IT Service Management Software designed for ISO 20000 ITSM

ISO/IEC 20000 Compliance Software

ISO/IEC 20000 is the international IT Service Management (ITSM) standard that enables IT organizations (whether in-house, outsourced or external) to ensure that their IT service management processes are aligned both with the needs of the business and with international best practice.

The ISO 20000 standard is based upon the best practice foundation of ITIL. It introduces a service culture and provides the methodologies to deliver services that meet defined business requirements and priorities. It identifies relationships and provides guidelines, objectives, and controls.

CENTRE software has been certified as compliant with ITIL V3 in six (6) process areas. These process areas are:

• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Service Asset and Configuration Management
• Service Level Management
• Request Fulfillment

ITSM involves a paradigm shift from managing IT as stacks of individual components to focusing on the delivery of end-to-end services using best practice process models. ITSM promotes the adoption of an integrated process approach to effectively deliver managed services to meet the business and customer requirements.

ITSM is generally concerned with tasks dedicated to running the company or ensuring that the systems and platforms perform as expected. It focuses upon providing a framework to structure IT-related activities and the interactions of IT technical personnel with business customers and users.

ISO 20000 1:2011 specifies five key service management processes and their components

Service Delivery Processes:

• Capacity Management
• Service Continuity and Availability Management
• Service Level Management
• Service Reporting
• Information Security Management
• Budgeting and Accounting for IT Services

Relationship Processes:

• Business Relationship Management
• Supplier Management

Resolution Processes:

• Incident Management
• Problem Management

Control Processes:

• Configuration Management
• Change Management

Release Processes:

• Release Management

As a result, an organization using CENTRE will be recognized as delivering successful service to its clients and constituents with dependably high-quality and consistent methods and practices.

CENTRE’s ISO/IEC 20000 includes ‘CENTRE ISO 9001:2008’ Quality Management System elements which are:

• CENTRE – Document Control System (DCS)
• CENTRE – Human Resources
• CENTRE – Records Control System (RCS)
• CENTRE – Meeting Management
• CENTRE – Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• CENTRE – Supply Chain Management
• CENTRE – Ad-Hoc Report Writer

ISO 20000 1:2011 specifies five key service management processes and their components

Contract Management

CENTRE’s Contract Management module has been designed with the flexibility to meet the demanding needs of government and private enterprises. The Contract module stores Contract specifics and maintains source documents, identifies customer services, equipment assets and dependencies, historical asset usage and costs, and hierarchical SLA provisioning.

Simple yet powerful checkbox options manage important business rules for asset change management, quality control, user assignments, and SLA variances.

Incident Management

Incident Management is an IT Service Management (ITSM) process area. The goal of the incident management process is to restore a service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations.

Incident Management services are an important component of IT operations. Having an effective tool to track and manage service requests is critical in today’s competitive business landscape.

CENTRE Incident Management is a fully integrated incident and problem management solution that enables IT organizations to effectively and efficiently respond to service requests.

CENTRE’s Incident Management Module:

• Rapid classification and escalation.
• Validates assets and facilitates the entry of new assets.
• Provides free text fields for Incident description and resolution.
• Monitors Open Incidents.
• Records and tracks customer satisfaction.
• Instant equipment repair history for Incident ‘Repair or Replace’ decisions.
• Bridged to a Problem Management System for Incident trending, workarounds, and permanent solutions.
• Linked to Change Management.
• Creates warehouse pick tickets.
• Returned parts are tracked and monitored.
• Reports Subcontractor performance.
• Supports customizable escalation thresholds and automated alert routing.
• Incident workflows may be constructed to ensure actions are approved and validated.
• Provides SLA performance and exception tracking.
• All Incident management reports are definable to historical periods, contracts, and other selectable criteria.
• Provides secure access.

Problem Management

Determining what problem to tackle first and who is responsible for identifying the root cause is critical for effective problem management. Properly tracking, prioritizing and routing problems streamlines the process and increases problem-handling efficiency. As a result, organizations can effectively address the underlying causes of incidents.

CENTRE Problem Management is an integrated Service Desk solution. It leverages flexible workflow and data sharing, eliminates redundant and recurring incidents, identifies permanent solutions and temporary workarounds, and provides a high level of visibility throughout the problem lifecycle. Links between the problem, incident, change, and configuration items are maintained for reference and reporting purposes.

CENTRE’s Problem Management maintains the relationships between the problem, incident, change, and configuration records.

• Supports flexible threshold escalation and notification.
• Facilitates customizable reports.
• Maintains historical records for support staff.
• Maintains a complete detailed audit log of the change record.
• Tracks ownership and problem responsibility.
• Maintains free text areas to define problem descriptions and resolution.
• Automatically increases problem priorities based upon the number of associated incidents.

Change Management

In today’s demanding business climate, IT change is unavoidable. Unfortunately, so is the unplanned downtime that results from unauthorized, ad hoc, or poorly implemented changes. When systems and users go offline, the impact is felt in reduced productivity and lost revenue.

