Designing a service model

This book provides detailed information about designing, developing, publishing, and maintaining service models that enable you to manage your IT resources from the perspective of the business services that they provide.

Service model design process

The best service models are enterprise-specific, achieving the organization's business availability goals. The IT environment, its organization, and its operational constraints vary significantly among enterprises.

A cost-effective strategy when you begin the process of building a service model is to select one critical business process or service, decompose it to identify all aspects of the service, and build a complete service model for that part of your enterprise.

The following figure shows an example of a generic service model as it appears in BMC Impact Model Designer with business users, services, and IT structure layers. The lines between the configuration items (CIs) represent provider/consumer relationships.

Example of a service model

 

The following factors determine how a service impact management solution must be designed and implemented:

• Diversity of IT resources and how they are monitored
• Location of resources and how the management responsibilities for them are distributed within and among IT or information services (IS) groups
• Relative importance of various resources in the delivery of business services
• Need for change management
• Maintenance of the service model over time

The service modeling process involves the following tasks:

• Identifying sources of event information
• Gaining familiarity with the structure and content of events
• Identifying core competencies within the organization
• Identifying critical business processes
• Identifying IT services and their CIs
• Finding relationships and dependencies between IT services
• Building the necessary database of information (asset inventory, service catalog, and so on)
• Building the service model