Webinars

Getting Started with Service Level Management: Moving Beyond Excel for Managing Service Level Agreements

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Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are virtually ubiquitous processes in organizations today. They are leveraged to manage relationships with suppliers, internal business units and external customers. In addition, the term is often used to refer to managing the organizational infrastructure.

As companies begin the process of formalizing the management of these agreements, they often take manual approaches to handling them. Spreadsheets, databases, and infrastructure monitoring solutions may be leveraged as tools to handle these contractual obligations; however, taking these manual approaches forces a company into a reactive mode for managing service level agreements.

To be effective, a company needs to define a proactive Service Level Management strategy that defines performance contracts, understands how these contracts should be measured, and automates the data collection and reporting of these agreements.

Attend this complimentary webinar from Oblicore to learn:

• How to get started with Service Level Management
• Who needs to be involved
• What considerations should be made regarding automation and tools
• How should performance ultimately be measured

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Five Easy Steps to Integrating Service Level Management with Service Request Management

You’ve recognized and understand the benefits of both a Service Level Management and Service Request Management strategy, but what are the key factors you should consider to maximize your cost effectiveness whilst increasing customer satisfaction? Moreover, how can the two be combined effectively to ensure service requests from the business are appropriately and actively measured against expectations?

Join Oblicore and Biomni for this complimentary webinar to learn the five easy steps of how to effectively integrate your Service Level Management and Service Request Management operations to improve the performance of your IT service delivery. In addition, participants will learn:

• What to consider when implementing a Service Level Management strategy
• What to consider when implementing a Service Request Management strategy
• Ways to integrate Service Level Management and Service Request Management through a sound Service Portfolio and Service Catalogue Management strategy

Witches, Warlocks, & Disparate Service Processes, Oh My! Unify Your Service Catalog, Service Request, & SLM Operations

The Service Catalog, Service Requests, & Service Level Management processes: too often, we look at each process as a silo, failing to realize the importance & necessity of integration points.

Instead of providing the business a consistent, comprehensive view of the services it consumes; the business is left utilizing a piece-meal, disparate approach that causes confusion & distracts from the value that IT is delivering.

Attend this complimentary webinar from Third Sky & Oblicore to learn:

• ITIL best practices for integrating the Service Catalog, Service Requests & Service Level Management
• How to design these integration points & achieve service alignment
• What will go wrong if these processes are not integrated
• Examples of a successful integration & good service alignment

Making the Grade with ITIL: Get Straight A’s with SLM

With the release of version three of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Service Level Management has taken a far more central role within the framework; however, “even though SLM is critical for many organizations, it is often the least mature process” (ITIL: Continuous Service Improvement).

Please join Oblicore for our webinar series on Implementing ITIL and Service Level Management. This month’s complimentary webinar will provide a “deep dive” analysis of how to leverage Service Level Management as part of your company’s Continual Service Improvement strategy. Specifically, it will discuss the processes and tools that will help your organization implement ITIL-based Service Level Management, specific use case scenarios, and how to make the most out of your IT investments through Service Management.

Join us for this Webinar and you will learn about:

• Implementing a Service Portfolio and Service Catalog that can move beyond request management and drive critical business decisions
• Defining service performance metrics in accordance with ITIL V3
• Understanding the relationships between supplier contracts, operational level agreements, and service level agreements
• Automating and aligning IT and business objectives and how to effect continual process improvement

A Healthy Dose of SLM to Improve Health Care IT: The Story of Catholic Health East

Catholic Health East is the 4th largest Catholic health system in the United States with 54,000 employees spread across twenty-six health care facilities that are managed by 16 CIOs. Like most organizations, measuring IT service delivery was widely varied by facility. Each facility engaged in its own set of processes which made it difficult to measure service delivery consistently across the health system. Similarly, without consistent performance reporting, IT lacked accountability and oversight which prevented any measurable performance improvement.

Join Sean Hughes and Kara Barnes of Catholic Health East as they discuss how they implemented Oblicore Guarantee to improve performance and increase accountability with standardized and automated processes. They will explain how Oblicore Guarantee enhanced operations and led to increased customer satisfaction.

IT at a Discount: Improving Cost Management with SLM

With executives cutting your IT budget every quarter, it becomes imperative to prove the value of services that IT provides in a language that the purse holders can understand: $$$. By measuring service levels in business terms, CIOs and IT Managers are better equipped to justify IT spending. Moreover, by understanding how IT operations impact the business, you are able to constantly measure and improve.

