The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL),* like other IT service management (ITSM) frameworks, is often applied to the Network Operations Center (NOC) to guide and document its processes, functions, and roles.
ITIL helps IT functions like the NOC organize and operationalize themselves. It offers a playbook of prescriptive and guiding practices that help teams answer questions like:
ITIL’s processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists are neither organization-specific nor technology-specific. Rather, they’re flexible, scalable, and versatile enough to offer generic instruction you can apply to develop your own strategies, deliver your own services, and maintain your own competencies.
While the NOC intersects to some degree with all five processes in the ITIL lifecycle, here we explore that intersection in greater detail for one process in particular: ITIL Service Operation.
Use this guide to understand how ITIL Service Operation is relevant to the NOC, what challenges typically hinder a NOC’s ability to execute ITIL’s processes, and which best practices to look for in a NOC when ITIL alignment is critical.
ITIL Service Operation’s objective overlaps neatly with the NOC’s: Ensuring services are delivered within the agreed-upon service levels.
ITIL offers a clear, consistent, and repeatable workflow NOCs can follow to achieve that objective—the “plays” in the playbook.
When looking for a NOC support partner capable of delivering on ITIL practices, ITIL’s “maturity” levels—grades that signal where an organization, team, or person falls on the ITIL Maturity Model—can be useful for two critical evaluative tasks:
ITIL defines five levels of maturity that correspond to a one- to five-level rating, with level zero indicating a process or function that is entirely absent:
Since each maturity level corresponds with specific definitions and characteristics, this simple rating system can tell you a lot about NOC’s capabilities and its adherence to the ITIL framework.
Many enterprises and large service providers will find the most crucial distinction for a NOC between levels 3 and 4. This is the “dividing line” between an operation measuring and continually optimizing itself from one that is not.
This distinction can be critical as it can significantly impact the quality of support you can expect a NOC to deliver. Simply put, NOCs operating at a level 3 or below can’t demonstrate that they have the systems in place to continually improve themselves and pass those improvements onto their clients through better service. As a result, these less “mature” NOCs typically remain “stuck in place,” unable to see their shortcomings and opportunities, let alone address them.
The takeaway here is especially important for enterprises and service providers: Without a continual improvement program, an immature NOC will likely struggle to meet its current service demands, much less any more stringent demands required of it in the future.
A more “ITIL-mature” NOC, by contrast, can demonstrate that its processes and functions are, in the case of level 4 maturity, “under constant improvement,” or in the case of level 5 maturity, subject to a “self-contained continuous process of improvement.”
You can expect to find a robust Continual Service Improvement (CSI) program integrated into the organization at these higher maturity levels. Some providers even take this a step further, making CSI a component of an even larger Customer Experience Management (CEM) program that stretches continual improvement to all service dimensions.
We’ve broken down ITIL Service Operation into its component functions, explaining how the NOC applies to each, and perhaps more importantly, what to look for in a NOC to ensure it provides the capability and level of ITIL alignment you require.
In large organizations, many events must be managed across the IT infrastructure each day. ITIL clearly states that event management’s objective is to detect these events, analyze them, and determine what action is necessary, if any. Event management also happens to be one of the NOC’s primary responsibilities.
Here, and with each appropriate section below, we identify the common challenges NOCs face and which best practices to look for in a potential NOC support partner.
ITIL defines an incident as an unplanned interruption to a service, a reduction in the quality of a service, or an event that has not yet impacted the service to the customer or user.
ITIL also states that incident management aims “to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operations as quickly as possible.” It’s another core function of the NOC, which relies on recognizing and following incident management best practices to fix what is broken as quickly as possible.
Request fulfillment generally falls outside of the NOC’s purview and instead to the Help Desk or a similar function. Everyday tasks here include resetting passwords, upgrading laptops, and taking on other typical IT requests.
However, NOCs do handle some specific request fulfillment functions, such as carriers’ reasons for outages (RFOs). Following the resolution of an incident, for example, a NOC will often be requested to provide a root-cause analysis or RFO, which requires a call to the carrier. This is a request for additional information about why something happened and a prime example of the very narrow types of request fulfillment that fall to the NOC.
Access Management is another area with a somewhat limited intersection with the NOC.
There are certain tightly-compliant financial and government agencies where, depending on the nature of a support relationship, the NOC must be the conduit for these bodies to access a particular service. In these situations, access management is handled through the NOC.
Effective problem management is an ITIL function that provides greater long-term stability and solves trending incidents at their root.
Although problem management is less “visible” than incident management, it’s just as critical. Very often, problem management isn’t referred to by name but instead asked for by function: “We’re seeing the same set of incidents over and over again—can you help?”
Problem management is an advanced support service you can expect to find with a level 4 or 5 ITIL-mature NOC, one that offers it as a part of a broader CSI or CEM program. Again, this capability is precious, especially at the enterprise and service provider levels as it proactively reduces the number of incidents from occurring in the future.
Read also: How Problem Management Benefits NOC Support
IT Operations Management is mostly outside the NOC’s scope, falling instead to a systems infrastructure team or similar function.
The NOC monitors and controls IT operations, but in an efficient operation with well-defined roles, the work of patching and maintenance is handled by other teams.
ITIL’s Technical Management objective is to provide technical expertise and support for managing the IT infrastructure. This is where a NOC with Tier 2 and 3 staff offers something distinct from Tier 1-only NOCs.
But merely having advanced technical expertise doesn’t necessarily confer any enhanced capabilities. An operational support structure must be in place to ensure those resources are utilized when and where they should be.
Here at INOC, for example, we’ve developed a NOC operations structure to radically transform where and how support activities are managed—both by tier and category. In a matter of months, the value of a useful operational framework like this becomes abundantly clear as support activities steadily migrate to their appropriate tiers, lightening the load on advanced engineers while working and resolving issues faster and more effectively.
Like other proven ITSM frameworks, ITIL helps teams design and deliver services as effectively and efficiently as possible. Whether you’re implementing ITIL internally or integrating with an ITIL-aligned external support function, achieving success requires participation at every level of the organization and guidance from experts with extensive first-hand experience.
By working with a NOC service provider that has seen and solved many ITIL implementation challenges, you can radically improve the performance of your in-house NOC function or turn up outsourced support on a NOC that consistently delivers outstanding service results.
Here at INOC, we help organizations with both of these critical needs through award-winning outsourced NOC support and NOC operations consulting services.
Interested in learning more about ITIL-aligned NOC operations support? Contact us to see how we can help you improve your IT service strategy and NOC support, and be sure to download our free white paper below.
*Originally developed by the UK government’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) - now known as the Cabinet Office - and currently managed and developed by AXELOS, ITIL is a framework of best practices for delivering efficient and effective support services.