Integration of service management with CMMI ® and SPICE

Integration of service management with CMMI ® and SPICE

IT Service management standards such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and now ISO/IEC 20000, are of increasing importance to organisations around the globe. The growing awareness and adoption of ITIL is evidenced by the exponential rise in the number of Foundation certificates granted over the last five years. There is demand for ITIL-qualified staff: in March 2007, of the 21,804 Australian vacancies on it.seek.com.au, 588 jobs requested ITIL skills. These positions were in the areas of Help Desk/Support, Project Management, Business Analysis, Software Engineering, Networking, and Training. This is a marked increase since May 2004 when Seek listed only 25 jobs asking for ITIL skills. These statistics confirm reports in industry press that certification has become a ‘recruiting filter’ in Australia as well as in Europe (Wilson 2004, Schuller & Wheeler 2006).

In recent years there is increasing awareness of the need to integrate models for software development with processes for service support and management. The focus is moving to a life-cycle approach with shared processes rather than the confusing situation today whereby organisations are grappling with multiple models to ensure best practice in development, implementation and ongoing support.

The growing realisation of the importance of IT service management is evidenced by the current development work on CMMI for service delivery (CMMI-SVC). Process areas focused on service delivery activities have been initially drafted and will be scheduled for piloting and refinement after the release of the CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ) (Hollenbach & Buteau 2006).

The CMMI-SVC comprises 25 processes areas spread over four categories: process management, services support, service establishment and delivery, and project management. Of the 25 process areas, 16 are common to CMMI-DEV and CMMI-ACQ. Supplier agreement management is shared by CMMI-SVC with CMMI-DEV. There are five new service process areas: problem management, incident and request management, service delivery, service transition, and capacity and availability management. There are also three optional service process areas: organisational service management, service system development and service continuity management.

In December 2005, ISO member countries adopted a standard for IT Service Management - ISO/IEC 20000, based on BS 15000 which was derived from ITIL. A comparison of ISO/IEC 20000 (ISO/IEC 2005b, ISO/IEC 2005a) with CMMI-SVC processes reveals that the majority of the ISO/IEC 20000 processes are represented in CMMI-SVC with the possible exception of information security management, business relationship management, and service reporting.

In 2005, a team of researchers at the Public Research Center Henri Tudor in Luxembourg developed and trialled a process reference model (PRM) and process assessment model (PAM) consistent with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and compliant with the IT Assessment Standard ISO/IEC 15504 (Di Renzo et al. 2005). The Assessment and Improvement integrateD Approach (AIDA) project developed the PAM based on the ISO/IEC 15504-5 assessment model (ISO/IEC 2003) and includes process performance indicators for base practices and work products and process capability indicators. The PRM includes the five ITIL service support processes (incident management, problem management, configuration management, change management and release management) (OGC 2002b) and the five ITIL service delivery processes (service level management, IT financial management, capacity management, IT service continuity management and availability management) (OGC 2002a). The ITIL books were used to identify input and output work products which were then classified according to relevant processes.

Developers of both the CMMI-SVC and AIDA models will need to recognise that the release of ISO/IEC 20000 will have an impact on IT service management as organisations are expected to move to the international standard in preference to the UK Office of Government and Commerce’s ITIL.

References
Di Renzo, B., Barafort, B., Lejeune, V., Prime, S. & Simon, J. M. (2005) ITIL based service management measurement and ISO/IEC 15504 process assessment : A win-win opportunity. SPICE 2005 Conference. Klagenfurt, Austria.
Hollenbach, R. & Buteau, B. (2006) CMMI for Services: Introducing the CMMI for Service Constellation. CMMI Technology Conference. Denver CO.
ISO/IEC (2003) ISO/IEC 15504.5:2004 Information technology - Process assessment - an exemplar Process Assessment Model. IN Iso/Iec Jtc 1/Sc 7/Wg10 (Ed.).
ISO/IEC (2005a) ISO/IEC 20000:2005 Information technology - Service management - Part 1: Specification. IN Jtc 1/Sc 7 (Ed.) Geneva, International Organization for Standardization.
ISO/IEC (2005b) ISO/IEC 20000:2005 Information technology - Service management - Part 2: Code of practice. IN 7, J. S. (Ed.) Geneva, International Organization for Standardization.
OGC (2002a) IT Infrastructure Library- Service Delivery, London, Stationery Office.
OGC (2002b) IT Infrastructure Library- Service Support, London, Stationery Office.
Schuller, H. & Wheeler, G. (2006,31 May) An ITIL bit of knowledge. Computerworld.
Wilson, E. (2004) Opening the book on ITIL. Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney.

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