Hlavní práce70801_kada02.pdf, 3.9 MB Stáhnout

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University of Economics in Prague

Faculty of Informatics and Statistics

Implementation and delivery of Integrated IT Service

Management solution using ServiceNow platform

MASTER THESIS

Study programme: Applied Informatics

Field of study: Information Systems and Technologies

Author: Aleksandr Kadesnikov Supervisor: doc. Ing. Jan Pour, CSc.

Prague, June 2020

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P r o h l á š e n í

Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci Implementation and Delivery of Integrated IT Service Management solution using ServiceNow platform vypracoval samostatně za použití v práci uvedených pramenů a literatury.

V Praze dne 25. června 2020 Aleksandr Kadesnikov

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Abstract

The main goal of this master thesis is to implement a solution for the integration of IT services management entities, which will facilitate the operational activities of IT support workers that are making sure that the proper level of IT services is delivered. And, more importantly, to implement such a solution that will allow to do it efficiently and be economically reasonable.

The master thesis will consist of theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part would describe the conceptual and technological background that is necessary to further understand and assess the value of the practical part. It will contain the following topics: Information systems, Cloud computing, IT Service Management, ServiceNow and integrations. The practical part would then provide the overview of the business environment, the analysis of the old utilized solution, based on which the proposal on the reimplementation would be presented and the new solution would be designed and developed. And last but not least, the new solution would be evaluated and compared to the existing one in terms of usability, cost saving and functionality.

The secondary goal of this paper is to get more educated and experienced in all stages of ITSM integrated solutions delivery. Author sees this thesis as a big opportunity to improve his both business and technical abilities.

Keywords

ServiceNow, IT Service Management, Integrations

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Abstrakt

Hlavním cílem této diplomové práce je implementace řešení pro integraci modulů správy IT služeb, které usnadní provozní činnosti pracovníků podpory IT, zajišťujích poskytování správné úrovně IT služeb. A co je důležitější, implementovat takové řešení, které to dovolí dělat efektivně a úsporně.

Diplomová práce bude obsahovat teoretickou a praktickou část. Teoretická část popíše koncepční a technologické zázemí, které je nutné k dalšímu porozumění a posouzení hodnoty praktické části.

Bude obsahovat následující témata: Informační systémy, Cloud computing, Správa IT služeb, ServiceNow a integrace. Praktická část by pak poskytla přehled podnikatelského prostředí, analýzu starého aktuálně používaného řešení, na základě kterého bude předložen návrh na reimplementaci a nové řešení bude navrženo a vyvinuto. A v neposlední řadě by nové řešení bylo zhodnoceno a srovnáno se stávajícím, z hlediska použitelnosti, úspory nákladů a funkčnosti.

Sekundárním cílem této práce je získat více znalostí a zkušeností ve všech fázích dodání integrovaných ITSM řešení. Autor považuje tuto práci za velkou příležitost ke zlepšení svých obchodních a technických dovedností.

Klíčová slova:

ServiceNow, IT Service Management, Integrace

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank doc. Jan Pour, CSc. for the important notes and for the knowledge that he shared with me during the thesis creation. Also, I want to express my gratitude to my family, friends and colleagues for their support.

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List of figures

Figure 1 Cloud Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) Diagram. (Chou, 2018) ... 20

Figure 2: ITIL lifecycle diagram. Source: (Henderson, 2020) ... 25

Figure 3: Gartner Magic Quadrant 2019 - IT Service Management. Source (Gartner, 2019) ... 32

Figure 4: Reimplementation scenarios proposal. (Source: author) ... 41

Figure 5: An overview of the high-level integration service architecture. (Source: author) ... 44

Figure 6: CreateServiceRequest API architecture. (Source: author) ... 51

Figure 7: How business rules work. (ServiceNow docs, 2020) ... 59

Figure 8: Example of the Scrip Include usage. (ServiceNow developer, 2020) ... 60

Figure 9: Transformation process in ServiceNow. (ServiceNow docs, 2020)... 62

Figure 10: New solution architecture: Outbound direction. (Source: author) ... 63

Figure 11: New solution architecture - inbound direction. (Source: author) ... 65

Figure 12: New solution architecture - monitoring tool. (Source: author) ... 66

Figure 13: ServiceNow update set example. (Source: author)... 67

Figure 14: Integrations table definition. (Source: author)... 68

Figure 15: Triggers table definition. (Source: author) ... 68

Figure 16: Message parameters table definition. (Source: author) ... 69

Figure 17: Integration log table definition. (Source: author) ... 69

Figure 18: Custom mappings table definition. (Source: author) ... 70

Figure 19: Inactive integration table. (Source: author) ... 70

Figure 20: IntegrationHandler script include. (Source: author) ... 71

Figure 21: IntegrationLogger script include. (Source: author) ... 72

Figure 22: Integrtaion - Initialize business rule. (Source: author) ... 72

Figure 23: Integration - Send Message business rule. (Source: author) ... 73

Figure 24: Example of the SOAP message. (Source: author) ... 74

Figure 25: Example of the SOAP message fucntion. (Source: author) ... 75

Figure 26: Example of the Integration*Middleware* script include. (Source: author) ... 76

Figure 27: Example of the custom mapping. (Source: author) ... 77

Figure 28: Integration Inbound web service. (Source: author) ... 78

Figure 29: Integrtation Inbound transform maps. (Source: author) ... 78

Figure 30: Example of the transform map interface. (Source: author) ... 79

Figure 31: Example of the field map. (Source: author) ... 80

Figure 32: Transfrom scripts. (Source: author) ... 80

Figure 33: Example of the incoming direction custom mapping. (Source: author) ... 81

Figure 34: IntegrationMonitoring scheduled job. (Source: author) ... 82

Figure 35: IntegrationMonitoring script include. (Source: author)... 83

Figure 36: Inactive integrations log. (Source: author) ... 83

Figure 37: Integration definition. (Source: author) ... 84

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Figure 38: Integration trigger. (Source: author) ... 84

