Assignment 2 Week 3 : ITIL

I watched this video to get the fundamentals of ITIL in an attempt to get the information necessary to complete the assignment. The following is a summary of what I learnt.

What is ITIL

A set of guidelines for IT service management, best practice processes for delivering IT services to customers, both internal (in the company) and external.

Its not a standard,just best practice guidelines.

Why is it popular?

  1. Vendor Neutral
  2. Non-prescriptive
  3. Best practice based on experience

Why is it successful?

  • Delivers value to customer
  • Integrates service strategy with business strategy and the customers needs
  • Measures, monitors an optimizes IT services, to improve performance and reduce costs
  • Manages the IT budget efficiently
  • Enables standard approach across the business
  • Supports the achievement of success
  • Improves interaction with customer
  • Optimize and reduce costs

Structure

ITIL has 5 modules in its life-cycle:

  1. Service Strategy
  2. Service Design
  3. Service Transition
  4. Service Operation
  5. Continual Service Improvement

ITIL-v3-lifecycle

What is a service?

ITIL defines service as a means of delivering value to a customer.

This is accomplished with a specific set of processes which deliver the service, that is how the service is provided.

ITIL also defines Service providers, they help us provide the service and are divided into 3 groups.

Untitled

Service Strategy

Objectives:

  • identify the services of the business
  • Define service quality
  • create and document value for customers
  • Differentiate value from competition
  • Financial Management
  • Allocation of services

Purpose: to become and remain valuable to customers.

Consider the following:

  • Perspective: the vision of the business
  • Position: how you want to compete
  • Planning how to get to desired position
  • Patterns: actions to meet objectives

Sets the goals, policies, guidelines, processes and measurement of performance.

Includes:

  • Demand management
  • Service Portfolio management
  • Financial management
  • Business Relationship management

Service Design

  • design new/modified/improved services
  • The plan for the service
  • Efficient and effective processes
  • Based on Redundancy, Scalability and continuity
  • Identify and manage risks
  • Contribute to overall improvement of the IT service

Results in improved governance, performance, quality and reduces cost and time to deployment.

Includes:

  • Service Catalogue management
  • Service Level management
  • Supplier management
  • Availability management
  • IT Security management
  • Capacity management
  • IT Continuity management

Service Transition

  • Planning to establish the new or changed service in production – this fits the first criterion of the assessment “Identify and describe how the framework provides for the implementation of the emerging technology
  • Ensure minimum impact on existing business – this fits with second part of the assessment “Determine how each framework can be used to identify infrastructure affected by the emerging technology”
  • Effective us of tech and apps to deliver the service
  • Service transition practices

The purpose is to build, test and deploy a service into production.

Includes 5 processes:

  1. Transition planning and support (costs, quality and time scale)
  2. Change management
  3. Service asset and configuration manager
  4. Release and deployment management
  5. Knowledge management

Service Operation

  • Maintain the stability of a service
  • Minimize the impact of a service outage
  • Effective and efficient delivery and support of a service

The purpose is to control and carry out the activities and processes to deliver the service at the agreed levels.

Incident, problem, event, service request and access management.

Continual Service Improvement

  • Identify and implement improvements
  • Continuously look to improve service effectiveness and cost effectiveness
  • This section will assist with the third criterion of the assessment “In each framework– describe how the framework facilitates the review of emerging technology?” start time 2:49 in the video
  • It leads to gradual quality improvement
  • Uses monitoring and reporting to identify ares of improvement
  • Improvements can be in organizational structures, resourcing, partners, technology, staff skill and communication

Uses Critical Success Factor and Key Performance Index to audit the service which allows for areas of improvement to be found.

Baselines are used to establish an initial data point.

3 Types of metrics:

  1. Technology metrics – the components and the app
  2. Process metrics – KPIs and activity metrics determine the health of a process
  3. Service Metrics – the overall result of the service

Summary

A very business focused framework on how to manage IT services in a business. Not specific to Network Infrastructure which is the core syllabus of the course. I think this would be better taught in a SYD course.

Assignment 2: Week 2

The emerging Tech

This is a weird part of this assignment, first, we are expected to choose an emerging technology, which we have.

The brief for the assignment then states the following:

“Produce a comparison of ITIL and Cobit5 frameworks in their facilitation of the development of effective implementation of an emerging IT technology in an organisation.

In detail, identify infrastructure requirements for an emerging organizational technology.”

So we have to discuss and compare ITIL and Cobit5, great, there is a marking schedule we can follow to do this.

But there is no marking schedule for the “Identify Infrastructure requirements” – so no marks for this section of the report. A discussion with the tutor recommended a brief discussion of the infrastructure requirements would be adequate and marking would just be a tick box.

This is a weird way of doing an assignment, nowhere in the assessment is there any discussion of marks given or removed for doing or not doing this task.

ITIL vs Cobit 5

This week I will look deeper into ITIL and Cobit5.

There are 3 sections in the marking schedule

  1. Identify and describe how ITIL provides for the implementation of the emerging Technology
  2. Determine how ITIL can be used to identify infrastructure affected by the emerging technology
  3. In each framework – describe how ITIL facilitates the review of emerging technology?

