The purpose of the Service Execution process is to deliver operational services to IT customers, by matching resources to commitments and employing the IT infrastructure to conduct IT operations.

See the definition of operation.

Read the Service Execution Key Concepts.

Important links

• Service Execution Tool Mentors
• Tivoli® Open Process Automation Library Extensions for Service Execution Management

Outcomes

As a result of the successful implementation of this process:

• Services are delivered in a reliable, robust, secure, and consistent manner
• Services are provided within service level targets
• Resources needed to operate IT services are managed effectively and efficiently
• Consumable resources used to deliver services are supplied in a timely manner
• Up-to-date service metric information is available

Scope

This process is responsible for the scheduling, operation and execution of the IT-based services which have been committed to customers. These services are of many types, including business transaction and batch processing, and also many types of self-service functionality offered as standard services to users.

Service Execution applies the resources made available to it through Deployment Management to the dynamic mix of workload demands. It makes adjustments to resource allocations within the tolerances provided and specified in the solution design.

Includes

• Understanding, creation, and maintenance of operational schedules
• Starting, stopping, and other operational resource management actions on system components, applications and other services
• Monitoring of system resources
• Detecting events and sending significant events to Event Management
• Understanding and maintenance of operational status
• Managing production workloads from submission through delivery of results and from service start to service close

Excludes

• Correlating and processing significant events (Event Management)
• Operational security (Security Management)
• Data management, backup, and recovery (Data Management) 

Key performance indicators

• Customer satisfaction with service levels delivered
• SLA and OLA attainment
• Accuracy of CI operational status (as represented in the CMDB)
• Percent of incidents discovered
  • By service operations and reported through Event Management
  • By users using the Service Desk
  • By other means
• Percent of incidents that do not result in a service fault
• Percent of Operational Schedule activities
  • Completed as planned and scheduled
  • Rescheduled or delayed
  • Needing revision
• Resource utilization
• The elapsed time and direct costs
  • In this process domain
  • In each process step and between steps

Relation to other processes

• Monitoring data generated by this process is used by Event Management to generate events.
• Service metric data is used by Service Level Management to determine how well the service met its service level targets.
• Outages in the operation of services may cause incidents (Incident Management), problems (Problem Management), or major service outages (IT Service Continuity Management)
• Services are developed using the solution development processes (Solution Requirements,  Solution Analysis and Design, Solution Development and Integration,  Solution Test,  Solution Acceptance)

For more information

In addition, see the IBM® Service Management Web page.