Web Services and ITIL Service Management

Enterprises currently faced with the challenge of integrating and extending their investments in sophisticated business applications such as ERP, CRM and Service Desk, are increasingly turning to Web services. As a result, many businesses looking to better leverage their IT assets and provide their organizations with the agility needed to stay competitive in today’s economy are now Web service enabling their IT infrastructure. The ultimate goal of these efforts is to increase enterprise efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and increase profitability.

This article provides an overview of Web services technology and its ability to fulfill enterprise-wide Service Desk integration requirements.

The Case for Web service architectures

Web Services offer an approach to software design where applications are assembled from reusable business components, called services. A service is a software building block that performs a distinct business function – such as creating an incident in a service desk application – through a well-defined interface.

These modular components, or services, are organized in a loosely coupled manner, allowing them to be linked together easily and quickly as business requirements demand. This is in contrast to many tightly coupled architectures that are less flexible and require recompilation when components are modified. An important consequence of loose coupling is that services can run anywhere on the network and are not restricted to specific hardware/operating system platforms.

Web services can be developed in virtually any language, from PHP and Perl through to Java and .NET and are truly platform agnostic. This enables any organization to leverage the skills they already have in-house.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

A service-oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services architected in such a way that facilitates their linking. These services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. The architecture provides support for connecting services to each other.

Although SOA does not require Web services, in practice, Web Services provide the standards upon which today’s SOAs are being built. Key Web services standards include:

• SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) – deals with how an application calls a Web service to perform an operation and return an answer
• WSDL (Web services Description Language) – the XML-based format used to define the interface to a Web Service
• UDDI (Universal Descritpion, Discovery & Integration), – directory of Web services that lets applications find out what services are available to them

Web services for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

Most organizations have complex IT environments consisting of disparate legacy systems, applications, processes, and data sources, which typically interact by a maze of interconnections that are poorly documented and expensive to maintain. These include applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and portals

The need for IT systems to communicate within an organization led to the evolution of enterprise application integration (EAI). EAI is the process of creating an integrated infrastructure for linking disparate systems, applications, and data sources across the corporate enterprise.

While companies have been using EAI solutions with great success independently of Web services and SOA, these solutions take on a much more significant and valuable role when they are plugged into a Web services infrastructure. With the right EAI solution, organizations are able to extend their “legacy” systems (any system that does not support Web services natively) into the new millennium.

What does this all mean for service management?

According to Gartner Research, service and support processes such as incident management have become commoditized within service management tools. This being the case it is no longer necessary to invest in building basic functions when implementing a service management application. Time and effort should be spent ensuring the service and support tool is an active application on the network.

When sales people are chatting to a client whilst accessing the customer details within the CRM tool, they should be able to log a service request within the service management tool without leaving the CRM tool interface. An accounts person who receives payment for a service contract, should be able to update the customer’s contract within the service management tool through the accounts package. Similarly, change requests can be seamlessly created from other applications through a simple web services call.

The ability to achieve such tight integration within a companies business services, make all IT investments more significant and valuable when plugged into a Web Services infrastructure. Implementing a service management tool that is built with the technology that allows for enterprise application integration (EAI), allows organizations to extend their “legacy” systems, and any application that does not support Web services natively, to build a responsive and agile IT service and support environment.

LiveTime Service Desk Integration using Web services

LiveTime provides rich Web services to allow organizations to integrate and extend their existing business systems with their IT service desk operations. With LiveTime, service desk organizations are able to get more value out of their existing resources, and capitalize on their Web services infrastructure more quickly than service desk products without this capability.