Demand management

[Sindhu B1]

Demand Management:

ITIL demand management helps a business understand and predict customer demand for services. Every business is subject to cyclical behavior. According to ITIL, the purpose of demand management is to understand, anticipate, and influence customer demand for services.

This means that demand for services can grow or shrink with the business cycle. In deciding whether to provide a service, IT Service Management must understand the patterns of business activity (PBAs) related to the service. While it is important to avoid having inadequate capacity, excess capacity is also a business risk, involving expense which typically cannot be recovered, since customers cannot be expected to pay for capacity they are not using.

PBAs are typically thought of in terms of transaction volumes. ITIL suggests other factors be considered as well, such as the source of the demand, special needs such as enhanced security, and tolerance for delay. The job of demand management is to identify appropriate PBAs and to associate them with user profiles (UPs). This becomes important input to the capacity management process in the Service Design lifecycle phase.

As a process, it is part of the stage of the ITIL lifecycle. Service strategy determines which services to offer to prospective customers or markets. The decisions that are made in the service strategy stage affect the service catalog, the business processes, the service desk, the required capacity, and the financial requirements of the service provider.

As part of the service strategy stage, demand management rationalizes and optimizes the use of IT resources. It ensures that the amount of technical and human resources that has been budgeted matches the expected demand for the service. If the prediction is too low, the agreed-upon service levels may not be delivered. If the predictions are too high, resources will have been allocated to a service that will not be used (or paid for). Demand management bridges the gap between service design, capacity management, and business relationship management to ensure that the predictions are accurate.

Demand management is a process within ITIL that is more supportive of other processes than a self-contained process. Unlike incident management, for example, the activities inside demand management are not visible to the customer. When service demand is not properly balanced, it affects nearly every part of the ITIL lifecycle.