So for the purposes of the assessment we have a team of 3, so it makes sense to choose 1 section each and investigate how ITIL and Cobit5 will assist with the task.

Sakar will work on 1, Jeff on 2 and myself on 3.

ITIL

According to AXELOS “ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. Organizations use its proven best practices to run their business from strategy to daily reality. Millions of IT professionals successfully drive their career thanks to the ITIL certification scheme. ITIL offers common concepts and vocabulary, aligned with international standards, to ease collaboration in a multicultural and interconnected environment. ITIL turns the challenges of the digital age into competitive edge.”

The ITIL V3 service lifecycle covers the five key stages of a service:

  • Service strategy defines the policies and objectives relating to the value of the service for the business, securing a return on investment through practical decision-making and the planning of required assets.
  • Service design then handles the creation of services, and their evolution or withdrawal, ensuring the consideration of all aspects, and the views of all stakeholders, to achieve a smooth build and efficient operations.
  • Service transition provides the planning and management that is necessary to bring designed services into production. It ensures the quality of the service, and stakeholder satisfaction during implementation.
  • Service operation carries out recurring activities that support day-to-day business.
  • Continual Service Improvement (CSI) ensures rigorous quality checks are conducted to ensure the service process is improved consistently.

From this and the video on ITIL presented in class it seems that The Continual Service Improvement is the first stage to explore to do my part:

“describe how ITIL facilitates the review of emerging technology?”

So I will now look at CSI in the ITIL framework and find out how to integrate this with reviewing the Biometric acess control.

Not an easy task, using the supplied materials, a lot of reading to find nuggets of information.

Cobit 5

I will have to find a similar element in the Cobit framework which does the same.

Week 13: 21 October

Reports

The Project Report

This weeks focus will be on the final project report.

The project build is as far as I need to present an end-end solution for the Poster Evening, so I will use this week to build the required 15000 word report.

With the experience of writing reports during the last 3 years of study, I don’t anticipate any issues with this aspect of the project.

We have also been provided with a template to build the report.

The first step as always is to open my existing report template and use the provided project template to add in the headers needed. I can then slowly add the content.

For the first stage of this project, the research aspect, I have written a report on the Azure services available that may be useful for the project, and this report will be added as an Appendix to the Project Report.

The Client Report

This formed the first stage of my project.

I researched the Microsoft Azure Cloud services which could be used for developing the project.

As the project progressed this report continued to be added to and this week I have completed the final report with a summary and recommendations.

The following is the final summary:

Summary

Microsoft Azure Cloud has the services required to enable the prediction of an event based on classification of an Image by a Custom Vision model.

Unfortunately, this platform proved to be unable to easily handle the scale required to analyze a full-length rugby video using the steps that were built for the Proof of Concept and will require an alternate approach to succeed.

Google Cloud Services has a Video Intelligence service which on initial inspection appears to be an ideal solution for this project and I would recommend further exploration of this service going forward.

Friday

The final day at the workplace.

Part of this week has been a bit of fun for me.

On Monday a new computer arrived in the office. I have been offered and have accepted a job here as a Developer, an interesting title and job for a networking major! And as part of the process my future employer has ordered a new computer fro me. A high powered Lenovo ThinkPad which will eventually be connected to 2 large screen monitors, with a wireless mouse and keyboard.

So I got to play a little.

Installing all the software I will need, took a fraction of the time I spent in the last few years on installs, more CPU cores, a higher speed CPU and much more RAM makes a computer sprint compared to my walking speed laptop.

I am also copying all my work from the old computer to the new laptop, a not inconsiderable task using 2 external hard drives.

All the while my final report is slowing coming together.

Week 12: 14 October

An Update

The last 2 weeks were a mid-semester break, so I had a break from blogging.

I continued to work on project during the break and continued to keep the same hours at the company I am visiting for this work experience.

I now have a Full-stack, beginning to end solution to the proof of concept. unfortunately due to limitations in the Azure platform there have been changes and bugs.

1. The first stage Windows app converts a video to frames and uploads the image to storage.

Capture

2. The second stage Azure Function app, is triggered by an image (blob) arriving in the container and uses Custom Vision to classify the image and adds the image information to an XML document.

sendToCV

3. The third stage use Azure Logic app (a pipeline) to email this XML document to my email address.

logicApp

Issues

Azure Function Apps cannot scale effectively to convert a video to images, it times out after 10 mins, the maximum an app can run in Azure. So the conversion is now on a local computer and the images are uploaded to storage blobs.

The platform also struggles to scale when reacting to hundreds of images arriving in a storage container at rapid intervals. A “serverless” function app actually runs on a small 1 CPU, 1.5 Mb RAM device and a maximum of 200 devices will scale out for the function app, not effective for large volumes of images.

And sometimes it just doesn’t trigger for no apparent reason.

This breaks the classification stage of the process, it works on small scale with minutes of video but not with larger quantities.

