ABSTRACT
Continual service improvement ensures that services are aligned with changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to IT services that support business processes. The performance of the IT service provider is continually measured and improvements are made to processes, IT services and IT infrastructure in order to increase efficiency, effectiveness and cost effectiveness. This chapter considers how continual service improvement is applied to minimize the risk that the application service reliability, latency, quality, and availability delivered to cloud service users will be compromised by a cloud service customer's (CSC's) efforts to deliver new services and value faster and improve operational efficiency. It focuses on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle, the seven-step improvement model and the data-information-knowledge-wisdom model. Continual service improvement seeks to identify and deploy specific refinements to an organization's policies, processes, and practices that produce reproducible, sustainable improvements to the organization's performance. Standard policies, processes, and practices establish a baseline context for execution of PDCA.
