Calbro Services profile
Calbro Services overview
To demonstrate the top-down service level management approach, a fictional company named Calbro Services will serve as a user story to help explain how key principles and procedures are used in practice. Although Calbro Services is a fictional company, it is based on research of actual BMC Software customers. Seeing how Calbro Services management team identifies and completes each of the steps in the process should provide a reference point that you can use in your own environment.
Calbro Services company background
Calbro Services, a large, global company, is headquartered in New York City and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company has 27,000 employees in 240 offices located in 20 countries. The following table describes Calbro Services key business services.
Key business services
Business Service | Supporting Technical Service | Description |
|---|---|---|
Online retail banking |
| Customer facing service of 500 ATMs in major cities |
World wide web (WWW) presence | Extranet | Customer facing website delivering corporate site and online brokerage services |
Discount equity brokerage |
| Customer facing service providing online and storefront services |
Sales force automation | Not applicable | Automated sales activities such as leads, orders, reports, and so on |
Customer support | IT service management | Support centers in the United States, Europe, and Asia |
Mass marketing | Data services | Internal service supporting world-wide marketing campaigns aimed at making Calbro Services a household name |
Financial management | Finance applications | Restricted internal service managing corporate finances |
| Internal service providing the exchange on electronic mail | |
Employee directory | Intranet | Internal service providing employee location and contact information |
Human resources | Intranet | Internal service containing individual employee records |
Payroll | Finance applications | Internal service providing employee payment process |
Calbro Services revenues
Calbro Services has revenues in excess of $18.5 billion dollars, with over $308 billion in assets. Their online banking and discount equity brokerage services are their key revenue generators.
Calbro Services business strategies
Already a leader in the discount equity market, Calbro Services has plans for growth in the banking, brokerage, and financial services arena. They also want to ensure that their investments in ground breaking technology provide a good return on investment as they offer more services and products globally. Calbro Services expects to increase their operating revenue by increasing their gross margin 4% over the current 44%.
Calbro Services business challenges
Calbro Services has several branch offices across the world. While they have a common data center, the various IT departments have been operating as separate entities. To pursue their ITIL goals and ensure that the IT services provided maximize the business value and runs like a business itself, Calbro Services plans to consolidate their various IT departments.
Calbro Services roles
The ITIL framework provided Calbro Services with some excellent guidance when it came to the roles and responsibility associated with managing business services. In the past, Calbro's IT department has always prided itself on getting the most out of its infrastructure purchases by having computer systems and applications shared among multiple business services. However, if a critical component fails, several services might be affected, and due to their reporting structure, communication would breakdown leading to chaos. Based on the ITIL suggestions, Calbro has identified the following roles for each of their business services and assigned individuals to these roles. Some of the names associated to the roles have been adjusted to better fit into the Calbro culture; however, the key responsibility associated with each role are almost identical to the ITIL definition.
Role | Description |
|---|---|
Service manager | Manages the end-to-end life cycle of one or more business services |
Customer advocate | The eyes, ears and voice of the service user community |
Service supplier manager | The eyes, ears and voice of all service suppliers |
Business relationship manager | Negotiates business service contracts with customers |
Service level manager | Defines, measures, and reports on a service |
The following diagram shows the normal interaction between the individual roles. A Calbro service manager is responsible for most of the communication between the parties. For all external facing services, the service manager is a business person concerned with the cost and revenues of each service offering in production, the on boarding of new service offerings, and the retirement of others. The service manager makes the service owner aware of these activities so that the other team members can be notified at the appropriate time. The business relationship manager receives service enhancement requests and complaints from the user community and funnels this information to the service owner who in turn feeds the request to the service manager and discusses problems with the service supplier manager. Prior to a service offering being made available to users, a service level manager receives a set of user expectations that support the service offering that are then translated into measurements, tested, and deployed into the environment. All members of a business service team are continually looking for ways to improve the support and delivery of the service through quarterly review meetings.
The following diagram shows the Business service team interactions:
Calbro Services and BSM
In alignment with ITIL recommendations, business owners at Calbro Services have mandated that their IT department move from a set of in-house developed, highly customized management tools to off-the-shelf management solutions. Calbro's service support teams selected and have been deploying BMC Helix ITSM solutions including BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk, Incident Management, BMC Helix ITSM: Change Managementand BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management over the past 1-1/2 years.
Calbro's operations teams have been using a variety of BMC server and application management solutions since 1998 during the height of the dot com era. The business owners understand that the key to Calbro's success is following proven ITIL processes, making sure their customers are satisfied with the level of services they are receiving and proving service suppliers are living up to their obligations.
In the initial service level management phase, Calbro's business relationship managers have been tasked with identifying three critical business services and established a set of criteria around the tracking, reporting, and automated notification of these services.
Calbro Services and service levels
As a leader in their industry, Calbro Services realize that customer satisfaction and innovation have positioned them where they are today. Shortly after Calbro began their ITIL alignment project, a detailed assessment was conducted around their service level management process. It was no surprise that the IT department had taken the lead in defining a set of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each business service, however, most of these measurements were created in response to customer complaints rather than actual user expectations. Calbro business owners recognized the disconnect between promises detailed in their service offerings verses how they were tracking against these promises. Calbro was staking the future of their company using a bottom-up approach to service level management. A project was put in place to deploy a top-down approach to service level management with the intent of aligning their service suppliers with their business objectives as outlined by ITIL.