT Service Management will be expected of all ITIL Masters.

Source

ITIL – What You Need To Know

5 tips for adopting ITIL

ITIL v3 Explained

ITIL standards and CSPO training course

CSPO, ITIL SOA and PMP certification exams

ExamForce Releases Exam Preparation for the ITIL Foundations Exam

Information Technology: What Is ITIL?

SAP FICO module training for finance students

ITIL study resources?

Pursuing the ITIL 2011 Foundation Certification.

Robert Recommends...

An Introduction To ITIL

ITIL – What You Need To Know

ITIL v3 Explained

The Evolution of Service Management

How To Become An ITIL Expert

Build Powerful Business Processes using Automation

Saturday, 3 May 2014

The Evolution of Service Management

The Evolution of Business Service Management (BSM)

By Peter Goldin

Looking back, the emergence of business service management (BSM) seems inevitable. This new generation of tools helps IT organizations manage technology infrastructures within the context of the key services they provide for their customers. BSM tools are critical enablers for the increasingly popular process-focused IT Service Management (ITSM) approach.

What’s driving this evolution to BSM and its related IT management paradigms? Executive Consultant Troy DuMoulin of Pink Elephant, an ITIL events and consulting firm, explains, “The interest in ITIL, the evolution of legislation like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), and the interest in standards is symptomatic of something much more rudimentary. At the base of this growing focus on formalization and legislation is a growing awareness of exposure and dependency that the business has on IT. Before, IT was seen as an enabler, supportive but yet somehow separated from the business processes themselves. But now there is a realization that there is no true separation between the business process and the underlying IT services and systems.”

Information technology has become so vital to business today – so ubiquitous in every aspect – that most businesses literally cannot function without it anymore. Even simple manual tasks like filling a car with gas or cashing a check now require the support of an IT system.

This heightened reliance on IT has placed companies at a crossroads. They are compelled to address this new dependency by putting processes and technology in place to ensure IT does its job serving the business effectively. So the move to BSM can be seen as a natural reaction to the new way IT interacts with and enables business.

“BSM is a way for a company to agree on what the business expectations are, and manage the IT performance to those agreed upon expectations,” clarifies Brian Childers, a consultant who also serves on the Board of Directors for itSMF USA, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting best practices in IT services management. “Once we understand the expectations, we can build the processes to suit the expectations, and manage against them.”

Vendors are responding rapidly to these new service management imperatives. Leading software providers – like HP, BMC, Mercury and Managed Objects – are already introducing new BSM-versions of their popular tools to help revolutionize the way IT managers gauge technology performance and leverage that knowledge to meet business needs. And new kinds of automated, self-learning software from companies like Netuitive, are making it easier than ever for managers to cut across their technology silos and tie together their existing management tools.

“Over the years – especially during the frenetic IT build-out of the late 1990s – companies cobbled together a mishmash of systems within their IT organizations,” adds Tony Gilbert, vice president at Netuitive. “The result now is a heterogeneous set of components in the IT environment, and individual departmental silos for managing each one. The right set of BSM tools makes it possible to tie together all of these pieces of technology across an enterprise and to monitor IT from the perspective of the service it delivers.”

BSM tools help IT groups see technology in terms of how it impacts their business services, and zero-in on the cause of a particular performance issue that is affecting that service — a capability companies do not have when they manage IT solely through technology silos. The new BSM tools can also enable a company to prioritize resources based on the relative importance of multiple business services. For example, a brokerage firm could manage online trading or online banking services holistically instead of piecemeal within silos: the server group, the database group, the application group.

More Than Just Technology

But completely changing a management approach is not easy. “For the last 20 years our industry has been focused on managing technology. Management of IT has been by domains, such as mainframes, networks and databases. But those domains don’t truly live in isolation.” Pink Elephant’s DuMoulin continues, “A basic premise is that there is a business requirement for IT to understand how any given IT component relates to another and how these devices support or potentially disable a business process. When you understand IT from this perspective you see that you cannot manage by technology or device. You need to understand the relationship between those devices, and how they relate to IT services, and ultimately how IT services are consumed by business.”

The people factor remains an issue, too. For many organizations, BSM often requires a corporate culture change. IT personnel must learn that they don’t just manage boxes and applications, but actually provide services that the business consumes in order to survive and thrive. Most experts agree that the tools are out there, and are necessary, but they go hand in hand with changing processes and changing the way companies perceive the value of IT.

“Some people believe that it doesn’t matter what technology you use as long as you have the right processes in place,” comments Ken Wendle, the ITSM Solution Lead at HP. “But I have always said that IT service management is a combination of people and process, enabled by the right technology, all working in synergy with each other. It is about the intelligent blending of technology to enable and enforce the right processes, which then will allow an organization to execute around business priorities.”

“I have seen companies that put the right processes in place, and trained the right people, but then created process silos,” HP’s Wendle also notes. “But ITSM is about cutting across the technology silos, not just creating another set of process silos on top of them. ITSM is about taking a holistic approach.”

The BSM Evolution Continues

256px Cloud computing icon.svg The Evolution of Service Management

Cloud computing icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Where is BSM going from here? “One of the missing ingredients today is the enrollment of the business community,” itSMF’s Childers believes. “They need to understand what BSM is and why they would want to support it. I think the better job everyone does with bringing the business side onboard, the faster BSM will progress.”

“I don’t think companies have gained all the benefits of technology that they could,” HP’s Wendle agrees. “The business people need to understand and appreciate what IT can do to help the business side of the organization.”

Clearly there is work to be done, but the adoption of ITSM and the BSM tools that support it continues to gain momentum as more companies realize this is a prerequisite for success in a new world where business and IT have become one.

“The prediction is that over the next five years, ITSM will be as impactful as ERP systems were, or maybe more,” itSMF’s Childers concludes. “I don’t think ITSM is going away, because it makes too much sense.” And innovative BSM vendors will continue to develop new tools to help.

Reprinted from BSM Digest

The BSM Digest newsletter delivers timely original articles about the latest trends in business service management, IT Service Management and ITIL. Plus, we scour the technology industry’s leading publications and alert you to the best articles you don’t want to miss. http://ift.tt/1eUGbUi