Figure 39: Integration Outgoing message parameter. (Source: author) ... 85

Figure 40: Integration Incoming message parameter. (Source: author)... 85

Figure 41: Custom mappings overview. (Source: author) ... 86

Figure 42: New incident record. (Source: author) ... 87

Figure 43: Outgoing integration log. (Source: author) ... 88

Figure 44: Example of incoming SOAP message, done with SOAPUI. (Source: author) ... 89

Figure 45: Incident ticket created from incoming transacation. (Source: author) ... 89

Figure 46: Integration logs overview. ACK message. (Source: author) ... 90

Figure 47: Yearly TCO comparison, old and new solutions. (Source: author) ... 97

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List of tables

Table 1:List of custom tables in existing solution. (Source: author) ... 47

Table 2: List of import set tables in existing solution. (Source: author) ... 48

Table 3: List of script includes processing the existing solution. (Source: author) ... 49

Table 4: WSDL structure of CreateServiceRequest. (Source: author) ... 51

Table 5: Requsted for user logic in CreateServiceRequest. (Source: author) ... 53

Table 6: New integration solution architecture overview. (Source: author) ... 62

Table 7: Yearly integration development plan - old solution. (Source: author) ... 93

Table 8: Yearly integration development plan - new solution. (Source: author) ... 94

Table 9: Yearly integration operations plan - old solution. (Source: author) ... 95

Table 10: Yearly integration operations plan - new solution. (Source: author) ... 96

Table 11: Glossary of terms. (Source: multiple) ... 102

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Introduction

This chapter briefly explains the author's motivation, sets objectives for implementation and describes the approach towards the thesis.

Topic definition

At a time when the world is moved by information technology (IT) and the prosperity of organizations is mostly defined by how IT is leveraged, almost no business can survive without an information system. It not only serves businesses to store data across the organization, but also helps with function and process optimization: customer management, operations management, demand management, long-term strategic planning and other areas. The indisputable benefit of the information systems is the ability to automate business operations and processes. Therefore, the information system should be designed and implemented as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Recently, there is a growing trend in the IT world called “Cloud computing”. Cloud approach towards IT is enabling businesses to use information technology power without the need to manage any On- Premise infrastructure. Instead of buying IT infrastructure units as products, companies simply rent the required solutions as a service. The concept of the ServiceNow solution is based on these principles and is primarily designed to manage IT services in the enterprise.

Cloud computing company ServiceNow debuts on the list at No. 1, seizing the title of the World’s Most Innovative Company of 2018. (Forbes, 2018) ServiceNow offers a wide range of customization options to fit the business processes, including management of services - Information Technology Service Management (ITSM). The discipline dedicated to this area focuses on the services inside the organization from their creation, through their deployment, execution, until decommission.

The focus of this thesis is directed to the topic of managing services inside an IT organization. There is a certain trend for businesses, which lack their own IT power to support daily operations, to outsource business units’ IT management to 3rd party suppliers. These businesses mainly come from the government, energy, medical, and other sectors. Since most businesses don’t want to record and track their incidents or requests in the supplier system, but to have visibility and capability to create those at their ticketing portal so they would be then handled by a 3rd party supplier, the integration takes place.

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Goals of master thesis

The key goal of the thesis is to build up an IT Service Management Integration Engine solution based on ServiceNow platform which will quickly and efficiently integrate customer and supplier portals with a focus on the process details of both systems.

Quality solution will allow companies-suppliers of IT services to significantly reduce the cost of implementing ITSM integrations and subsequent operations support. Secondary goal will be to emphasize that by providing a complete overview on the business and market environment and project related costs.

Reasons for choosing the topic

The reason for choosing the topic is, first of all, lack of quality solution at the company for which the author is providing IT consultant services. The current solution utilized by the company is outdated and has a lot of technical issues that result in expanded project timeline and hence in project operating expenses.

The second reason for choosing the topic is personal interest. Author sees this as an opportunity to broaden his IT knowledge and improve his IT skills. Implementation of the integrated ITSM solution based on the most innovative platform is a challenging task. That would be a valuable experience for the future career.

Target Group

Target group of the IT Service Management solution are large IT companies managing 3rd party services and enthusiasts wishing to gather knowledge on the use of cutting-edge technologies.

Approach

To make this paper readable not only for IT field specialists, but also for people specializing in other industries, the thesis starts off with a brief theoretical part describing the concepts of the Information Systems, Cloud Computing, IT Service Management, ServiceNow and integrations. Afterwards, the author will be operating with given ServiceNow components to implement the integration engine solution. Received results will be then tested and evaluated from the point of configurability and flexibility; potential benefits regarding project costs will be presented. The possible applications of the solution will be discussed, the author's work will be assessed from different angles.

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1 Literature Review

This chapter represents the summary of resources used for this paper creation. Literature review is divided into two parts. In the beginning of the chapter the referenced books and magazine publications are described, following online sources in the second part.

1.1 Literary review of publications

Seifedine, Kadry. On the Evolution of Information Systems. 2014 - a chapter from the Seifedine Kadry’s research paper, providing a summarized and laconic view on the past, present and future of the information systems. Information systems are assessed from the technological innovation and functional innovation perspectives.

Hirchheim, R., Klein, H. K. A glorious and not-so-short history of the information systems field. 2012. - Perhaps the world's leading paper on the study of information systems and their history, being referenced in most information systems’ researches. The paper is divided into four eras, with each era assessed from the perspective of the technology environment, research themes released at the time and research methodology, the approach towards IT education and the industrial advancements.

Srinivas, J. CLOUD COMPUTING BASICS. 2013. - the publication is devoted to the exploration of different concepts of cloud technology, and examination of clouds from technical and service aspects. The benefits of cloud computing are highlighted, underlining the importance of cloud technology and showing why that technology is successful.

Vellante, D. ServiceNow: Redefining Enterprise IT Service Management. 2014. - a community page article by David Vellante describing how ServiceNow came to its success from a historical perspective. The overview of the company is given, its competitive advantages are discussed and the future outlook is provided.

Fleming, W. Using Cost of Service to Align IT. Presentation at itSMF, Chicago, IL. 2005. - one of the first presentations that have shaped the IT Service Management concept as we know it today.

