Scenario
A clothing manufacturer has made a decision to supplement factory-based retail outlets by opening a series of stores at out-of-town shopping malls.
The internal IT organization provides support to many mission-critical business systems for both the manufacturing and retail operations. It must increase its portfolio of services and service options to meet the planned new expansion. Typically, the business is subject to seasonal patterns of demand, which recently have begun to exceed the capability of some of the IT services. This has led to periods of poor performance of some of the critical systems and therefore to degraded service quality. In periods of minimal demand, there is a surplus of capacity and performance is optimal.
There is concern that the additional business demand from the new stores will exacerbate these service performance issues.
The board of directors, made up of representatives from each business unit, has asked for a review of the business supply and demand issues currently being faced by the IT organization. Many service management processes have been implemented including service portfolio management and capacity management. However, IT does not have a demand management process.
Additionally, performance levels on many of the supporting services have remained unchanged for the past 3 years, even though some may now be less relevant to the overall performance of the critical services.
Refer to the Scenario.
The review of the supply and demand issues concluded that the implementation of a demand management process could help the IT organization address the issues. Which one of the following options provides the BEST solution to both the problems currently being faced and those related to the proposed expansion?

• A. The service portfolio should be reviewed and an analysis carried out of each business unit's requirements to understand their current usage of the IT services and where seasonal variations lead to fluctuations in usage.
  Discussions should take place with the business units to impose limits within specific time periods for each business unit's usage of IT services.
  Work with business relationship management and capacity management to develop long term plans to meet the extra demand resulting from the company's expansion plans.
• B. An analysis should be carried out of each business unit's patterns of business activity (PBA), and appropriate services for each business unit selected from the service catalogue.
  In conjunction with the finance department, a revised cost model should be introduced to allow for the fluctuation in usage and costs.
  Differential charging should be introduced to address the issues of service quality.
• C. The service portfolio should be reviewed and the business unit's cumulative service usage should be reviewed, monitored and analyzed.
  Work with the business to develop short-term measures to manage demand for the IT services, such as delayed or batch processing of retail transactions.
  Service levels should be reviewed to take into account changes to supporting service performance targets and, where applicable, agreements should be updated through change management.
• D. The service portfolio should be reviewed and an analysis carried out of each business unit's requirements in order to understand their patterns of business activity (PBA) and corresponding usage of the IT services.
  Differentiated service offerings should be developed to match PBA; this will make better use of available IT resources. Supporting service performance targets should be amended to reflect these changes.
  Work with business relationship management and capacity management to develop long term plans to meet the extra demand resulting from the company's expansion plans.

Scenario
A financial services organization has undergone a period of rapid expansion. From its operating base it has expanded to serve customers in over 25 countries spread around the globe. There are plans to enter more markets in the next 12 months.
The key stakeholders involved in the global expansion project have briefed the chief information officer (CIO) on the plans. They have identified IT service performance as one of the major threats to the plan. The CIO has been under pressure from the board due to poor IT service performance in the previous six months. The chief concern has been significant performance variations in network connectivity and communications.
The organization currently has three contracts with different local external suppliers in operating markets supporting three IT network hubs. Whilst the suppliers are all happy to follow local internal IT processes, getting the three to work together on incidents or changes has proved increasingly difficult.
A number of outages have resulted in a blame culture where even the local internal IT departments have been sympathetic to their service providers, resulting in strained relationships between these internal departments at an operational level.
Other issues encountered at one or more locations have included:
* Long-term service improvements have been sacrificed in favour of short-term fixes that avoid the payment of contract penalties by the suppliers
* Changes in ownership of the customer relationship by the suppliers
The CIO believes that a lack of communication between suppliers has been the key cause of failures.
All three supplier contracts are due for renewal in the next 12 months. After consultation, a decision to re-tender for network services has been taken by IT, and approved by the CIO and the board of directors.
Refer to the Scenario.
When considering suppliers, which one of the following options would BEST ensure that network issues are addressed in order to meet the needs of the financial services organization?

• A. Consideration should be given to entering into a partnership with a single supplier where mutual trust and a good relationship can be established.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined point of ownership within each country to manage all local operational issues.
  A risk-reward framework should be mapped out as an incentive for the supplier to solve local issues.
  A strategic alignment should be sought with the supplier where values, goals and cultural fit are similar to that of the financial services organization.
  The supplier should set up its own dedicated global account management team to deal with transition and on-going issues by working with local IT support teams.
• B. Consideration should be given to entering into a partnership with three local suppliers who have worked together before in similar circumstances. This will ensure both communication and local cultural differences are addressed.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined local point of ownership with responsibility granted for operational management of issues.
  The threat of contractual penalties should be removed to encourage suppliers to think longer term about sustainable service improvements.
  Suppliers will commit to the use of local IT processes to ensure compliance and good communication.
  Suppliers are to ensure that staff engaged in the contract (in particular the account managers and customer service managers) are fully ITIL trained so they understand and can implement service management best practice disciplines.
• C. Consideration should be given to entering into a partnership with a single supplier where mutual trust and a good relationship can be established.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined point of ownership with local responsibility granted for operational management of issues.
  A long-term, risk-reward framework should be mapped out to encourage the supplier to work towards sustainable service improvements instead of shorter-term quick fixes.
  A strategic alignment should be sought with the supplier where values, goals and cultural fit are similar to that of the financial services organization.
  Implementation of a joint partnership team to initially ensure a smooth transition of the service to the new supplier and to subsequently manage on-going service improvement.
• D. Consideration should be given to re-contracting with the three current local suppliers. There is no suggestion that they are technically incompetent; it appears to be communication and local cultural differences that cause problems.
  Supplier management should have a single, defined local point of ownership with responsibility granted for operational management of issues.
  The threat of contractual penalties should be removed to encourage suppliers to think longer term about sustainable service improvements.
  Communication issues should be addressed by ensuring all incidents are reported to a single global service desk that the financial institution should implement.
  Suppliers are to ensure that staff engaged in the contract (in particular the account managers and customer service managers) are fully ITIL trained so they understand and can implement service management best practice disciplines.