Service Transition is often viewed by IT as simply a mechanism that bridges the gap between two capabilities – Service Design (‘Change the Business’) and Service Operation (‘Run the Business’) – that ensures new or changed services are deployed into Production environments in a controlled and systematic manner.
Some even view Service Transition quite mistakenly as a just a ‘tick box’ exercise prior to the go-live deployment of services and systems. In reality it is a summation of the output of many critical processes (i.e. Change Management, Knowledge Management, Release Management, Service Testing, Support, etc.) together with other IT processes that come into play such as Early Life Support.
To support these critical processes, Service Transition performs a much more complex role and the approach taken can be dynamic, flexible and evolving determined by:
- The balance of stability / speed of change required by the business
- The fragility of the current IT-enabled business capability
- The current underlying systems architecture employed
- The ability of the Business to adopt new technology
- The current organisational set-up of the IT Department
- The mechanism for ongoing support of deployed IT services
To accommodate these determinant factors, Service Transition should be considered as a Transformation Capability that has to take into account the available parameters in both the Business and IT arena in order to make an informed decision on how to approach the transition. However, this decision does not need to be static or ‘carved in stone’ and should evolve over time as the IT and Business capabilities change in their own right.
A key concept to choosing the optimal Service Transition approach to take will be the impact that it has on the current IT systems, resources and architectures and their perceived ‘fragility’ compared to the business drivers for the required service.
In order to assist with this and to determine at a given point in time what the optimal approach to take for Service Transition, the underlying service architecture has to be understood and should be mapped out as ‘Service Maps’ which will encompass the totality of business services and capabilities and which systems support them. The gap between where IT and the Business want to be compared to what they can currently achieve can then be better understood and ‘road-mapped’. The service transition capability can then be aligned to accommodate as ‘optimally best-fit’ rather than ‘perfect fit’.
It is unlikely that a perfect fit will ever be achieved simply because there is no perfect world with unlimited resources and ultimately flexible architectures but the Service Transition capability can, at the least, be optimised to accommodate ‘the now’ with a path to the future firmly kept in view.
To find out more about Service Transition please see the iCore White Paper ‘Service Transition – Living On The Edge’. Alternatively, if you would like to find out how iCore can help you with your Service Transition requirements, then contact us on 0207 868 2405 or email info@icore-ltd.com.