Managing and controlling change is a vital undertaking to business operations. CENTRE’s Change module is designed to keep the Change Management process moving forward by allowing IT organizations to put a much tighter focus on what’s being changed, who’s making the change, and how changes will impact resources and users. It provides the solution to:

• Reduce downtime
• Improve visibility
• Provide escalation
• Track compliance
• Post Change Review Schedules
• Reduce the business risk of implementing change
• Identify and link related records (Configuration Items)
• Maintain detailed audit trails

Configuration Management

The Configuration Management goal is to provide a logical model of the service support infrastructure. At a minimum, this requires identifying and storing configuration items (CIs) in an asset repository.

CENTRE’s Configuration Management system provides a broad range of infrastructure and asset management tools which support configurable asset types, relationships, and services. CENTRE Configuration Management offers the:

• Ability to associate the incident, problem and change record to the related CI.
• Ability to track and relate all events that impact the CI.
• Ability to set up standardized CI relationship types.
• Provides a “single master of record” representation of your infrastructure.
• Ability to track, manage and report on CIs and the CMDB with a variety of real-time
• and trend reporting tools.
• Ability to track history of CI modifications.
• Ability to create relationships between CIs.
• Centralized CMDB that is shared across all ITSM processes.
• Enforcement of standard naming conventions.

Release Management

As software systems, development processes, and resources become more widely distributed, they become more specialized and complex. Release of software products and hardware is an ongoing cycle of development, testing, verification, and release. Release Management solves the growing complexity of systems which must fit together seamlessly to assure the success and long-term value of a product or project.

CENTRE’s Release Management is tightly integrated with ITSM processes and is designed to sustain software management in a planned, traceable, and orderly approach. Development of new software and modification of existing software is phased with documentation, verification, and disciplined execution. CENTRE’s Release Management will impart Best Practices through effective policies and procedures by:

• Tracking compliance.
• Tracking costs and hours.
• Maintaining audit trails.
• Reducing costly downtime and rework.
• Effecting software patch management.
• Qualifying and quantifying the outlay.
• Reducing the risk of implementing change; and
• Managing the control and protection of software assets.

Project Management

Project management is a planned and organized endeavor to accomplish a specific undertaking or task. Project management includes the development of a project plan, goals and objectives, specifying tasks, identifying resources, and associating budgets and timelines for completion.

CENTRE’s ‘Project Management’ system tracks Projects in a planned, manageable, and systematic approach. It provides resource management, time tracking, expense monitoring, and workforce collaboration. It is a Web-based system designed to support multiple users modifying different sections of the plan at the same time. It assists Project Management personnel by;

• Providing Best Practices through effective policies and procedures.
• Offering intuitive, fast, and, powerful search capabilities.
• Monitoring project and task status.
• Providing tracking for multiple locations.
• Reporting project and task timelines.
• Tracking project documents and equipment.
• Identifying task predecessors.
• Tracking resource hours and expenses.
• Importing data from CENTRE and external sources
• Generating Gantt charts.
• Identifying risk mitigation and outcomes.
• Interfacing with time card entry.

Financial Management

Financial Management refers to the concepts of time, money and risk and how they are interrelated. Finance is one of the most important aspects of business management. Without proper financial planning and management, an enterprise is unlikely to be successful.

CENTRE possesses many posting and reporting features to ascertain financial health. Throughout CENTRE, costs are captured, audit trails are created, and risks are identified.

CENTRE’s standard search screens (which are available in each module) permit a user to instantly filter data to his or her needs, thus providing information such as service costs, purchasing trends, and supplier performance.

CENTRE also has the capability to run background ‘Potential Problem Management’ scans designed by the user to watch over data that has breached user established criteria. CENTRE’s ‘Potential Problem Management’ was developed to raise alerts by systematically scanning CENTRE data records for problem trends or record conditions (such as cost levels). The PPMS system is coupled with CENTRE’s Ad-hoc reporting system providing an exceptionally flexible analysis tool.

CENTRE supplies financial management and budget reports by project, category, and by month, and it was designed with the capacity to export and import data in a standard format with external accounting systems for further analysis and tracking.

Measurement and Analysis

Systematically measuring and monitoring progress against objectives is essential to good corporate responsibility management.

CENTRE maintains a standard set of reports on the ‘Measurement and Analysis’ menu. Reporting on progress against the plans is available within CENTRE and is available to stakeholders and other authorized personnel.

The reports highlight:

• Outstanding parts and equipment.
• Outstanding Activity Reports due by engineers and subcontractors.
• Service Record metrics (performance, cost, and scores).
• Inventory details and usage.
• Quality assurance.

To devise other measurement and analysis reports, CENTRE provides the Ad-hoc reporting system. This system is an agile information extraction program designed to effortlessly interrogate CENTRE’s collection of data. The Ad-hoc system guides the user through a series of comprehensible screens, making this one of the most powerful and flexible features within CENTRE.