Modern Service Management for Office 365

Introducing the Modern Service Management for Office 365 blog series! These insights and best practices are brought to you by Carroll Moon, Senior Architect for Modern Service Management.

Part 1: Introducing Modern Service Management for Office 365

Part 2: Monitoring and Major Incident Management

Part 3: Audit and Bad-Guy-Detection

Part 4: Leveraging the Office 365 Service Communications API

Part 5: Evolving IT for Cloud Productivity Services

Part 6: IT Agility to Realize Full Cloud Value - Evergreen Management

Regardless of the size of the organization, the move to Office 365 brings changes from a Service Management perspective.  In a small environment where there are no dedicated IT staff members, there is still someone who gets the phone call when the boss’ email is down.  In enterprise environments, the Service Management aspects are broader, deeper, and more important because IT must integrate Office 365 Workloads into their existing IT Portfolio (e.g. moving Exchange to the cloud is one of hundreds of IT Services in the enterprise Service Catalog) and into their existing IT Operations strategy (e.g. monitoring).  At one extreme, enterprise customers worry that their tooling, workflows, and IT Pro roles must drastically change.  At the other extreme, customers do not focus on the Service Management aspects of integrating the cloud with their existing catalog and operational model.  Given the importance of these Service Management topics, Microsoft is beginning a blog series to help simplify the discussion for customers of all sizes, but particularly for enterprise customers.

Service Management should be a focus for all customers, but especially for enterprise customers who need to have the outputs of Office 365’s processes become the inputs into their existing ITSM processes and tools

For Office 365, there are five major areas—four that are foundational/core and one that is more business focused:

1. Monitoring and Major Incident Management...knowing if your users are impacted (regardless of root cause) and ensuring that the right things happen without heroics when users are impacted
2. Evergreen Management...being ready to successfully absorb the changes and to achieve business value from the evergreen service
3. Service Desk and Normal Incident Management...being ready to support Office 365 end-users leveraging the automation investments from the Office 365 service and being able to measure the call and escalation rates driven by your users on-premise and in the cloud so you can use the data to focus on the right areas
4. Administration and Feature Management...managing the workloads and configurations thereof through the Admin Portal as well as programmatic management
5. Business Consumption and Productivity...a higher order focus on the business to drive transformation using Office 365 capabilities to drive more business, more productivity, and lower costs

In the coming months, we will publish additional blog posts for Office 365 Service Management in all of these areas.  Each blog post in this series will provide the core framing for how to think about the topic and the integration of Office 365 into the existing IT Service Management Portfolio.  The series will focus on integration with Office 365 APIs where appropriate, and in some cases, we will post sample scripts to help your business integrate with less effort.  Each blog post will also layer in existing and announced features that support each framed scenario.  And in the future, as we release new Service Management features, we plan to blog about them within the framing that is outlined here.  In other words, the blog posts will not always map one-to-one to the bullets above, but we will always reference back to this simple model.  The goal of this blog series is to continue to add layers onto the Service Management story for our customers while keeping the integration story as simple as possible. 

If you are excited about this series, or if you have feedback, let me know: carrollm@microsoft.com or @carrollm_itsm

What’s next?

The next post in this series will land in April and it will focus on Monitoring and Major Incident Management.  In the meantime, get ahead by reading our “ITIL for Cloud and DevOps: Monitoring” blog series.

Carroll Moon

Senior Architect for Modern Service Management