Dear Friends,
This blog about ITIL concepts has become and integral part
of my life and I really missed it last three days. There were some personal
commitments and I could not make it. Anyways, let’s move ahead.
In my last post, we discussed what ITIL says about Value
creation for the customer with the combination of Utility and Warranty. What if
we want to increase the value for customer? Simple…!!! Increase any of these
and you enjoy the increase in Value….right? NO…Remember, alone utility and
warranty are insufficient. Hence we need to increase both in order to achieve higher
Value for customer.
Ensuring Utility is quite easier to understand. You only need
to ensure that you take proper understanding of the customer requirement
(Coffee or Cold Drink) and provide that. Although it may not be that simple.
How do we ensure Warranty? There are certain pointers for
that.
1.
Availability: Service is available to the user
when he needs it (in an agreed manner). This is the most visible aspect. Hence
Availability management is the most critical aspect of value creation in
Service Delivery.
2.
Capacity: Service with required quality is able
to support up to an agreed level of demand. Suppose a service has been created
to support 100 concurrent users. Everything is fine up to 50 concurrent users
but slowness is observed if users increases. It means that although the service
is available, its capacity is not sufficient.
Capacity becomes important where Utility
arises from sharing of resources. Hence Capacity management is critical.
3.
Continuity: This ensured that Services are continued
even in case of disruption or failures. Another important aspect of the
continuity ensures that services backs to normalcy within the agreed timelines
in case of any failure. Continuity is assured with redundancy. E.g. using
cluster of servers.
4.
Security: It assures the secure utilization of
services. Security supports the previous three aspects of warranty.
So…How do we create value? If we want to create value by
providing services to customer, we definitely need to have Capability and we
need to have Resources. Resources and capabilities are assets used to create
value.
Resources are the direct inputs and Capabilities are the
Organization’s ability to coordinate, control, manage and deploy resources to
produce value. Management, Organization, Knowledge, People etc are used to
transform resources into value.
Capabilities => Management Organization Process Knowledge People
Resources => Financial Capital Infrastructure Applications Information People
Did you observed something? “People” is the part of
Capability and Resources both. Why? Because of its skills it is part of
capability and because of its ability to produce results, it s part of resource.
Clear? Not yet? Let’s take an example-
Suppose you are given with the process to make toys by hands.
You can have document on method to make a toy but to make that toy; you need
money, infrastructure and a person to make it. Similarly if you have money,
infra etc; you need to know the process (method) to make the toy. Now “People”
with knowledge of making toys may act as capability (knowledge & method)
and Resource (hands) both. Hope this example clarifies the concept.
Cheers and Happy reading.