And the images are also not analyzed on a “first come, first classified” basis, but in a seemingly random order due to the nature of a Function App and how the triggering process works, so the resultant XML document is an unordered list of images.

disorderedDoc

But I have a fix for this, I have learnt how to programmatically manipulate an XDocument, I can order the document based on the image name, the names suffix is always a number starting from 00-00-00.

Day 1 – 4

This week was a “break” from the proof of concept App. The app is as good as I can make it within the limitations of Azure Function Apps and a final product will need to rely on a different approach, such as using container instances to run the code or an always on server to run the app.

This week I have researched “Motion” and how AI and ML figure out scene and shot changes in a video. Its all about the frames!

The video is actually analyzed frame by frame with a neural net trained to measure differences between a frame and the previous frame, small  changes equal the same scene or shot and larger changes a different shot or scene.

Even more exciting, I found the Google Cloud Services (GCS).

VI

There is a service called AutoML Video Intelligence(AutoML VI), an AI video service which does pretty much what I want.

GoogleCloud

I can upload videos to GCS storage and import the videos into  AutoML VI and train a model to recognise scenes in a video e.g. scrums and line-outs. The service can then be called via an API and will go through an entire video and produce a document listing the scenes found, the start and end times.

Video Intelligence

There is one disadvantage here and that is the time it will take to watch rugby videos and extract relevant scrum and line-out clips for uploading and training.

I will now need to discuss with my future boss and his clients, this exciting finding and persuade them to move from Azure cloud to GCS.

Final Stage

The next step is to complete a report of this project and prepare for the poster night.

Images

Some additional images of the action.

The Function App fired on my VS debugger, but not on Azure for some unknown reason.

FunctionApp

The Logic App with green success ticks.

LogicAppRan

An email arrived.

EmailArrived

The XML document.

XMLFile

 

Assignment 2: Week 1

Emerging Technologies, Critical Comparative Study ITIL, Cobit5

The start of assignment 2 for NET701.

We are a group of 3 students who have to investigate an emerging technology and using 2 frameworks, ITIL and Cobit5, we have to produce a report on the implementation of this technology into a business. The report is a joint effort.

What sounds like a report to a manager to show off the new tech. and discuss the benefits and implementation into the company.

This blog is an individual submission for the assignment.

Task 1

The first task was to choose an emerging technology to discuss.

What is an emerging technology?

https://i0.wp.com/www.activistpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/emerging-tech.jpg

According to Business Dictionary, emerging technology can be defined a:

“New technologies that are currently developing or will be developed over the next five to ten years, and which will substantially alter the business and social environment. These include information technology, wireless data communication, man-machine communication, on-demand printing, bio-technologies, and advanced robotics.”

Tech Republic lists the following as the top 10 emerging technologies in 2019:

  1. IoT
  2. Artificial Intelligence
  3. 5G
  4. Serverless Computing
  5. Blockchain
  6. Robotics
  7. Biometrics
  8. 3D Printing
  9. Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality
  10. Drones

We had a brainstorming session as a group and decided to use Biometrics as the emerging technology for our report.

https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cse571-11/ftp/biomet/fig4.jpg

Biometrics—including face, fingerprint, and retina scans—are becoming mainstream methods for verifying identity and can be used by a company for recognising its employees , e.g. for access control to a building.

https://d1902livswy8rb.cloudfront.net/dimg/800x800/dimg/biometrics_facial_recognition.jpg

Task 2

So what are ITIL and Cobit5?

They are frameworks or guiidelines a business can use to facilitate the effective implementation of a new technology into the organisation.

ITIL

According to Cherwell,

ITIL

“Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is a  set of IT best practices designed to assist businesses in aligning their IT services with customer and business needs.”

The objectives of the ITIL framework includes delivering value, meeting customer needs and achieving business goals.

ITIL provides guidelines on how to implement and measure these objectives.

Cobit5

From Wikipedia:

“COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) is a good-practice framework created by international professional association ISACA for information technology (IT) management and IT governance. COBIT provides an implementable “set of controls over information technology and organizes them around a logical framework of IT-related processes and enablers.”

The framework defines the generic processes for management of IT, with each process having an input, an output, key activities, objectives and performance measures.

https://www.simplilearn.com/ice9/article_detailed_content_img/cobit5-principles.jpg

Task 3

The final report will discuss the following topics:

  1. Identify and describe how the framework provides for the implementation of the emerging Technology (300 words)
  2. Determine how each framework can be used to identify infrastructure affected by the emerging technology (300 words)
  3. In each framework – describe how the framework facilitates the review of emerging technology? (300 words)

Task 4

we have to produce a Work Load Table

Task Task Description  Person Start Date/time End Date/time
Google Doc creation Create a shared doc for the assignment Stewart 17/10/2019 17/10/2019
Choose an emerging Technology Decide on a technology we are going to implement All 17/10/2019

11h00

17/10/2019

13h00

Blogs Weekly blog posts Individual Weekly

17/10/2019

Weekly

21/11/2019

Task 5

This is a link to our Google document that we will use to colaborate as a team and build the report.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KqvixdoUNJ9aTs9ju0rEHntCYIIlY7EF5jugAZpYqug/edit?usp=sharing