The presentation contains necessary definitions and interesting facts on the ITSM topic.

Bucksteeg, Martin. ITIL 2011. Brno: Computer Press, 2012. - a book provides a systematic, structured, holistic and at the same time laconic overview of the concept of ITIL’s best practices, summarizing a 1500 pages long original publication. The uniform structure of this publication makes it easier to obtain essential information about the processes and functions, as well as about the general aspects of the phases of the service life cycle.

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15 Sabelija, Joseph. ServiceNow Platform Technical Overview. 2015. - a white paper released by one of ServiceNow representatives, describing the approach towards the ServiceNow platform implementation, its benefits and capabilities.

Gála, Libor, Pour, Jan, Šedivá, Zuzana. Podniková informatika 2., přepracované a aktualizované vydání. Grada Publishing, a.s. 2009. - This book is a reliable assistant to any student or person related to the IT industry. It provides an understandable and detailed description of the term Business Informatics, its purpose and role in the business. The book then talks about its main components, including Applications of Business Informatics, Approaches towards the applications implementation and its Maintenance methods. Author used this book to provide an overview on web service technology.

1.2 Literary review of online sources

ServiceNow documentation pages - contains all relevant information about ServiceNow architecture components and configuration best practices. Apart from that, the detailed information about offered products and expected upgrades and releases is presented on this portal.

Gartner IT Glossary - a list of terms and definitions of the main phenomena in the IT industry, provided by Gartner, a leading research and advisory company.

Gartner Magic Quadrant - a methodology by which Gartner provides an assessment of the trending market areas and helps readers get acquainted with the market's competing technology providers and their positioning. The providers are divided into four groups and presented in a quadrant. Provider groups are: Leaders, Niche players, Visionaries and Challengers.

MBI (Management Byznys Informatiky) portal - a portal containing generalized solutions in business management and IT. Its purpose is to share and use knowledge and recommendations arising from practice and other sources. The portal is maintained by a group of experts, researchers from various Czech universities.

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2 Information Systems (IS)

In order for any reader to be acquainted with the subject of the master thesis, a holistic view on the topic area will be presented. Beginning with the concept of the information system, how it was shaped during several decades, and what are the overall benefits of having an information system.

1.1 History of Information Systems

The years 1950-1970 were characterized by the appearance of the first information systems, the so- called “electronic calculators”. (Hirschheim, 2012) They were intended for processing bills and calculating salaries and were implemented on accounting calculating machines. This led to a vast reduction in costs and time for the documents’ preparation. “This era also marks the development period when the focus of organizations shifted slowly from merely simply automating basic business processes in the 1950s and the early 1960s to consolidating the control within the data processing function.” (Seifedine, 2014)

In 1970-1980, information systems continued to develop rapidly. At this time, the “technological advancement continued to soar. The major advancement was the introduction of the personal computer (PC). With the introduction of PCs, organizations began to distribute their computing/processing powers across organizations as the hardware cost of PCs was much cheaper compared to mainframes. This era also saw business units other than the accounting and the engineering departments compete for computer resources.” (Hirschheim, 2012) A variety of computer and telecommunication technologies began to be used in offices, which expanded the scope of information systems. These technologies include word processing, desktop publishing, email.

The years 1980-1990 were characterized by the advent of desktop personal computers and a sharp jump in productivity, both in hardware and software. “During this era, many business units resorted to purchasing their own hardware and software to suit their departmental needs. This was the era of personal computing giving rise to departmental computing (e.g., decentralization). This trend led to new problems of data incompatibility, connectivity, and integrity across functional departments.”

(Hirschheim, 2012) This period is also characterized by the fact that information systems began to claim a new role in the organization: companies have discovered that information systems are a strategic weapon.

In 1990-2000, the Internet appeared. With the advent of the global network, it became possible to immediately receive orders from customers all over the planet. “Due to this changing environment, organizations started to modify their business strategies to take advantage of the new technological opportunities afforded by the Internet. Organizations also shifted their focus to provide better services to their customers. To that end, they customized services and products to meet individual

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17 needs.” (Hirschheim, 2012) With the unification of the planning functions of material and financial resources, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have appeared; the ability to update information via the Internet has contributed to the development of reference information systems.

The 21st century is characterized by attempts to combine all the existing systems into one, creating an ecosystem of information, where the customer lifecycle would be endless. “Trends and systems found in today’s business environment include the use of outsourcing, re-engineering, management information systems, transaction processing systems, relational database management systems, and non-relational database management systems.” (Seifedine, 2014)

1.2 Benefits of Having an Information System

When introducing computer information technologies into an organization, the two key interrelated goals are pursued:

● Increased productivity.

● Cost reduction.

These effects are usually achieved by:

1. The use of trending technologies.

The ability to store, use, transmit and analyze data is already a necessary minimum of the IT strength of the organization. The ability to turn data into information is used in large companies and companies that want to be market leaders. Using new trends, such as, for example, Knowledge Management and IT service management, will allow companies to achieve long-term success.

2. Optimized decision-making.

The information system provides timely and reliable information, allowing to improve the decision- making process. As an example, the sales information collected can help to timely detect a decline in the sale of certain goods, making it possible to find out the reasons and take action.

3. Improving labor productivity.

It relates to the speed, cost and quality of performing routine tasks. To increase labor productivity, organizations use computerized document management systems such as, for example, ERP, allowing managers and employees to carry out actions only in a few minutes that took days to take several decades ago.

4. Transparency.

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18 When a manager tries to evaluate the work of a company, he can see many different “versions of the truth”. A single system creates one final version of the truth, which cannot be disputed by anyone, since everyone uses the same system.

5. Standardization.

Information systems come with standard methods for automating certain steps of the production process. Standardizing these processes and using a single integrated system saves time, increases productivity and reduces discomfort from operations activity.

1.3 Chapter conclusion

This chapter provided readers with basic understanding of what the information systems are, how they were evolving in the last 50-60 years, and what benefits they bring for the organizations.

