Or the ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI).
I have passed the ITIL SOA test 😉 (38/40!!!!!), and now onwards to the next one.
Since CSI has new words/terms/abbreviations, here are some of the most important ones :
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Service dashboard – A graphical representation of overall IT service performance and availability. Gives data in real time.
The balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and management system that is used extensively in business and industry, government, and nonprofit organizations worldwide to align business activities to the vision and strategy of the organization, improve internal and external communications, and monitor organization performance against strategic goals.
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This is always in the picture :
Process : a structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective. A process takes one or more defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs.
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Organizational culture : a set of shared values and norms that control the service provider`s interaction with stakeholders (customers, users, suppliers, staff etc).
Governance – the single overarching area that ties IT and the business together.
Governance is what defines the common directions, policies and rules that both the business and IT use to conduct business.
Governance ensures that policies and strategy are actually implemented, and that required processes are correctly followed.
A system – is a number of related things that work together to achieve an overall objective.
Key components of the system are the structure and processes that work together.
IT governance – a part of an organization’s corporate governance
The CSI manager is the chief advocate and owns all CSI issues.
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These definitions were here from earlier exams, but bear repeating :
Data – a collection of facts
Information – the result of processing and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the person receiving it
Knowledge – information combined with experience, context, interpretation and reflection
Wisdom – the ability to make correct judgements and decisions
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Assessments are the formal mechanisms for comparing the operational process environment
to the performance standards for the purpose of measuring improved process capability and/or to identify potential shortcomings that could be addressed.
Benchmarking is a specific type of assessment and is a process used in management, particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. It is used to compare performance between different organizations – or different units within a single organization – undertaking similar processes.
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Metric is a scale of measurement defined in terms of a standard.
Metrics define what is to be measured.
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And abbreviations themselves :
ad hoc – made/done for this situation only/for this case only
AMIS – availability management information system
BCM – business continuity management
BMP – best management practice
CFIA – component failure impact analysis
CMIS – capacity management information system
CMS – configuration management system
Downtime – time to restore service
ERP – enterprise resource planning
FTA – fault tree analysis
MTBF – mean time between failures
MTRS – mean time to restore
PIR – post implementation review
PSO – projected service outage
ROI – return on investment
SaaS – software as service
SBU – strategic business unit
SFA – service failure analysis
SIP – service improvement plan
SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound
SMS – service management system
TCO – total cost of ownership
TO – technical observation
TQM – total quality management
Uptime – time between failures
VOI – value on investment
YDT – Year to date, the period beginning at the start of the calendar year up to the current date.