In search of the best practices of Service Level Management
Sergio Andreozzi
As the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) evolves from a project-based governance model to a network of long-term organisations (e.g. National Grid Infrastructures), the service provisioning processes need to adapt to this new scenario. Moreover, now that the new federation of independent service providers is firmly established, the service operation transitioned and the relevant collaborations defined, it is time to have a closer look at how high-performing industries manage their services, what are their best practices and evaluate if they could inspire improvements for EGI.
Luckily for us, the industry-level best practices for IT Service Level Management (SLM) have been collected and organised by the UK Government for the benefit of all under a number of books named IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). In 2007, ITIL Version 3 was released comprising five 1000-page books covering Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations, and Continual Service Improvement. After four years of experience and feedback, and with the advent of cloud computing and its impact in the provision of IT services, ITIL has been refreshed with a new edition released on 29 July 2011 (ITIL 2011, almost 2000 pages).
In an environment like the grid, documenting, managing and policing rights and responsibilities in a fair but enforceable way is extremely complex. Given the evolution and overall complexity of EGI and plethora of information available on ITIL, EGI.eu has established a timely collaboration via a Memorandum of Understanding with the gSLM project aiming to improve service level management in the grid domain. The gSLM project brings together decades of commercial sector experience in the area and is, therefore, the ideal partner to help analyse EGI processes and identify areas of alignment with the ITIL framework.
The gSLM project has already performed an initial analysis of the EGI Glossary to ensure a consistent understanding and usage of important terms across all the functional areas of the organisation. The EGI glossary was compared with the ITIL glossary, resulting in proposed recommendations from the gSLM partners.
The next step will be to deliver a tutorial at the EGI Technical Forum, providing an overview of the ITIL framework, its most important concepts and content, as well as an outline of management practices and processes. The tutorial will potentially be the most interesting for resource centre managers, NGI managers, or grid operations and technology experts.
The collaboration between the EGI community and gSLM will continue by conducting a survey of both service providers and end-users. The aim will be to understand the current obstacles and service provision requirements to then analyse which processes need to be improved in order to make supporting new users as easy as possible. Later on, we will work on adopting and implementing the suggested alignments as necessary.
While the EGI ecosystem presents unique organisational characteristics, we believe that the overall activity will lead to increasing the value of the EGI services to its users and will facilitate the easier integration with external partners.
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