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3 Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using internet technologies. (Gartner, 2020)

3.1 Characteristics

The main characteristics of Cloud Computing were clearly and holistically described by Srinivas Jagirdar (Srinivas, 2013) in his article on the related topic. The 5 main features of any Cloud solution were identified to be: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and a measured service.

1) On-demand self-service.

A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.

(Srinivas, 2013)

2) Broad network access

Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and personal digital assistants (PDAs)). (Srinivas, 2013)

3) Rapid elasticity

Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time. (Srinivas, 2013)

4) Resource pooling

The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the subscriber generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or data centre). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines. (Srinivas, 2013)

5) Measured service

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20 Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service. (Srinivas, 2013)

3.2 Cloud Delivery Models

The overview on existing delivery models of IT infrastructure could be found below:

Figure 1 Cloud Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) Diagram. (Chou, 2018)

a) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

The SaaS concept model of service delivery is offering a product or service that exists as a shared cloud service offered by a cloud provider. The cloud provider is then responsible for maintaining the underlying IT resources. Unlike IaaS or PaaS, the SaaS delivery model does not provide cloud consumers with administrative control over the service, it only provides them with a set of tools to deal with data or information.

Most common example of SaaS is Office 365 from Microsoft or GSuite from Google.

b) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

In short, PaaS solutions provide a development environment with already installed, deployed and configured IT resources.

The cloud service provider offers its customers a prepared software environment and tools for setting it up. The several common elements of PaaS are hardware, operating system, database management

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21 system, middleware, testing and development tools. The client can customize such a platform to suit his needs, making it a platform for testing software or, for example, a platform for automating financial procedures. This type of service is especially popular among software developers.

Typical examples of PaaS are Google App Engine, Apache Stratos and OpenShift.

c) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

IaaS providers provide the customer with a computing infrastructure (servers, data warehouses, operating systems and network resources) for deploying and running their own software solutions.

The option is suitable for companies whose need for IT resources is not the same at different points in time, with bursts and declines of IT infrastructure demand. Or, when the organization is rapidly growing, and the issue with constantly scaling IT infrastructure arises. Additionally, IaaS could be the best solution for companies which do not possess enough funds to create their own infrastructure.

Examples of existing IaaS solutions are: Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Azure Virtual Machines from Microsoft.

3.3 Cloud Deployment Models

This section explains the basic cloud deployment strategies. A cloud can be deployed using any of the below mentioned strategies.

1. Public Cloud.

In simple terms, public cloud services are characterized as being available to clients from a third party service provider via the Internet. The term “public” does not always mean free, even though it can be free or fairly inexpensive to use. A public cloud does not mean that a user’s data is publicly visible; public cloud vendors typically provide an access control mechanism for their users. Public clouds provide an elastic, cost effective means to deploy solutions. (Srinivas, 2013)

2. Private Cloud.

A private cloud offers many of the benefits of a public cloud computing environment, such as being elastic and service based. The difference between a private cloud and a public cloud is that in a private cloud-based service, data and processes are managed within the organization without the restrictions of network bandwidth, security exposures and legal requirements that using public cloud services might entail. In addition, private cloud services offer the provider and the user greater control of the cloud infrastructure, improving security and resiliency because user access and the networks used are restricted and designated. (Srinivas, 2013)

3. Hybrid Cloud.

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22 A hybrid cloud is a combination of a public and private cloud that interoperates. In this model users typically outsource non business-critical information and processing to the public cloud, while keeping business-critical services and data in their control. (Srinivas, 2013)

4. Community Cloud.

A community cloud is controlled and used by a group of Organizations that have shared interests, such as specific security requirements or a common mission. The members of the community share access to the data and applications in the cloud. (Srinivas, 2013)

3.4 Benefits of Cloud

There are some solid advantages associated with the use of Cloud Computing solutions:

1) Cost.

Cloud resources are independent of computing systems and their geographical location; those factors are not necessary to consider when working with them. This provides significant savings due to the ease of scaling of resources according to the needs.

2) Availability

There are potentially much more applications and resources available to employees and organizations, than a regular server managed by a system administrator can provide. In most cases, access to Cloud solutions can done through a regular browser.

3) Reliability

Backing up and restoring cloud data is substantially simpler than storing it on a physical device. The most popular cloud service providers are handling the information recovery themselves and offering it as a product advantage. Thus, this makes the entire process of recovery much easier than the traditional on-premise data storage methods.

4) Quick deployment

Cloud computing gives companies an advantage of quick deployment of the applications across the organization. Once a certain application is released, the entire system is able to perform new tasks in a short time, depending on the application complexity itself.

5) Flexibility

In the Cloud, software integration usually happens automatically. This means that no extra effort is required to configure and integrate applications according to preferences. In addition, cloud computing makes it easy to parameterize the provided services.

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3.5 Chapter conclusion

The chapter tended to provide a deeper understanding of the growing technology in the IT industry - Cloud Computing - and its benefits over on-premise infrastructure solutions. Main Cloud delivery models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and Cloud deployment models (Public, Privat, Hybrid, Community) were described in detail.

The understanding of the concept of Cloud is a must in order to deeply comprehend the architecture design and implementation approach in the practical part of the author’s paper.

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4 IT Service Management (ITSM) - theory and concepts

This chapter is devoted to the basics of IT Service Management that would provide a holistic view on the problematics and would make this paper perceptive for non-IT oriented people.

4.1 What is IT Service Management

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is a subset of Service Science that focuses on IT operations such as service delivery and service support. In contrast to the traditional technology- oriented approaches to IT, ITSM is a discipline for managing IT operations as a service that is process oriented and accounts for 60% - 90% of total cost of IT ownership. (Fleming, 2002) The ITSM approach allows to shift the focus from dealing with technology towards maintaining business relationships.

Whenever someone mentions IT Service Management, then the topic of the conversation would inevitably end up in discussing the ITIL principles, as up to this date ITIL best practices have managed to describe and expand the ITSM concept to the fullest. Thus, this chapter would explain the ITSM concept from the ITIL perspective.

