To make these innovations and have time for them, the IT organization and our institute need to have a very well-organized standard IT service operation. It should be organizationally, time, process, and cost-effective. It cannot generate more labor than the required minimum, just as it cannot generate uncertainty in solutions, chaos, or even frustration from work. It must be a common standard, ideally fully automated.
The word innovation or service with added value does not have to hide only a new project in the order of tens of millions of crowns. Innovation can be a single automation script, which saves the accountant's work or reduces the length of the process of transferring data to user systems, or, for example, free users from spam. Each of us must have enough time for innovation, whether for new projects or for improving entrusted systems. Each of us needs to know what services he provides, for whom he operates it, whether those services benefit the organization and whether they are cost-effective. The sets of processes, practices, and roles that point to and evaluate these elements are generally referred to as IT Service Management. We can take them from the well-known ITIL, Cobit, or DevOps framework, or for example, from standards such as ISO 20000-1 or ISO 27001 for information security.
We have already started!
The basis for us to run standard IT services professionally is that we must first point out things that do not work 100% for us. The Institute is currently implementing Incident and Problem Management, including the CMDB (configuration database), which manages all outages and ensures that the same incidents do not happen again. The implementation of IT Service Management is also underway, which points out, measures and determines the quality of the services provided.
Surely you already know about the implemented project for the support of IT services, within which an IT catalog of services was created. It was subsequently promoted on the web portal it.muni.cz, and it makes a face for services provided by ICS and other IT components of the university. As part of this project, an IT Service Desk (it@muni.cz) was created, which serves as a "single point of contact" for our users, our "customers". At present, it has been merged with CPS, where we use the power and background of 24/7 CPS operation and knowledge from solving the IT Service Desk requirements.
Two more projects are currently underway in this area. The pilot deployment of the unified Confluence documentation platform, which will bring cooperation and sharing of know-how, is being completed. It's great to have the answers you need right now, in a place you know you'll indeed find there, or you know who you're guaranteed to turn to if you're looking for answers about project solutions. The crucial step is to solve the most pressing problems that have been named at the institute for a long time: weak cooperation, communication, substitutability, information sharing, chaos in solving more complex incidents, or changes.
In this series of articles, we will describe the individual sub-activities in more detail. We will write about Incident Management, CMDB, IT Service Management, Change or Project Management, and IT Service Catalog. We will describe what are "modern phrases" such as time to market (TTM), minimum viable product (MVP), total costs (TCO), or transparency - and why they are crucial also in our Institute of Computer Science.
The goal is to make us work better together on a professional level. The aim is to show the university that we can be a top, efficient, innovative partner competing with modern technology companies even in these very dynamic times. We provide the university with the perfect IT services with added value to meet challenging goals.