In this webinar, Erik Hille and Rodney Bridgman of Oblicore discuss Cost Management strategies that can reduce your budgets while simultaneously improving the value of services and demonstrating the ROI of IT spending.

Cubits and Parsecs and Other Misapplied IT Metrics

There is no shortage of measurements in most Information Technology (IT) organizations. Measurements (metrics, SLA’s, KPI’s, etc...) are leveraged that pertain to whether elements of the infrastructure are up or down, how well the network is performing, how many help desk incidents were recorded, and so on.

But are they meaningful and actionable? Too often these measurements quantify the wrong thing. They express infrastructure elements rather than expressing IT services, they leverage metrics that are understood by IT but are not readily comprehensible to business users, and they choose calculations that do not holistically reflect performance.

Join Brian Bourne of PureSCM and Erik Hille from Oblicore for a tutorial on the best practices for defining performance metrics for IT. Attendees will learn how to express performance in business terms not just technical terms, will learn the best metrics to improve your IT operations and reduce overhead, and will learn how multiple data sources should be aggregated to provide the most accurate and holistic gauge of IT performance.

Driving Without Headlights: The Importance of SLM for Your Service Catalog

Service Catalog Management has become a popular topic among information technology professionals. However, people often think of the Service Catalog as a means for provisioning services to individual members of their organization. Of equal importance is the ability to leverage this standard "bill of services„ as a means for administering and optimizing service offerings and ‘selling’ them to both your internal and external constituents. In order to attain this goal, an organization must leverage its Service Portfolio and Service Catalog efforts within a defined Service Level Management strategy. This process enables the organization to standardize services and establish clear metrics to monitor operational performance. As a result, it lowers operational costs and increases value by promoting scalability, repeatability, and predictability into your Service Level Agreements.

Please join Shane Carlson of Pepperweed Advisors and Erik Hille of Oblicore, Inc. for an informative discussion of the techniques, processes and tools that empower your organization to reduce costs and improve efficiency with an ITIL-based approach to Service Catalog Management and Service Level Management.

The ABC’s of SLM for OSS/BSS: A is for Automating, B is for Business Focus, C is for Contract

In the telecommunications industry, Service Level Management (SLM) is all too often confused with network monitoring. Yes, SLM measures the performance of networks, applications, services, and other infrastructure elements, but more importantly, it compares those measurements to the contractual obligations that companies make with their customers. In order to continually improve service performance, a company must relate the infrastructure to the services that are offered to internal and external customers. Moreover, it should create Service Level Agreements, Operational Level Agreements, and Underpinning Contracts that reflect those requirements of its constituents. In other words, telecom companies have to move beyond the networking approach espoused by eTom and embrace an OSS/BSS framework that enables your organization to proactively manage these service levels rather than just report them.

Please join Erik Hille and Rodney Bridgman as they discuss how automating Service Level Management will improve service performance by correlating real-time service levels to contractual expectations. Discover how this process will reduce costs by right-sourcing service levels and increase productivity by reducing downtime in your organization.

Improving Service Delivery with Service Portfolio Management

Service Delivery Management has become increasingly sophisticated as the Service Delivery Platform incorporates new technology from disparate sources. As customers demand a broader range of services under shorter time lines, the Service Portfolio expands to meet these needs. In order to effectively manage service delivery, it is imperative that providers standardize these new services and establish clear metrics to monitor deliverables. Standardization lowers costs and increases value by promoting scalability, repeatability, and predictability into your SLAs so that Service Delivery Managers can re-focus on business priorities.

In this webinar, Erik Hille and Reg Lo will examine the impact of diversification of services on Service Delivery and offer tips on building as much standardization into the Service Portfolio as possible.

SLM, SLA & ITIL: More Than Alphabet Soup

IT Service Management all too often gets reduced to a series of acronyms. In this webinar, George Spalding of Pink Elephant explores the best practices of Service Level Management as dictated in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. He will explain how Service Level Management contributes to Continual Service Improvement with consideration of Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation.

Join us for this webinar to decode the alphabet soup and improve the efficiency of your IT Services while reducing costs. Learn how to employ the best practices of ITIL V3 for Service Level Management in order to build and manage a stronger relationship between IT and the Business.

Maximize the Efficiency of Your Outsourcing Agreements with SLM

Even though many companies create well-defined SLAs with their service providers, very few follow through with managing those services. Despite the critical importance of these services, they leave it at the discretion of the providers to ensure that contractual obligations are met. Join us for this webinar to learn how Service Level Management techniques can help your organization maximize the efficiency of your outsourced services and improve the performance of your business.

