ITIL v3: Four Things You Need To Know - ' New practice areas, new '

V3 includes new practice areas, roles and definitions.
In v3, practice areas, roles and definitions, are added or expanded upon. Take these following four examples:

• Establishing a service level program, and the roles associated with it, is addressed in the Continual Service Improvement book. For instance, the book defines a service level manager, identified as someone responsible for monitoring and reporting whether service levels are being met, and a continual service manger, responsible for reviewing trends, identifying opportunities and making plans for improvement.
• Setting up self-help and knowledge management programs are outlined in the Service Operation book. "Self-help is something many forward-thinking I.T. organizations have done for some time-the ability to get go and solve your own problems," Stroud says. Those practices include setting up a knowledge tool to handle an error with a printer or other service, or setting up a method to handle a service request, such as requesting a laptop for a new employee. That service request, he says, could then be automatically linked to other processes such as issuing a password to the new employee.
• Setting up a service catalog is covered in the Service Transition book. It includes an explanation of what a service catalog looks like and identifies key attributes, such as costs and a warranty. "I like to give the example of when you buy a new washing machine or other device, it comes with a warranty. We started to define that as a key word in I.T. service management library," Stroud says. In addition, the service would be described so that it makes sense to the business side of an organization, as well as defined for the technology organization.
• Event management, once part of incident management, is now recognized as a core process separate from an incident. "An event does not always imply something has gone wrong," Cannon says. "It could imply that somebody needs to do something normal. For example, replace a tape in the tape drive or a job is finished and you go and launch the next job." An incident, on the other hand, is defined as an unplanned interruption to an I.T. service or a reduction in the quality of an I.T. service.

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