IT Services organizations including Internet Service Providers, Network Operating Centers and Shared IT Enabled Shared Service Providers manage large infrastructure comprising a variety of servers, personal computers of various brands, heterogeneous operating systems, standard and non standard applications, networking devices and their operations run across the continents and customers are mobile across the globe.

Services spread across the time zones and cover a 24 by 7 operation throughout the year.

The cost of downtime in IT Services is phenomenally high. It varies widely across the applications and that explains the existence of platinum, gold and silver levels of service offering a guaranteed uptime tailored to suit specific categories of customers. These premium services carry stiffer penalties.

The Service Level Agreement is the basic minimum tool that attracts the customer towards the service products offered by IT Service Providers. However there have been misgivings about enforcement of service level commitments. There has been no mechanism to measure service level commitment violations in a systematic manner. Most of credits for service level deficiencies depend on customer complaints. But things are changing. Tools and services are being forced into pinpoint and measure service level deficiencies. Hence more will the need to offer services that demand high level of performance and yet keep the cost of redundancies to the required minimum. There is a growing awareness and urgency on the part of service providers to incorporate business continuity plans and disaster recovery features in their offering. FIS eB Framework streamlines the service processes involved in IT Infrastructure Management in a variety of ways.

Enterprise Based IT Infrastructure Management

FIS eB Framework offers a stratospheric view to control and manage IT infrastructure from a global perspective. Designed to work across multiple platforms the IT organizations can draw up a global strategy to manage devices and applications thus avoiding duplication of efforts by pooling of expertise. The hierarchical structure of service organization can be safely configured into in FIS eB and the role of individuals and strategies on occurrence of specific events can be preset for a coordinated reaction across the organization. People can take ownership of the problems relating to appliances and applications and others concerned can view the status of problems as they occur and get resolved. The Total Service Process including management of spares, tools and expertise can be oriented towards meeting the service levels commitments dictated by either a standard package or a tailor made solution shifting the emphasis from mere problem solving to customer orientation. The Knowledge Manager of FIS eB makes available a pool of invaluable expertise resources across the globe built from years of practical experience on the field.

In short FIS eB helps to cut down costs in managing IT resources, improves customer satisfaction and reduces penalties.

Service Level Management

A typical facilities and application maintenance organization needs to handle multiplicity of service contracts, deal with agencies with whom non core services have been entrusted by way of outsourcing contracts and to retain the services of different communication service providers. The top most priorities of these organizations are

	Constantly monitor and improve the gaps between service delivery expectations of the customer as reflected in the service level agreements and actual service delivery reflected by the performance of individual in-house and outsourced agencies
	Deciding the priorities in meeting the service requirement on a day to day or event by event basis and scheduling and rescheduling workflow
	Managing and controlling the performance of service personnel and outsourcing agents by improving or modifying the conditions under which they work for optimum performance

FIS eB Knowledge Manager provides an exhaustive list of reports and charts on

.	Availability of Devices
.	Fault Patterns across different time line and geographical spaces
.	Mean Time To Acknowledge
.	Mean Time To Resolve
.	Mean Time Between Failures

User can define the limits set by the customer for individual service or equipment and measure the deviations there from in a systematic way, analyze and record root causes, classify them according to the segments, identify the key modes of faults and improve the processes. Users can easily view the changes as a result of improved processes and either improve or modify the processes or get themselves notified of any deviations. Thus FIS eB leads to a six-sigma way of ensuring Quality of Service.

FIS eB redirects the efforts in allocation of service management resources in accordance with the service level commitments. Users along the hierarchy can define the workflow and schedule operations to meet customer defined service level commitments resulting in revenue maximization goal of the IT Service Organization. For efficient identification of problems, their resolutions and the improved utilization of resources FIS eB make use of manufacturer defined SNMP event traps wherever possible.

The management of multiple agencies could a painful affair in the facilities management of any shared service organization. FIS eB conveniently groups the agencies and helps to view the performance of individual agencies or review their compensation structures or reallocate business share of such agencies. The message statistics, provided by the Knowledge Manager, give a wealth of information over volume of messages, traffic patterns or time graphs which give a definite leverage over future terms and conditions.

At the devices level, multidimensional grouping of devices helps to assess the performance of the same class of devices across the vendors or groups of devices across the brands; these lead to decisions that make future investments or the cost of ownership to the minimum without losing or in fact bettering the performance levels as measured by the customer.

The measurement of service level has always been a tricky affair. The service definition commitment definitions tend to be vague and most cases not measurable. Many service level agreements have deceptively drafted to offer a myriad of things that really turned out to be a mirage. More and more customers are demanding now an enforceable service level agreement, which is transparent in defining and measuring the commitments. They spell out compensation and penalties that get translated into easily traceable billing mechanism. FIS eB provides a perfect response in demonstrating the service level capabilities but also leading the service organizations to reorient itself along with all the processes that go with it for efficiently and cost effectively meeting the commitments. FIS eB responds very quickly to changing customer preferences year after year.

IT Enabled Services

IT Enabled Services seek to streamline the service operations of globally located units of customer organization deriving the benefits of centralization, specialization of routine functions, economy in skill development and training maximizing the advantages on time and cost differential along the longitudes. Such advantages can be enduring if and only if the IT Network Backbone is capable of responding to the stringent operational criteria.

The time being the very essence of service contracts, the movement of data files and output files need to be virtually fault free. Any failure across the service chain, whether it is a failure of a link or anticipated failure of a critical device or overflow of storage space or unexpected premature termination of application services will have far reaching consequence impacting service delivery commitments adversely. Whereas it is in the interest of economy to pool all resources while handling a large number of service contracts it would be dangerous to underestimate the consequence of impact on gross margin on rendering the services or the penalties on nonperformance.

FIS eB can smoothen the workflow aligning the processes to revenue or profit maximization objective taking service level commitments into account. Thus the activities peripheral to the basic processing but playing a key role in service delivery commitment can be managed efficiently. For instance, a failure in transmission of data required for a high priority job can be immediately notified to the user who will know to re route the operation in the next best possible route while trying to fix the problem in hand. The project owner simultaneously gets the notification, assesses the impact on downstream activities in the processes or triggers a message to the customer if the situation warrants.

Cost of downtime in back office operations in finance or airline sector run into millions of dollars per lost hour. The adaptability of FIS eB in different environments and its unified message delivery capability make it the most useful tool to handle issues in IT Enabled Services industry. To sum up IT Services is marked by declining service costs and absence of entry barriers for new players due to deflation in hardware costs; the best and only way to be competitive is being efficient in operations. Demand by customers in innovative pricing options based on technology, service or enterprise location and visibility on cost structures make it difficult to manage the IT Service Organization without proper software tool … and FIS eB is fulfilling this need.