19. Can you give me a concise summary of the Service or Help Desk?

The Service Desk role and function is as follows:

·         To provide a Single Point of Contact (SPOC)

·         The prime objectives of the Service Desk are to facilitate the restoration of normal operational service with minimal business impact on the customer, within agreed SLA levels and business priorities.

·         Service Desk functions include:

§  Receiving calls and first-line customer liaison

§  Recording and tracking incidents and service requests generated by the Telemetry system

§  Keeping customers and staff informed

§  Making an initial assessment of requests, attempting to resolve them or refer them along the Service Support and Delivery chain

§  Monitoring and escalation procedures relative to the appropriate SLA

§  Identifying problems

§  Closing incidents and confirmation with the responsible parties that this is fact

§  Coordinating second and third line support

20. What is Information Lifecycle Management?

Information Lifecycle management is based on three pillars, Data Protection, Data Archival and Storage Tiering.

Data Protection involves taking periodic images or copies of active data in order to provide a method of recovering records that have been deleted or destroyed. Most backups are retained only for a few days or weeks as later backup images supersede previous versions.

Data archival is designed to provide ongoing rapid access to decades of business information. Archived records can be placed outside the traditional backup cycle for a long period of time, while backup operations protect active data that's changing on a frequent basis.

Data Protection (backup)

·         The Data Protection Platform delivers unified, disk- and tape-based data protection, archival, and recovery management that scales to protect the largest data center environments. It offers comprehensive protection and a single console for the management of all backup and recovery operations spanning remote offices and the data center. This centralized management platform provides integrated data archiving, migration, and retention capabilities that address regulations for governance and compliance. Advanced reporting on backup and recovery operations enables service-level management of all protected data in your enterprise.

·         The data protection console provides administrators with real-time operational monitoring, management, troubleshooting, and alerting. The console is monitored 24*7*365 and all issues are logged with the service desk for follow up by certified support engineers.

·         The platform increases the visibility and the efficiency of backup and recovery processes with advanced backup reporting. The Platform provides proactive updates to key stakeholders in your organization with automated reporting that can be delivered by scheduled email. Organizations can verify backup service-level compliance and align the costs associated with backup and recovery with the needs of the business.

Data Archival

·         The archival platform stores, manages, and discovers unstructured information. Using a market proven architecture, it provides an open, intelligent and manageable approach to improve management, reduce costs and control information risk. With unstructured information consuming a large percentage of corporate storage, the platform archives information from messaging, file servers and collaborative systems using powerful storage optimization, classification and retention technologies. The software will automatically capture, categorize, index and enforce retention policies and secure unstructured information while reducing storage costs and simplifying management.

·         In addition to day to day responsibilities, IT is also being asked to partner with legal departments to develop information retention systems that not only ensure records are not accidentally lost or deleted, but can also ensure rapid recovery. Organizations faced with litigation involving e-discovery must be able to apply indefinite litigation hold of relevant content with minimal strain on storage and IT resources. The archival platform helps Fusion and its clients close the gap between technology and policies in order to eliminate the risk associated with non-compliance. This simplifies management, enforces policies, enables legal hold, reduces information redundancy, and allows for timely search and retrieval of relevant information for legal cases. Archiving is the cornerstone of an efficient, repeatable and defensible discovery process.

 Storage Tiering

·         Tiered storage is the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media in order to reduce total storage cost. Categories may be based on levels of protection needed, performance requirements, frequency of use, and other considerations. Fusion have the ability to provide storage tiering for the Data Protection and Archival platforms.

All these features add up to real benefits for your organization. When delivered by a partner that offers a service management approach to hosted services you also have the added performance and assurance levels you need to deliver IT based services to internal staff and to your customers.

21. What is 'supplier scope' and the supplier contract officer?

Supplier scope can be defined as the activities and tasks associated with the management of all contracts and agreements made with third parties that can influence the ability of the service provider to deliver the agreed service targets captured in a service level agreement.

A large amount of these tasks and activities could be done by a Supplier Contracts Manager or Supplier Manager. It would be fair to say that the role of Supplier Manager would logically have some form of reporting line to the Service Level Manager, but the Supplier Manager may equally be a non-IT person.



Management of suppliers, contracts, terms and conditions requires more than a technical understanding of the services being delivered. While it may be necessary to include a technical supplier manager; for larger organizations the contracts owner may be someone that is well versed in the standard legal requirements of the organization. This contracts manager also creates an independent assessor on the nature of the agreement and acts as a Governance officer for the entire supplier relationship.

22. Who is Q-Venture?

Q-Venture is a provider of innovative telecommunication, ICT and Service Management solutions across Africa and the Middle East. Q-Venture represents the symbiosis of Venture Communications and Quintica. Venture Communications a national icon and leading provider of communications infrastructure and Quintica a leader in the field of IT Service Management solutions, consulting and education services.

The union of these two diverse, yet complementary, organisations has lead to the creation of Q-Fusion. Offering a full spectrum managed service, Q-Fusion is the new leader for traditional Managed Service Operations and the emerging discipline of Managed Security Services. Q-Fusion offers a variety of management packages, with the premier option of ‘total ownership outsourcing’ offered through the QV-Capital program

To learn more about Q-Venture visit the web site www.qvcomms.com

23. Who is the OGC?

Quite simply the OGC is the owner of the ITIL and Prince2 Frameworks (among others).

OGC is an abbreviation for Office of Government Commerce and they are a quasi-Government department in the United Kingdom. The OGC was originally called the CCTA. The OGC makes the frameworks that it holds the copyright on available through a number of third party organizations.

Of these third party organizations TSO (The Stationary Office) is the publisher and primary distribution agent for all OGC owned intellectual property.

24. What are some key metrics for Incident Management?

For each process there is a wide array of available metrics for measuring the overall health and performance of that process.

For incident management the typical metrics are as follows:

• Total number of incidents received


• Stage of the incident lifecycle (e.g. logged, solved)


• Incident count Backlog


• Average time to resolve


• Average time to respond


• Average cost per incident


• Reopened count


• Incorrect incident assignment


• Incorrect incident categorization

Want to find out how our consulting services and service management solutions can help you implement this and other processes, then contact us.