4.2 Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

This section tends to provide an overview of the best practices on how organizations' IT power should be managed in order to be in line with the current technology level. The overview on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library is prepared with help of Martin Bucksteeg’s book “ITIL 2011 - Stručný a srozumitelný výklad”.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a comprehensive and widely used guide to manage IT services in the form of a collection of books, which has become, over time, essentially a standard and set of best practices. ITIL provides a freely available framework representing the complete cycle of IT services and is flexible enough to tailor ITIL recommendations to the needs and requirements of a particular organization. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

The key publications of this collection are 5 books, each of those representing a single phase of the service life cycle and describing the relevant processes, principles and recommendations. These are the following publications:

● Service Strategy

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● Service Design

● Service Transition

● Service Operation

● Continual Service Improvement

The visual overview of ITIL is provided in the image below.

Figure 2: ITIL lifecycle diagram. Source: (Henderson, 2020)

4.2.1 Service strategy

"A strategy is a plan that shows how an organization wants to achieve its goals." (Bucksteeg, 2012) Service Strategy is the first phase of the life cycle in which IT Service Management is designed, developed and implemented as a strategic asset. At the same time, emphasis is placed on the overall strategic concept of the offer of services in terms of performance and key competencies, and at the same time client demand and potential investments.

However, strategies are actually much more complex. Service strategies specify, among other things, how an IT provider should use services to achieve its customers’ business goals and thus the provider’s goals. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

The ITIL Service Strategy bundle offers the necessary concepts that need to be implemented to achieve a successful service strategy, with a clear focus on defining an IT service strategy that is a typical part of an IT strategy. The service strategy represents a specific approach of the provider,

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26 thanks to which it stands out from competitors and thus offers customers unique added value.

(Bucksteeg, 2012)

Service Strategy process

Service strategy processes are in charge of managerial level of service management. At the same time, they provide an orientation towards the overall service strategy for all phases of the life cycle, as well as a sound financial and strategic basis for the provision of services. The strategy of a given service provider, depending on its type, focuses on the strategy of an internal or external customer.

(Bucksteeg, 2012)

Service strategy processes include:

IT service strategy management - generates strategic goals so that the management of IT services is in line with the company's strategy. This process takes care of the perspective, plan, position and given patterns of business behavior in relation to services and their management in the IT organization. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

Finance management of IT services is in charge of the economic aspect of creating a service, i.e. the actual cost of creating and managing IT services or considering whether to create a service at all.

Billing for IT services is often complicated, because, for example, the actual costs per customer or service are seldom adequately covered. So financial management is trying to prevent this.

(Bucksteeg, 2012)

Service Portfolio Management. The service portfolio includes all services that an IT service provider has ever developed, created or already provided. Based on the company's demand, it defines which IT services it should offer, why the customer should use them, what the pricing models of these services are, etc. The management of the service portfolio therefore manages and administers services throughout their life cycle. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

Business relationship management. Based on this process, the service provider understands the needs of the customer and is able to offer him services corresponding to his requirements. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

Requirements management - this process aims to understand, anticipate and manage customer requirements and ensure capacity in a timely manner so that its surpluses or shortcomings do not occur, which is perceived negatively for both the provider and the customer. By working with the customer, planning, trend analysis or service level agreement should reduce fluctuations and demand uncertainty. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

4.2.2 Service design

The design of the service is dealt with in the second ITIL book and its purpose is the design and creation of services in accordance with the first book - service strategy. There is a very close link

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27 between service design and continuous service improvement, as aspects and mechanisms for service improvement are already taken into account and implemented during service design. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

The starting point of the service design is the alignment of business requirements, continuing through development and documentation of the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and OLA (Operational Level Agreement). (Bucksteeg, 2012)

Service design processes include (Bucksteeg, 2012):

Service level management - this process contractually treats customer requirements for provided IT services and also ensures control of the fulfillment of the contract, i.e. whether the agreed level of service is complied with. Customer requirements for quantity and quality of service can only be met if service level objectives follow business requirements.

Availability management - ensures that services meet the approved availability level. This is a very important aspect of success. If availability requirements are not met, the service does not provide the expected benefit to the users.

Service catalog management - the service catalog is an integral part of providing services to the customer. The goal of this process is to create and manage a catalog of services, mainly in order to have a reliable and comprehensive source of information about the available services.

Information security management - the goal of this process is to create and manage a defined information security for the company. At the same time, it must be guided by enterprise security, which represents confidentiality, integrity and availability for IT assets, information, data and services. The output of this process can be information security regulations, risk analysis and management processes, etc.

Supplier Management – ensures compliance with contracts with suppliers and third parties, thereby helping to support business requirements. The output can be contract information, risk considerations or supplier reports.

IT Service Continuity Management - ensures the survival of essential IT services and infrastructure in the event of an emergency or disaster. Planning and preparation for crisis situations and subsequent renewal of IT services allows for the lowest possible impacts on business and an early return to normal regime according to the SLA. The output of this process is rules, but also the planning of tests, scenarios and evaluations.

Capacity Management - ensures that service capacities meet the service capacity and performance requirements. The output of this process is a capacity plan, or long-term forecasts for tactical and strategic planning.

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28 4.2.3 Service transition

The third book of ITIL deals with the transition of the proposed service to real operation. This phase of the life cycle takes responsibility for the transfer of the service strategy contained in the service design package from theory to practice, i.e. organized and controlled commissioning of IT services with all components. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

Service transition processes include (Bucksteeg, 2012):

Change Management - The main goal of change management is to minimize the number of incidents and outages caused by change, the potential dangers of change, and to maximize the benefits of change. These should be fast and controlled, thanks to standardized methods and procedures. The output may be the rejection of the change request, the approved change, the change proposal, the updated change plan, etc.

Transition Planning and Support - Provides planning and coordination of required resources. It is necessary to create rules, standards and procedures for activities related to the transition of the service. The output of this process is not only the strategy and budget of the service transition, but also the integrated plans for its transition.

Release and operational management - this process is responsible for the delivery of the service to the customer as it was agreed during its design and so that the customer can use it and obtain the required values.

Service validation and testing - This process should ensure the delivery of the service according to the specification and requirements of the store. Through validation and testing, objective evidence is provided that the service meets the requirements within a defined service level. The output of this process can be performed tests and their results.