Prioritize Your Service Desk Operations with SLM

Most companies employ various tools to manage service and support incidents. They range from commercial incident management solutions to home grown systems built with spreadsheets. Often several departments participate in incident management and each has a different role and responsibility at a given stage of the customer care process. As a result, a disconnect frequently develops between the customer facing service desk and the priorities of business operations. This can result in missed or late action, loss of revenue, and customer dissatisfaction.

In this webinar, learn how prioritizing tickets with business logic and standardizing processes can bridge this gap and improve the efficiency and productivity of your service desk to improve customer satisfaction and reduce penalties.

Cutting Costs with Sourcing Management

Outsourcing and purchasing services from third parties and external vendors accounts for billions of dollars in today's marketplace. From startups to enterprises to government agencies, organizations spend a significant portion of their budget on outsourced services to run their business. Whether it's call centers, servers, telephony, or websites, it is essential that you effectively manage these services to ensure that they are meeting the needs of your business and you are spending your money efficiently.

This webinar will demonstrate Sourcing Management techniques that will help you maximize the value of your outsourced services to ensure that they are optimally serving your business.

Connecting Service Catalog to ITSM: A Look at Service Level Management

With the introduction of ITIL v3, there has been a renewed focus on the Service Catalog as the definitive source of information on all of the agreed services for an organization. While it may serve as the starting point for IT Service Management initiatives, it also ties significantly into Service Level Management (SLM). An SLM oriented Service Catalog provides value across the Service lifecycle from Service Strategy to Continuous Service Improvement. This type of Service Catalog is unique in its ability to link key performance indicators contained in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to the ongoing measurement of service quality. This connection is critical to ensure that IT organizations can track – and meet – their service quality commitments. Join Oblicore and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) to learn more about the Service Catalog from an SLM perspective.

Oblicore & Third Sky Webinar: Running IT without a Service Catalog is like Navigating without a Compass

As companies struggle to align IT performance with business objectives, many have turned to ITIL-based service portfolio management as a means to describe the ITIL services that can be leveraged by business units or other service consumers. But what processes should be considered, what are the right steps to take and what is the role of technology in the service catalog?

This Third Sky and Oblicore webinar will focus on the value of defining the services you provide from a business perspective. This catalog of services will serve as a guide to provide a focus to IT. This focus will help IT leaders allocate and manage resources on activities their customer’s value. A clearly defined catalog of services can be controlled, measured and managed, which are all essential elements for continual improvement.

ITIL V3 Best Practices for a Business-Oriented Service Catalog

This French webinar has been delivered in partnership with Pierre Jourdan, a well recognized ITIL consultant, associated with both itSMF and Gartner. It will teach you how to create a Service Catalog, depending on the service-oriented degree of maturity of your IT organization. You will also recognize the immediate benefits provided by Oblicore Service Catalog Center to implement the process.

Please Note: This Webinar is in French

Notez S'il vous plait:   Ce Webinar est en Français

Improving Corporate Performance with Service Level Management: How Catholic Health East Enhanced Customer Service

It’s a fact. Service Level Management improves IT processes and allows your staff to be more productive. The organizations who adopt SLM internal processes are better able to deliver high quality services to customers and make sound business decisions. Encouraged to enhance their customer service approach, organizations can still face several barriers that can result in high costs and underperformance.

Meet with us and other IT professionals to learn how Catholic Health East, a multi-institutional health system, became a customer-centric institution by overcoming their challenges.

Set Up Your Service Catalog and Optimize its Business Impact in 10 Easy Steps

As a first step towards implementing the ITIL framework, many companies have begun assembling a catalog of services. The Service Catalog consists of services that are offered to current and prospective customers. It enhances efficiency and productivity surrounding the provision of these services and enhances the IT organization’s ability to meet corporate objectives and goals.

Join us for an informative discussion about where to start your service catalog project, how to avoid common pitfalls, the role of automation in managing the Service Catalog, and the interdependency of the Service Catalog and Service Level Management.

Leveraging the ITIL SLM Process to Drive Success for your IT Operations

Pink Elephant & Oblicore Joint Webcast
Service Level Management, a key component of ITIL v3, helps businesses build a roadmap for high level customer experience and business value. As IT organizations strive to align their operations with business objectives, SLM must work with the business to determine new or changed service level requirements as well as work with the various IT functional groups to understand IT's capability to meet and deliver the desired service targets. Don’t miss out on this joint Pink Elephant and Oblicore webinar to learn how to establish an effective ITIL-based SLM process.