1. CSI - Introduction
ITIL v3

2. Purpose of CSI
The primary purpose of CSI is to continually align and realign IT services to
the charging business needs by identifying and implementing improvements
to IT services that support business processes. These improvement
activities support the lifecycle approach through Service Strategy, Service
Design, Service Transition and Service Operation. In effect, CSI is about
looking for ways to improve process effectiveness, efficiency as well as cost
effectiveness.
Consider the following saying about measurement and management:
You can not manage what you can not control
You can not control what you can not measure
You can not measure what you can not define.
If ITSM processes are not implemented, managed and supported using clearly defined goals, objectives and relevant measurements and lead to actionable improvements, the business will suffer.

3. CSI Objectives
Review analyze and make recommendations on improvement opportunities in each lifecycle phase
Review and analyze Service Level Achievement results
Identify and implement individual activities to improve IT service quality and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of enabling ITSM processes
Improve cost of effectiveness of delivering IT services without sacrificing customer satisfaction
Ensure applicable quality management methods are used to support continual improvement activities.

4. CSI Scope There are 3 main areas in CSI that need to be addressed:
Overall health of ITSM as a discipline
Continual alignment of the portfolio of IT services with the current and future business needs
Maturity of the enabling IT processes for each service in a continual service lifecycle model.
To implement CSI successfully it is important to understand the
different activities that can be applied to CSI.
The following activities support a continual process improvement plan:
Reviewing management information and trends to ensure that services are meeting agreed service levels
Reviewing management information and trends to ensure that the output of the enabling ITSM processes are achieving the desired results
Periodically conducting maturity assessments against the process activities and roles associated with the process activities to demonstrate areas of improvement or, conversely areas of concern
Periodically conducting internal audits verifying employee and process compliance
Reviewing existing deliverables for relevance
Making ad hoc recommendations for approval
Conducting periodic customer satisfaction surveys
Conducting external and internal service reviews to identify CSI opportunities.
These activities must be planned and scheduled on an ongoing basis, by default ‘improvement’ becomes a process within IT with defined activities, inputs, outputs, roles and reporting. CSI must ensure that ITSM processes are developed and deployed in support of an end-to-end service management approach to business customers.

5. CSI Approach The CSI Model
The CSI Model shows that there are many opportunities for CSI. It also illustrates a constant cycle for improvement. The improvement process can be summarized in 6 steps:
Embrace the vision by understanding the high level business objectives. Vision should align with business and IT strategies
Assess the current situation to obtain an accurate baseline assessment.
Understand and agree upon the priorities for improvement based on deeper development of the principles defined in the vision.
Detail the CSI plan to achieve higher quality service provision by implementing ITSM processes.
Verify measurements and metrics are in place.
Momentum for quality improvement is maintained by assuring Changes are embedded in the organization.
There is more information available on CSI Roles & Responsibilities, within this toolkit.
© Crown Copyright 2007 Reproduced under license from OGC
The CSI Model

6. Value to the business
There are 4 commonly used terms when discussing service
improvement outcomes:
Improvements
Benefits
ROI (Return on Investment)
VOI (Value on Investment).
Improvements: Outcomes that when compared to the ‘before’ state, show a measurable increase in a desirable metric or decrease in an undesirable metric.
Benefits: Gains achieved through realization of improvements, usually but not always expressed in monetary terms.
ROI (Return on Investment): The difference between the benefit (saving) achieved and the amount expended to achieve that benefit, expressed as a percentage. Logically, we want to spend little to save a lot.
VOI (Value on Investment): Extra value created by establishment of benefits that include non-monetary or long term outcomes. ROI is subcomponent of VOI.

7. Justification
To justify any improvement, the IT organization should compare costs
and revenue. The difficulty in doing this, however, is that while the
costs are relatively easy to measure the increase in revenue as a
direct result of the Service Improvement Plan (SIP) is more difficult to
quantify.
Understanding the organization’s target and current situation should
form the basis of the Business Case for a SIP. A stakeholder
assessment and a goal-setting exercise will help focus on the results
and aims.

8. Benefits
Benefits must be clearly identified to help justify the effort involved in
gathering, analyzing and acting on improvement data. It is important
to:
Consider both direct and indirect benefits.
Identify the benefits for each group of stakeholder at every level in
the organization.
Define the benefits in clear measurable way.

9. Benefits
Other benefits that will be realized by implementing CSI within an
organization:
Business/customer benefits
Financial benefits
Innovation benefits
IT organization internal benefits

10. Cost
A Service Improvement Plan (SIP), just like any other major plan, will
have cost associated with executing its activities:
Staff resources trained in the right skill sets to support ITSM processes
Tools for monitoring, gathering, processing, analyzing and presenting data
Ongoing internal/external assessment or benchmarking studies
Service Improvements either to services or service management process
Management time to review, recommend and monitor CSI progress
Communication and awareness campaigns to change behaviors and ultimately culture
Training and development on CSI activities.

11. Interfaces to other lifecycle practices.
For CSI to be successful, it is important to provide improvement opportunities throughout the entire service lifecycle. There is much greater value to the business when service improvement takes a holistic approach throughout the
entire lifecycle. The connection point between each of the core phases is the
Service Portfolio.
The following slides look at the relationships between each phase and CSI.
There is more information available on CSI Roles & Responsibilities, within this toolkit.
© Crown Copyright 2007 Reproduced under license from OGC

12. CSI & Service Strategy
Service improvement opportunities could be driven by external
factors such as new security or regulatory requirements, new
strategies due to mergers or acquisitions, changes in
technology infrastructure or even new business services to be
introduced. Feedback from the other lifecycle phases will also
be important.

13. CSI & Service Design
Design takes the strategy described in the first phase and
transforms it through the design phase into deliverable IT
services. Service Design is also responsible for designing a
management information framework that defines the need for:
Critical Success Factors (CSF’s)
Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
Activity Metrics for both the services and the ITSM processes.
New strategies, architecture, policies and business requirements will drive the need for continual improvement within Service Design.

14. CSI & Service Transition
As new strategies and design are introduced this provides an
excellent opportunity for continual improvement. Service
Transition is also responsible for defining the actual CSF’s,
KPI’s and activity metrics, creating the reports and
implementing the required automation to monitor and report on
the services and ITSM processes.

15. CSI & Service Operation
Every technology component and process activity should have
defined inputs and outputs that can be monitored. The results
of the monitoring can then be compared against the norms,
targets or establishes Service Level Agreements. When a
deviation is identified, between expected and actual
deliverables, a service improvement opportunity Is created.

16. Don’t wait, improvements can start now!
All or Nothing?
At this stage it is easy to assume that all aspects of CSI must
be in place before measurements and data gathering can
begin. However, this is not the case.
 Measure now
 Analyze now
 Begin reviews of lessons learned now
Make incremental improvements now.
Don’t wait, improvements can start now!
There is more information available on Service Measurement Reporting, within this toolkit.