Service and Configuration Asset Management - This process ensures that reliable and truthful information about a company's assets is available to deliver services. This information includes details on individual configuration items, resp. assets, in particular their interrelationships.

Evaluation of change - evaluates the success of the change and directs the expectations of the parties involved to the real limits. The findings of this evaluation serve to support the approval of change management.

Knowledge management - knowledge management enables access to essential, comprehensible and quickly available information so that not only the quality of the decision-making process is improved, but also the given situation is correctly evaluated. With proper knowledge management, all information is reusable, reducing costs and increasing satisfaction.

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29 4.2.4 Service operation

The fourth book of ITIL deals with the operation of the service, whose processes and functions focus on the area of IT organization. It aims to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of service provision, so the stability of IT services will be ensured in all circumstances. (Bucksteeg, 2012) This part of the life cycle is the most important for the customer, because the real value of the service is visible at this stage. However, implemented processes and functions are useful only if they are rigorously managed and controlled. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

The processes of operation of the service include (Bucksteeg, 2012):

Incident management - This process records and handles deviations from normal system operation.

The incident is categorized and prioritized so that it can be resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible and the operational state is returned to the state according to the SLA.

Request fulfillment - deals with the fulfillment of user requirements. These are requirements related to the performance of a service, such as a request for a new device. Requirements usually have a predefined framework and solution procedure and are subject for approval. The result of this process is a completed request, either positively or negatively.

Event management - the main task of event management is to identify and analyze events and derive appropriate measures. The event management process begins with the discovery of an event, continues with conclusions, and ends with the selection of an appropriate action.

Problem Management - The problem management process is responsible for reducing the number of recurring incidents if they increase. The problem management lifecycle tracks the problem from start to finish, i.e. from identification, through analysis, documentation to eliminating the cause of the problem. The output can be solved problems and related activities, updated records of problems, proposals for changes, etc.

Access management - a process that takes care of granting access to use the service to authorized users, and vice versa to prevent access to unauthorized users. The process is also intended to prevent abuse of the service through disproportionate access rights. The output is therefore the granting of authorization to the user in accordance with information security regulations, as well as records of current and historical granted and denied authorizations or reports on abuse of access rights.

4.2.5 Continuous service improvement

The latest ITIL book is called "Continuous Service Improvement" (CSI) and describes ways and methods of continuous service improvement. As business requirements can change throughout the service lifecycle, potential new adjustments need to be identified and improvements made to increase effectiveness, optimize costs, and maximize efficiency. (Bucksteeg, 2012)

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30 This book is based on the principle of the Deming cycle, which consists of 4 parts (Bucksteeg, 2012):

● Plan - the potential for improvement of the current situation is sought, an estimate is made and a plan for improvement is created.

● Do - the plan created in the previous step is being implemented.

● Check - in this step, the implemented service improvement is checked, whether the expected benefit is performing well, or whether unexpected side effects have occurred and how to evaluate them.

● Act - this step involves the implementation of measures to correct the detected deviations and ensures that there is no return to the original state.

4.3 Chapter conclusion

Understanding the IT Service Management concepts is, at minimum, a good knowledge on how the leading companies are dealing with their IT power and strategically approach the business demand in IT. Moreover, the author’s paper is focused to provide a way for IT Service Management portals to be able to align their processes and communicate. Hence, this chapter gives clarity on what are the main modules and architecture components that are required in the integration solution design.

The ITSM concept structure was presented according to the respected and proven ITIL best practices.

The main stages of the service management include: Service strategy, Service design, Service transition, Service operation and Continuous service improvement.

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31

5 ServiceNow

The purpose of this chapter is to make the reader familiar with the concept of ServiceNow Platform and what it offers. First, the general overview of the company will be presented. Second part is describing the current market positioning of ServiceNow. And the last part would be devoted to the ServiceNow architecture principles and how they fit in the IT Service Management practices.

5.1 ServiceNow overview

The overview of the ServiceNow platform is conducted with help of David Vellante’s research paper

“ServiceNow: Redefining Enterprise IT Service Management”. (Vellante, 2014)

ServiceNow was launched originally as a Software-as-a-Service ITSM solution back in 2004 by Frederic B. Luddy and is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. At the time, such solutions were seen by the market as overcomplicated, misaligned and non-responsive. However, 2 key events have helped ServiceNow business exponentially grow:

● Amazon launched Amazon Web Services, which has heated the Cloud market with the necessary discussions and put up a thought on the future of IT to many companies.

● The launch of ITIL 2007, helping ITSM tools being highly popularized and evolving the methodology into a more holistic and full life-cycle way.

“The company’s modern architecture, single code base and single data model, shared among all applications in the system, made it very easy for ServiceNow’s customers to adapt its platform to business requirements and new ITIL processes.” (Vellante, 2014)

Over time, however, ServiceNow managed to shift from being positioned as a SaaS solution and started being treated as a complete platform solution, enabling users to develop their own applications and build and enhance the existing processes. ServiceNow is not really competing directly with PaaS players like Salesforce or Amazon, but it tries to leverage their relationships with IT and make apps simple to build. In substance, the company strategy is to make ServiceNow a new type of application development platform. (Vellante, 2014)

5.2 Market Positioning

Over the last several years, ServiceNow has been outperforming its competitors in the IT Service Management field. Their strategic vision and ability to turn this vision to reality has brought them to the 1st place in Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2019.

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32 Figure 3: Gartner Magic Quadrant 2019 - IT Service Management. Source (Gartner, 2019)

Gartner (Gartner, 2019) have identified the following strengths and cautions for ServiceNow ITSM capabilities:

Strengths

- Gartner identified ServiceNow as a company with strong brand recognition. ServiceNow has managed to triple their ITSM tool market share compared to the closest competitor.

- Several platform-level acquisitions have allowed ServiceNow to add Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning functionalities to its ITSM offering.

- ServiceNow is building a strong partner ecosystem, by leveraging strong market position.

Cautions

- Frequent changes in licensing policies and bundling.

- Restricted support to the current and previous versions of the product, which requires customers to perform an upgrade at least once every year, causing possible risk exposures.

