Caregroup Executive Summary

Bradley Herman INFO 290-10 May 15, 2007

CareGroup ITIL Action Plan†
Executive Summary The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a framework of best practices for managing information technology services. Adopting the ITIL Service

Support model can help CareGroup avoid another incident like the network collapse of November, 2002. Because implementing the entire service management framework will take years and is an expensive proposition, the author recommends starting with the five aspects most relevant to CareGroup 's situation just after the incident. Establishing a service desk is the best first step; all of the other service support processes take advantage of this single point of interface between IT providers
(4) Tracking, closing, and learning from these requests. When these incident management policies are operating at CareGroup, that digital Xray storage access complaint will be handled differently. First, the service desk staffer would log the call according to policy as an incident and check for already known resolutions or work-arounds. If there were none, she would send a message to the predefined appropriate technician, clinical systems support in this case, with the appropriate priority flag. That technician would communicate a resolution, work-around, or known error for that incident back to the service desk once it had been investigated. Perhaps this investigation discovered high network utilization was a problem; the service desk learns that users should try accessing a different storage mirror and network support is notified about the high utilization issue. Finally, the service desk staffer would contact the original customer to let him know how to work-around this issue and that a deeper issue is being investigated. While this is an idealized situation, a formal process is more efficient and valuable than the current situation. To gauge the performance of this process, CareGroup IT management should track a few key performance indicators. Comparing these to historical data may also be helpful to demonstrate the value of implementing incident management best practices. Speed
Following best practices, CareGroup first needs to fully document all of its IT assets, configurations, and services. This should be done via an audit of each of its facilities and interviews with IT managers and employees with a long CareGroup employment history. The goal is to identify everything relevant to the IT environment, including individual PCs with serial numbers and operating system version, servers with what services are exposed on which ports, network switches with software version numbers, and physical and network location information for each item. This configuration information, along with documentation of the new physical network should be added to a customized configuration management database (CMDB). Specialized consultants should be brought in to help define the structure and labels for that database; architecture and naming practices are difficult to get right. Getting it right is important because the CMDB needs to connect to software systems that manage these other IT management processes and needs to be understandable by the change control board. Once created, the configuration database needs to be maintained and its accuracy verified. During creation and maintenance, CareGroup should establish two new staff First the