What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support - Part VI

An entity’s organizational structure provides the framework within which its activities for achieving entity-wide objectives are planned, executed, controlled, and reviewed. An entity should develop an organizational structure suited to perceived needs. Entity-centric organizational structure appropriateness is dependent, in part, on size and the nature of activities. Furthermore, effective organizational structure establishment includes deploying suitable authority and responsibility with adequate accountability for activities. As regulators, internal control systems are designed and operated in order to achieve the goals set in adopted governance rules or to comply with adopted governance rules.

“View Part I of the What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support series here“

What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support - Part V

Management’s operating style is usually derived from devotion to tasks, symbolic behavior, and engrained cultural norms. Operating style will typically be reflected, directly or indirectly, in entity-centric imperatives presented in items such as the mission statement, management principles, management plans, ethic codes, and conduct codes. Within this context, the manner of communicating management’s operating style also affects employee behavior. Regarding IT, as stated in ISACA COBIT 4.1, the “control environment should be based on a culture that supports value delivery whilst managing significant risks, encourages cross-divisional co-operation and teamwork, promotes compliance and continuous process improvement, and handles process deviations (including failure) well.”

“View Part I of the What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support series here“

What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support - Part IV

Management’s philosophy encompasses a broad range of beliefs, concepts, and attitudes that have a significant impact not only on the entity’s basic policies, but also on determining the entity’s culture. Management’s beliefs are the focal point for directing activities. The manner of communicating management’s philosophy affects employee behavior when accomplishing the entity’s mission. Communications rendering the general business method as well as entity and/or IT purpose are usually documented within a ‘mission statement.’

Architecturally, mission statements are how management translates organizational concepts into instructive information enabling consumer and employee primary business driver(s) awareness. Management’s attitude toward information processing determines the approach to taking and monitoring operational or program risks. For example, generally, management’s attitude regarding adequate IT service delivery and support, clearly defining policies and principles to ensure the proper practices, communicating practices to internal and external parties, and establishing appropriate systems to achieve objectives impact information reliability.

“View Part I of the What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support series here“

Related Post:

Ex-Murdoch editor Brooks, five others, charged over phone-hacking scandal

What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support - Part III

For most individuals, integrity values are a personal issue that should reflect organizationally enforced edicts. Within an entity’s control environment, managerial integrity should represent “the quality or state of being of sound moral principles.” Specifically, management should demonstrate uprightness, honesty, and sincerity when conducting business, conveying information and interfacing with employees. By acting with integrity, management establishes trust and provides the basis for reliance on decisions affecting the entity. Stakeholders expect managers to maintain integrity values consistent with accepted societal norms and obligations. Managements’ capacity to sustain compliance to laws, regulations, policies, directives, procedures, standards and rules under adverse conditions are litmus tests of adherence to integrity values.

Ethical values, as with integrity values, are a personal issue that should reflect organizationally enforced edicts. There is an expectation that once assigned managerial responsibilities the entity’s ethical values are thoroughly understood and adopted by the manager. Adopting entity-centric ethical values require conformance to a system or code of morals that standardizes acceptable behaviors. However, just because a particular choice is acceptable statutory or regulatory conformance does not automatically qualify behavior as ethical.

“View Part I of the What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support series here“

Related Post:

Resume killers: Should Yahoo’s CEO be fired for embellishing resume?

What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support - Part II

Contributing foundational control environment factors are values and attitudes. Values and attitudes represent a view of what is desirable or undesirable behavior. Behavior refers to “the way one acts,” especially to actions that can be observed. Circularly, individual and group behavior is affected by association with purported general value systems and specific attitude endorsements. Values and attitudes are obscure evidential concepts due to their intangible qualities that must be inferred from actual behavior, verbal descriptions, and/or written statements. An individual’s total past experience provides a value framework through which the person evaluates the relative merit, usefulness, or importance of things, ideas, or alternative courses of action. Whereas, attitudes are more precise since they refer to a person’s disposition, opinion, or mental resolution concerning objects such as things, people, ideas, or policies.

“View Part I of the What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support series here“

What Every IT Manager Should Know About Service Delivery and Support - Part I

The control environment is an important component of an entity’s control structure or system that directly impacts IT governance. Literally, an entity’s control environment sets the “tone at the top” and can influence the effectiveness of specific IT service delivery and support control techniques. Delineated at a detail-level, factors that impact the control environment include: integrity, ethics, philosophy, operating style, the organizational structures, methods of assigning authority and responsibility (with appropriate accountability), commitment to competence, human resources policies and practices, control methods for monitoring and following up on performance, the effectiveness of audits, as well as influences external to the entity.

Managing the IT Configuration - Part VIII

An IT maintenance request requires analysis of all incidents and problems generated in the entity’s production environment. However, assigned IT service support personnel should make problem evaluation their final step prior to correction. Sequentially, within the evaluation process, an entity’s major problem management tasks should include: resolving problem causes, investigating and diagnosing the root cause of the problem, identifying and recording known circumstances, assessing known circumstances, recording the known circumstances’ resolution and requesting appropriate changes.

IT service support management has a proactive role in identifying application or infrastructure weaknesses and ‘areas of concern’ within the entity’s deployed IT architecture. Once adverse trends are recognized, service problems should be highlighted and corrective action initiated. For instance, a known circumstance can be forwarded to service support change management personnel or used for employee education and training.

“View Part I of the Managing the IT Configuration series here“

Managing the IT Configuration - Part VII

An IT service problem can be viewed as a demarcated and identified condition extracted from a single incident or multiple incidents exhibiting common symptoms. Initially, the IT service problem is an unknown circumstance awaiting identification and attribution. Through successful problem root cause analysis, the unknown circumstance converts to a known circumstance representing an identified condition where a CI is confirmed as the resource defect. Therefore, a primary problem management process objective should be ensuring IT services stability by identifying and removing known circumstances negatively affecting deployed IT. When cascaded, the primary goals of the Problem Management process are to minimize the adverse impact of known circumstances affecting IT service delivery and to prevent recurring incidents related to known circumstances that can affect IT service delivery. Furthermore, the reactive aspect of these goals is to quickly solve problems in response to one or more incidents; whereas, the proactive aspect of these goals is to reduce the overall number of incidents.

“View Part I of the Managing the IT Configuration series here“

Managing the IT Configuration - Part VI

Cascading from the primary release management objective, the primary release management goal should be to ensure approved and accredited components are installed malfunction-resistant and on schedule. Consequently, the high level activities associated with this process should encompass: release planning, CI distribution and implementation into production, as well as definitive software library (DSL) and definitive hardware store (DHS) management.

Commonly, change tracking and change oversight practices are necessary but not sufficient to achieve acceptable CI performance improvements. Specifically, there are a variety of potential IT service threats that can convert to intentional or unintentional incidents requiring adequate IT service support. If restoring service normalcy as swiftly as possible and minimizing adverse impacts on entity operations are the primary incident management process goals, then IT support personnel achievement of expected performance levels ensures that the highest possible service quality and availability levels are maintained.

“View Part I of the Managing the IT Configuration series here“

Managing the IT Configuration - Part V

Once change tests prove satisfactory functionality, most IT CIs should be moved to a secure staging area. Subsequently, a release request should be submitted to the appropriate individual for production implementation. Upon notification of a successfully released change, documentation updates should be delivered to the individual directly responsible for the CMDB. Moreover, a change review should be performed to assess change process performance and development adequacy.

Within the change management process, release management is the practice of software development, installation as well as support for software control and distribution. The primary release management objective should be to ensure that only authorized and correct versions of software are made available for operational production usage.

“View Part I of the Managing the IT Configuration series here“