It Services Costs, Metrics, Benchmarking and Marketing

This book is one of, if not the, best guides to developing, implementing and managing a mature production support organization. The value of this book is that it takes a business-centric approach to service delivery, and augments material on service level management (such as Foundations of Service Level Management - another excellent book). Specifically, this book contains sorely needed body of knowledge in a profession that has lost its way. What I mean by this bold statement is the production support function in many IS/IT departments has devolved from service delivery to infrastructure management. IT Services brings the focus back to where it belongs: supporting the business. What I like most about this book is it not only shows what is wrong with most production support organizations, but it provides a clear roadmap to how to restructure production support from an infrastructure management focus to a service delivery paradigm.I highly recommend this book to anyone in production support, consultants and IT/IS executive management. It would also be useful to ISPs and ASPs because most of the material can be applied to internal or external customers.

The size of our IT organization has exploded over the past five years as we've deployed new systems and products. The focus was always on delivering projects on time.Well, we've grown up and now have to support those products. Oh, what to do: we've been technology driven, not service driven. Along comes "IT Services" to provide a blueprint of how to go about implementing a services organization. There's practical advice on determining what "customers" want, what IT can offer, and what to do about the gap. It gives good examples of how to determine service costs. The sample "Service Level Agreement" in Appendix B and discussions of SLAs in the text is probably worth the price of the book alone.Minor nitpicks - Sometimes the authors could spend a little more time explaining figures and tables: I'm still trying to figure out what authors are trying to convey in the first two rows of Table 5-4 (p. 51). Overall, I had a hard time putting down the book. The more I read, the more ideas I had. I won't loan out this book for a while - I want to keep it close at hand. My staff will have to get their own copies...

Finally a simple step by step guide on how to successfully implement a Customer focused operation center. This book is a straightforward "Non-Techie" path to achieving a results oriented service delivery team. It is a must read for anyone serious about containing cost at the same time satisfying their customer!

This book describes how to build and run a corporate IT services organization from scratch. It is written in a very clear and readable manner without resorting to "Big-5 consulting firm" type buzzword-speak. Most of what I have read in this area promises much, but leaves things too vague to apply to specific situations. This book dissects a very complicated management problem into simple, understandible parts that make sense in the real world. An unsuccessful enterprise application rollout can cost a large corporation millions (if not billions) of dollars. The lessons here help you "dot-com" your organization successfully and delight your customers (internal or external) with the results.