Service Integration Management

Service Integration Management

For decades, various service organizations have been at the forefront of modern technology, so they are no strangers to working in a complex and ever-evolving world. The rate at which technology advances continues to increase with no signs of slowing in the future; maintaining pace with the breakneck speed of technology is the only option for organizations that want to remain relevant in today’s business world.

While the speed of production and delivery is imperative, speed alone will not provide success. IT management must also ensure the quality of the product. As such, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was created to help guide organizations in the successful development of IT products and services.

What is ITIL?

ITIL is the name given to a set of guidelines and best practices for an IT organization on how they can provide the best service possible. All the instructions provided by ITIL are intentionally generalized so that all organizations can apply the fundamentals of the system to their development systems. ITIL is intended to be customized and implemented in each organization’s unique business structure. Since its original inception over the past few decades, it has been tested and improved upon. Changes have been made to ITIL to continually incorporate new methodologies that are found to be effective means for improving IT services.

Most noteworthy, the generalized nature of ITIL makes it applicable to all kinds of IT organizations. But it also allows you to decide on which parts of ITIL are best for your specific business. You should consider aligning your IT services with your business needs in the manner which ITIL recommends. One of the best methods for implementing ITIL concepts into your organization is through the implementation of integrated service management.

What is an Integrated Service Management (ISM)?

Integrated service management was created to give organizations a standardized method for implementing ITIL concepts quickly and easily. Integrated service management is essentially a leaned down version of ITIL, utilizing the teachings of ITIL while cutting out the unnecessary bulk.

The integrated service management focuses on six core processes that are compatible with all IT service management processes throughout the IT service lifecycle. These core processes are:

• Service Level Management: Service level management (SLM) involves the definition of services, the levels of services required to support business processes, and the service level agreements (SLAs) created to establish standards for successful operation.

• Change Management: Change management guides the adoption of changes by preparing, implementing, and supporting the change process to drive organizational success. One of the primary duties involved in change management is education regarding changes to ensure everyone is on the same page before the switch is flipped.

• Operations Management: Operations management is geared towards empowering organizations to meet the highest levels of optimization possible. Operations management teams seek to balance cost and revenue to increase the performance of IT services.

• Incident Management: Incident management seeks to ensure business operations go as smoothly as possible. Incident management involves logging, classification, prioritization, diagnosis, and resolution of incidents.

• Configuration Management: Configuration management involves the planning and management of services across an organization’s infrastructure. It ensures the IT assets required to deliver services are controlled and properly detailed for use throughout the organization.

• Quality Management: Quality management is responsible for ensuring that all activities and tasks are performed at the desired level of excellence. The quality of IT services must be maintained at all times for the organization to continue successful operations.

Integrated service management combines the best practices for these six core components of ITIL to provide organizations with a clear and concise framework for successful IT service operations. Businesses looking to provide excellent service must always be seeking ways to improve upon their operations. Integrated service management offers the recipe needed to find this success.

Integrated service management tools make use of automation to reduce man-hours spent on repetitive tasks, freeing up IT professionals to focus on innovation instead. Leveraging integrated service management best practices combined with automation techniques will drastically improve your organization’s capability of providing quality IT services and solutions.

Some benefits of Service Integration:

1.  Quicker production: It allows for saving time greatly. The months that could have been spent on coding are reduced to days spent on integrating, which could be used for other crucial processes of the development cycle. 

2.   Lower cost:  You can cut down expenses on man-hours. If you save money, you can invest it later into improving the services by adding some unique features to it.  

3.   The best features:  By utilizing third-party integrations you can add the best possible features.  

If you consider adding third-party services, bear in mind these three financial aspects:

• The more integration you want to add, the higher will be the final cost of your project. 

• Third-party integrations require more holistic testing.

• Implementation of technically complex APIs will require constant reliable maintenance, which means extra cost.

1. What is integration managed services?

Integration managed services consolidate integration technology with specialists and processes for a complete data integration solution across the enterprise. But for managing the integration, the toolkits do not address the skillset or the manpower required to cleanse, normalize, secure and govern data throughout its lifecycle. It requires expertise in a growing list of data formats, standards, regional protocols, APIs, data security and regulatory requirements, which is never ‘done’.

These services handle data integration and management requirements across all applications, including legacy systems, cloud applications and trading partner networks. Most Noteworthy, the vendor becomes an extension to the IT team, allowing organizations to focus on core competencies without adding resources and overhead.

2. How does 3rd party web service integration work?

Without any second thought, web solutions have evolved the world drastically and offered endless business possibilities. Currently, every sphere of life requires various web services.

While for some companies it may be easy to invest a lot of money in developing high-quality web services. But for others due to limited time and budget, third-party integrations come handy.

The term ‘third-party integration’ means the addition of necessary external data to an existing project using different Application Program Interfaces. Due to the third-party web service integrations, the developers can build a new solution in a shorter period, using already existing components instead of creating code for new ones from scratch.