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33 - Organizations with low IT maturity struggle to demonstrate sufficient value from their

ServiceNow investments.

5.3 Platform architecture

This chapter focuses on the key architecture features of the ServiceNow platform, described in the white paper “ServiceNow Platform Technical Overview”. (Sabelija, 2015)

Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS)

ServiceNow developers have approached the issue in a distinctive manner: instead of following a single path and building SaaS or PaaS, the decision was made to find a better solution that would radically reduce the time needed to build custom applications - to stick to aPaaS concept. (Sabelija, 2015)

The application platform as a service approach eliminates the unnecessary development complexity, allowing developers to focus on coding unique and high-value business logic. Some of the required characteristics of the aPaaS architecture are provided below (Sabelija, 2015):

● Automatic application creation

The CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functionality enables developers to build new applications without altering the basic infrastructure and run new applications with minimal data input. (Sabelija, 2015)

● Data driven behavior

Since the main out of the box applications are already predefined in ServiceNow, the application metadata concept is utilized to simplify application enhancements. This allows developers to meet the specific customer requirements and focus their coding efforts on delivering application value.

(Sabelija, 2015)

● Standardized components

The foundation application level, that ServiceNow builds from the data diagram, contains a number of components. For these common components ServiceNow does not generate any individual code.

On the other hand, the behavior of each component is easily and extensively conﬁgurable, either by programming or the change on the form. Altogether, these components provide specialists with a set of tools to speed up development. (Sabelija, 2015)

● Rich integration support

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34 The platform should provide the possibility to not only integrate common and custom applications with external parties, but to allow them to communicate between themselves in a straightforward manner. (Sabelija, 2015)

5.4 Chapter conclusion

ServiceNow is a cloud platform, based on which the integration solution would be built. Thus, the information about the platform, its history and market position, as well as its architecture characteristics needed to be provided for readers in the theoretical part of the paper.

The chapter has provided an overview on the ServiceNow platform history and how it ended up being one of the leading ITSM solutions. Also, the company was assessed from the market perspective, which strategic position it holds and what are the company’s strengths and cautions. The third section briefly described the approach towards the platform architecture and its main component features.

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35

6 Integrations

The chapter provides an explanation on what the integrations are, common pros and cons of the implementation, and a short overview on usage of web services in integrations.

6.1. Integrations overview

Integration is a process in which various sources of business informatics are combined or interconnected into a single unit. These components then cooperate with each other and coordinate their functionality so that such a combination appears as a single unit. (MBI team, 2020)

As for the reasons on why the integration should be initiated and implemented, there can be a lot of them, depending on the business context, the level of IT infrastructure, the scale of company development and many others.

Common perks of implementing the integration include (MBI team, 2020):

- Interconnection of the systems into a single functioning unit - Sharing of the systems’ functions

- Better user experience

Among the issues and integration constraints could be mentioned (MBI team, 2020):

- Leading to a higher process complexity - Growing demand on IT infrastructure - Poor data could be disseminated

- Growing demand on the expertise knowledge of the IT resources

6.2 Web services

“Specifically, a Web service is a software component that can be accessed by another application (such as a client, a server or another Web service) through the use of generally available, ubiquitous protocols and transports, such as Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP).” (Gartner, 2020)

Web services typically provide users only with an interface for the request sending, and a message definition, or a message structure that, when filled out, allows the web service to read the message and process it correctly. The web service functionality is hidden behind and interface and cannot be accessed by any external entity.

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36 6.2.1 SOAP protocol

Among the number of web service protocols existing in the industry, one the most respected and widely used is the SOAP protocol with the WSDL standard. WSDL, or Web Service Description Language, is one of the methods of organizing a message structure that is being filled out and sent in the request. WSDL inherits XML syntax convention.

Client and service messages are sent in a structure as defined by the SOAP protocol and are actually again an XML document. The SOAP message or envelope must contain a body that contains the message data according to the WSDL definition. Optionally, a message header can be included, in which other (non-functional) message and policy properties are defined. (Gála and others, 2009)

6.3 Chapter conclusion

The purpose of this chapter was to give a reader a basic understanding on what the integrations are, what are their advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, to introduce a reader to the SOAP protocol and WSDL standard, as this technology would be used in implementation of the practical part - ITSM integration.

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7 ITSM Integration Engine solution

This chapter focuses on the practical part of the author’s paper.

In the first stage, it tends to describe the market background behind the subject and the company that this project is supposed to be delivered to. Next, the current company Integration Engine (IE) solution will be explained and assessed from the architecture perspective. Based on the outcome of the current solution’s analysis, a new solution would be designed and implemented to meet the customer’s needs.

A new integration engine solution would be compared to the old one in terms of overall usability, simplicity of delivery of the new integrations and effectiveness of the integration support in the operations environment. And last but not least, the new IE would be assessed from the perspective of costs and overall value: how much the client company projected to save utilizing the new solution during one year of usage; what are the benefits in the integrations activities and in the total cost of ownership (TCO).

7.1. Background

The 'T' company is the largest northern European provider of IT services. 'T' is providing comprehensive IT services for the private and public sectors and services for product development in the field of communications and modern technologies. The company provides services to the following industry groups: financial services; public, healthcare & welfare, industrial and consumer services. 'T's' headquarters are located in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. In 2018, the company reported net sales of 1.6 billion euros and almost 16000 full-time and part-time employees. In 2019, 'T' has finished its merger with the similar-sized IT company with the intention to expand on the Nordic market. The new company will have over 24.000 employees and is projected to generate revenue of over 3 billion euros for the fiscal year 2020.

As one of 'T's' main businesses is delivering and maintaining IT infrastructure for its big and small clients, the question appears - how can the infrastructure be delivered as a service, instead of as a product? So that the company could rationalize its cash flow and focus on the quality of the whole product experience that clients get, and clients could focus even more on their primary business activities and bother less about the state of their IT power. The answer is plain and simple - to stick with the best practices in the Information Technology industry and combine them with the cutting- edge technologies and solutions.

