MITA Service Management – a supporting pillar
Typically, the early understanding of what some of the primary value-adding activities within an IT organization are, include software development, IT administration, and ongoing configuration of services amongst many others. Complementing this, when an organization takes the role of service provider, it also needs to ensure that a solid layer of other practices is defined to support the delivery of value to the business.
Such practices would span the financial domain, governance, security, general administration and so on. Of great importance are also practices which govern the way infrastructure changes are performed, the approach to execute client requests, and how (including how fast) software is deployed. Such practices would also include what to do when issues occur and how to eliminate an element which is causing considerable or multiple issues. There is a long list, which complements and supports the technical expertise across specialized teams throughout an entire organization.
There are endless information resources that direct their audience towards understanding the importance of this category of practices within an organization. International standards are also available and help determining the “what” of requirements in order to operate at global quality levels. Such resources highlight the importance of having service management capabilities which support the technical arm by guiding them through the right direction.
It doesn’t matter if the organization is embracing or heading towards modern principles or modern technology such as for example software-defined-infrastructure or if it is still well served by monolithic applications running on metal servers possibly based on traditional IT Service Management. Having a defined set of practices would allow all organizational elements to steer towards a commonly agreed and beneficial target. It would support collaboration between parties and thus achieving better and faster results.
Throughout its thirty years of existence, MITA has thrived in this regard. The service management layer within the Agency is considered as one of the critical pillars sustaining the creation of value in collaboration with other essential stakeholders. This includes ensuring that the entire cycle of a service as well as related assets is managed with consistency, efficiency and effectiveness.
Keeping the end-user and business at the center of its activities and vision, service management effort has over the years solidified the said practices. MITA is in fact a living example which proves the theory often found in service management textbooks. It is an evident example of the application of several principles, concepts and methodologies into the real world. This led to the devising and ongoing maintenance of a common approach, irrespective of which technical arm is executing the work and thus contributing towards silo elimination.
MITA is ‘equipped’ with several practices to ensure the services it delivers are creating value to Government.
Some of these practices permit consistent, effective and efficient:
- delivery of services according to agreed service levels (targets) with ongoing analysis of trends allowing rectification of deviations as early as possible;
- controlled implementation of changes affecting the technical environment hence potentially impacting Government;
- querying a single-source of information regarding asset configuration that forms any given service, allowing more expedite troubleshooting and change-related decision-making
- direction with regards to handling of arising issues across the technical landscape
- requesting of additional pre-agreed services by the client from MITA through a single gateway
For these and other practices, MITA is aware of the ever-changing context and is to this extent involved in an ongoing improvement effort. Modern principles such as automated approval for changes, configuration management for the cloud, automation of service requests (shifting left), and others, impinge the need to review existing approaches endlessly.
