Scenario
A flower delivery company introduced ITIL-based service management processes 12 months ago.
One major benefit of the associated service improvement initiatives was that the service availability of the business critical on-line flower ordering IT service increased from 97% to 98.9% over the last quarter. This exceeds the service availability target of 98.5%. Last month, reports were circulated showing the availability improvement.
The service level manager is chairing a service review meeting to review the progress and report upon this achievement. The customer managers acknowledge the improvement but despite the reports of improved service availability, a major service outage occurred during the busiest week of the year when over 25% of the annual business revenue is normally earned. Although IT dealt with the outage satisfactorily, the loss of revenue and credibility in this mission critical, high-visibility trading period are serious concerns. The customer managers are concerned that the reporting does not seem to reflect this or their actual perception of the service.
Agreement is reached at the meeting to address two primary concerns:
1. Service availability targets for the mission critical periods are to be revised.
2. Amended and more representative business reports are to be produced.
Refer to the Scenario.
Which one of the following options will BEST ensure that the primary concerns related to the revision and reporting of targets are addressed?

• A. Meet with the customer managers to conduct a thorough review of all services and document all revised service level requirements (SLRs), ensuring that business impact and seasonal variations are taken into account. The SLRs should be transformed into a balanced scorecard of service targets with a dashboard for reporting purposes. Mechanisms should be agreed and implemented to collect, analyze and report against the agreed service targets using the change management process. Reports should be circulated to customer managers five working days in advance of service review meetings.
• B. Determine what information each IT team can provide regarding the collection and reporting of component availability. Implement revised mechanisms for the analysis, calculation and reporting of service availability. Ensure that event management is implemented to trigger alerts in response to availability issues. This will allow for reactive measures to be introduced so that, if services fail to meet their availability targets, proper actions can be taken to mitigate future failures.
• C. Meet with the customer managers to review and document their availability requirements, ensuring that business impact and seasonal variations are taken into account. Review the monitoring and measurement mechanisms and ensure that they can measure both component and end-to-end service availability. Agree the revised service availability reporting requirements with the customer. Agree and revise service level agreements and operational level agreements as necessary and implement any changes to the monitoring and reporting mechanisms using the change management process.
• D. Review the requirements for service availability against the data collection and measurement currently provided by the IT teams. Design availability metrics and controls to report any variances at the monthly service review meetings, as well as how these variances will be addressed in the future. Internal IT staff and a customer manager will attend the service review meetings. All changes have to be agreed in the service review meetings before any actions can be performed, thus forcing the customer to come to the meetings and reach agreement before any improvement work or change can occur.

Scenario
A financial services organization has undergone a period of rapid expansion. From its operating base it has expanded to serve customers in over 25 countries spread around the globe. There are plans to enter more markets in the next 12 months.
The key stakeholders involved in the global expansion project have briefed the chief information officer (CIO) on the plans. They have identified IT service performance as one of the major threats to the plan. The CIO has been under pressure from the board due to poor IT service performance in the previous six months. The chief concern has been significant performance variations in network connectivity and communications.
The organization currently has three contracts with different local external suppliers in operating markets supporting three IT network hubs. Whilst the suppliers are all happy to follow local internal IT processes, getting the three to work together on incidents or changes has proved increasingly difficult.
A number of outages have resulted in a blame culture where even the local internal IT departments have been sympathetic to their service providers, resulting in strained relationships between these internal departments at an operational level.
Other issues encountered at one or more locations have included:
* Long-term service improvements have been sacrificed in favour of short-term fixes that avoid the payment of contract penalties by the suppliers
* Changes in ownership of the customer relationship by the suppliers
The CIO believes that a lack of communication between suppliers has been the key cause of failures.
All three supplier contracts are due for renewal in the next 12 months. After consultation, a decision to re-tender for network services has been taken by IT, and approved by the CIO and the board of directors.
Refer to the Scenario.
When considering suppliers, which one of the following options would BEST ensure that network issues are addressed in order to meet the needs of the financial services organization?

• A. Consideration should be given to entering into a partnership with a single supplier where mutual trust and a good relationship can be established.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined point of ownership within each country to manage all local operational issues.
  A risk-reward framework should be mapped out as an incentive for the supplier to solve local issues.
  A strategic alignment should be sought with the supplier where values, goals and cultural fit are similar to that of the financial services organization.
  The supplier should set up its own dedicated global account management team to deal with transition and on-going issues by working with local IT support teams.
• B. Consideration should be given to entering into a partnership with three local suppliers who have worked together before in similar circumstances. This will ensure both communication and local cultural differences are addressed.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined local point of ownership with responsibility granted for operational management of issues.
  The threat of contractual penalties should be removed to encourage suppliers to think longer term about sustainable service improvements.
  Suppliers will commit to the use of local IT processes to ensure compliance and good communication.
  Suppliers are to ensure that staff engaged in the contract (in particular the account managers and customer service managers) are fully ITIL trained so they understand and can implement service management best practice disciplines.
• C. Consideration should be given to entering into a partnership with a single supplier where mutual trust and a good relationship can be established.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined point of ownership with local responsibility granted for operational management of issues.
  A long-term, risk-reward framework should be mapped out to encourage the supplier to work towards sustainable service improvements instead of shorter-term quick fixes.
  A strategic alignment should be sought with the supplier where values, goals and cultural fit are similar to that of the financial services organization.
  Implementation of a joint partnership team to initially ensure a smooth transition of the service to the new supplier and to subsequently manage on-going service improvement.
• D. Consideration should be given to re-contracting with the three current local suppliers. There is no suggestion that they are technically incompetent; it appears to be communication and local cultural differences that cause problems.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined local point of ownership with responsibility granted for operational management of issues.
  The threat of contractual penalties should be removed to encourage suppliers to think longer term about sustainable service improvements.
  Communication issues should be addressed by ensuring all incidents are reported to a single global service desk that the financial institution should implement.
  Suppliers are to ensure that staff engaged in the contract (in particular the account managers and customer service managers) are fully ITIL trained so they understand and can implement service management best practice disciplines.