IT Service Management principles serve this goal completely, and 'T' has decided to offer their customers just that - the complete coverage of the product delivery and its maintenance during the life cycle. 'T' leverages their strong partnership with ServiceNow and uses its platform to keep track

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38 of the offered products and control the level of service delivered to the customers. Therefore, the whole IT Service Desk unit of 'T' is utilizing ServiceNow instances.

When delivering and managing the product as a service, one of the key points that has to be discussed and put through with each customer or each partner is the communication. How will both parties interact in order to maintain the needed service level? Even with the current level of automation in the IT industry, people play a solid part in making sure that the infrastructure is running well. And from experience with ‘T’ service management, most of the incidents and problems do not come from the monitoring activity; they are being reported by real people. In the case of 'T', it means that all their clients would have to report any issues through their ServiceNow solution. But logically, barely any client, especially when it comes to some big government institutions, would want to adjust their rigid processes and use some communication channel on top of ones that are already established.

They want to be able to report and view progress on tickets in their own systems, while 'T' would be handling their requests in ServiceNow. This is where the integration takes place; both parties’

systems are being connected to exchange messages.

At the point when 'T' have decided to partner up with ServiceNow and use their platform for the IT process automation, they did not dispose of the necessary knowledge on how to build integrations and manage them. Hence, the company has decided to outsource this part of the work to IT consulting firms that already had a deep knowledge of Cloud solutions and ServiceNow platform usage especially. The Integration Engine that 'T' possesses was built up from scratch by an Indian multinational information technology and outsourcing company.

After some time, the 'T' company parted ways with their Indian partner. Management came to the conclusion that building strong strategic partnerships with European consulting firms would bring more benefits in the long term as there are less cultural differences and language barriers. The Czech market was one of the most inviting, with great IT resource potential and lower cost of labor than in Scandinavian region. Therefore, a new partnership with the ‘D’ company was arranged. ‘D’ is the European consulting firm focused on offering Information Technology consulting services and digital transformation for businesses. With headquarters based in France, its organizational structure is spread out across the whole Europe, having branches in Czech Republic, Austria, Germany and other countries.

The author of this paper is currently working for the ‘D’ company as a Senior Consultant. Almost all of the author's allocation is devoted to the partnership with 'T', where the author is performing the role of Solution Architect and Developer for the IT Service Management integration projects. One of the author's key objectives is delivering quality integration solutions. But since ‘D’ is the consulting firm, it is not enough to deliver the quality solution. Consultants should continuously find space for improvement and offer new ideas to their clients, which would potentially enable them to perform better and, in case of integrations, create even more quality solutions while cutting customer’s labor and maintenance cost.

Proposal for the Integration Engine reimplementation was one of those.

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7.2 Proposal on the Integration Engine reimplementation

This chapter provides a holistic overview on the major issues of the present integration solution in 'T'. A structural analysis was undertaken based on years of working experience with the existing integration tool. The engine was assessed from two different angles: usage during delivery of the new integration projects and during the operations phase. Operations phase could be also labelled as

“Integration support”, when the customer is actively utilizing the integration and reporting any concerns or unsatisfactory situations about the integration to 'T'. Unsatisfactory situations often include invalid message contents that were delivered or received, issues with attachment delivery, issues with inappropriate messages triggering and so on.

The proposal was presented by our team to the 'T' company with reasons for the Integration Engine reimplementation, scenarios of possible ways of delivery with expected positive and negative outcomes. Additionally, the existing Integration Engine analysis was conducted, providing a solid documentation ground for the further assessment. Readers of this paper can introduce themselves with some parts of the documentation in the previous section.

7.2.1 Reasons for the reimplementation

This section sums up the existing problems that our team had during operations with the existing Integration Engine.

1. Integration Engine code quality and design quality.

Since the IE solution was developed quite some time ago (around 4 years), it does not meet some of today’s standards in the company, especially the code policy. The code policy defines how the code should be commented and programmed. The code is written in accordance with the policy that includes the needed conventions.

Imagine the situation: you are developing a customized enhancement for a certain client during the integration project. While developing it, you decide to put the function to the Script Include that contains all of such custom functions, as you reckon it might be a useful feature for the new customer integrations in the future. The Script Include might have some older functions that are not written in accordance with the code policy, and you don’t know if any integration is actively using this function.

When trying to promote your enhancement between environments, it gets blocked by the Release team because the whole Script Include is not meeting the code policy, even though the older version of it already exists in the production environment.

What could be the possible next step? First thing that would come to everyone’s mind is to rework the whole Script so that it meets the new convention. But what if this script is 2 thousand rows long?

And more importantly, when any change is done to any script in IE, it has to be analyzed from the perspective of impact on all existing integrations, and of course tested. So, if we’re changing some part of code so that our Script Include meets the code policy, we have to make sure that whole functionality persists and test it with any integration that is somehow using this function. It is not

Hlavní práce70801_kada02.pdf, 3.9 MB Stáhnout

University of Economics in Prague

Faculty of Informatics and Statistics

Implementation and delivery of Integrated IT Service

Management solution using ServiceNow platform

MASTER THESIS

P r o h l á š e n í

Abstract

Keywords

Abstrakt

Klíčová slova:

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Introduction

Topic definition

Goals of master thesis

Reasons for choosing the topic

Target Group

Approach

1 Literature Review

1.1 Literary review of publications

1.2 Literary review of online sources

2 Information Systems (IS)

1.1 History of Information Systems

1.2 Benefits of Having an Information System

1.3 Chapter conclusion

3 Cloud Computing

3.1 Characteristics

3.2 Cloud Delivery Models

3.3 Cloud Deployment Models

3.4 Benefits of Cloud

3.5 Chapter conclusion

4 IT Service Management (ITSM) - theory and concepts

4.1 What is IT Service Management

4.2 Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

4.3 Chapter conclusion

5 ServiceNow

5.1 ServiceNow overview

5.2 Market Positioning

5.3 Platform architecture

5.4 Chapter conclusion

6 Integrations

6.1. Integrations overview

6.2 Web services

6.3 Chapter conclusion

7 ITSM Integration Engine solution

7.1. Background

7.2 Proposal on the Integration Engine reimplementation