Running applications internally or externally?

Managed services have become established for companies wanting to be relieved of running their IT service management applications themselves. This involves an external supplier providing all the services which are needed to run an application securely and efficiently.

The ITIL® set of best practice guidelines is adhered to in many IT organisations today, so the use of IT service management applications is widespread. A service desk with incident, problem and change management can be found in almost all companies which possess IT-supported business processes. These are either out-of-the-box applications or so-called build-applications which the companies have constantly and individually enhanced over the years. Such build-applications often include numerous individual adaptations and specific extensions. Out-of-the-box applications have also often been complemented with individual interfaces as the established ITSM systems are set up in modular format so they can be extended easily.Customer magazine MATERNA Monitor - Read the current issue

The more individual such applications become, the more complex and expensive it is to operate the overall solution. However it is important that the applications can still be upgraded and updated with the manufacturers’ core versions. The more an application deviates from the standard, the more likely it is that a migration project has to be carried out if the application is to continue running after an upgrade. That means the planning reliability for IT operations reduces, the more a company deviates from the software standard.

The desire to have strong planning reliability, to shift risks to third parties and to decrease costs for IT operations leads to management handing over such applications to external service providers. So the provision of managed services can be seen as a part of outsourcing and basically is concerned with operating business or IT processes by means of software.

Essentially it is possible to differentiate between two fundamental types of managed services: either the complete system platform including the ITSM application is handed over to a service provider or the application continues to run in the customer’s data centre but management and operations are carried out via remote access.

Comparing current status and requirements
Independent of the type of managed service being considered, it is recommendable to carry out an assessment workshop when approaching the topic of managed services. In such a workshop service providers and the company identify together which business and IT processes belong to the ITSM application and have to be taken care of. The assessment also includes the company’s requirements regarding e.g. reaction and recovery times as well as system availability. Workshops like this ensure transparency about the current situation. It also becomes apparent whether the expectations of the customer can be implemented against the background of their current status.

That is why it is important, together with the IT and user departments, to document precisely what actually happens on the individual IT systems and to determine which processes should be considered as critical. In this way the business processes become transparent and the people responsible can come to a conclusion about the way the application can already be run by an external provider. If the current status and the customer’s requirements differ too much then additional development work has to be carried out as an intermediate step: intermediate steps could mean mapping business processes in a different way, complementing applications and installing new components. In practice it has become clear, for example, that customers expect it to be possible to control existing systems remotely without having to make any changes – which is actually seldom the case. In the end the external service provider bears the risk for the service they offer, so they have to be certain that they are able to perform the service with the existing systems.

Customer magazine MATERNA Monitor - Read the current issue