Planet SCM

The impending release of the third version of the IT Infrastructure Library has a lot of people talking.

A recent edition of CIO offers  a story by Laurianne McLaughlin that serves as a good primer on the history of ITIL, the current version, and what improvements can be expected when the next version is released in June.

To boil it down, the article talks about ITIL being somewhat pigeon-holed as a best-practices framework for solving specific operational needs, as opposed to a strategic tool for adding business value through improved service delivery.

One of the flaws with the current version of ITIL in the eyes of people like Lee Hayes, vice president of enterprise technologies at SLM, the mortgage lender known as Sallie Mae, is it is "very descriptive, but not prescriptive."

The U.K Office of Government Commerce (ITIL's creator) hopes to remedy complaints like those with the new version. Trimmed down from the current eight books to just five core books, the updated version boasts more real-world examples, best-practice models and metrics - and emphasizes the entire IT lifecycle and ROI issues. The new version also addresses how to apply ITIL principles in outsourced operations, a growing facet of today's IT operations.

According to independent ITIL consultant Malcolm Fry, one of the benefits of implementing an ITIL framework is the ability to get to the bottom of an IT problem. "Looking for root causes is now important - you just can't keep fixing things," he said.

Overall, as George Spalding, a vice president for the consultancy Pink Elephant, stated, "ITIL drives the strategic direction that IT is about services, and it provides a definition of success."

If you are among the more than 97% of organizations that are either considering or are engaged in implementing the ITIL framework, the improvements in the third version should provide the additional guidance necessary to further accelerate your efforts.

In last week's edition of Processor, Kurt Marko wrote on ITSM & ITIL Best Practices.

Marko did a good job giving an overview of ITSM and ITIL and some of the other key acronyms surrounding this subject. There are a few points I wish he'd expanded further though.

He states that the chief benefit of adopting service-oriented best practices is "to work smarter and more efficiently." While true, ITSM has greater value, in my opinion, in the increased security and availability it delivers. While maximizing staff value has obvious benefit, it is the value of reducing downtime due to uncontrolled change or the exploit of a vulnerability that really brings value to organizations.

I agree with the three barriers to adoption Marko mentions - lack of understanding, resistance to change and resistance to documentation. Documentation, in particular, should not be a stumbling block. There are automated solutions for documenting infrastructures (including those provided by Ecora, the company I founded in 1999 - to provide full disclosure).

One point made in the article by Michael Tainter, ITSM practice manager at Forsythe Solutions Group that I'd challenge is it isn't easy to quantify the value of adopting ITSM. If, as he suggests, you're basing value on productivity or customer satisfaction, than it may be more difficult to get a hard ROI figure - although I'd think productivity should be measurable.

We're seeing customers finding measurable value in adopting IT Best Practices, particularly in the area of identifying and remediating misconfigurations.  With appropriate configuration and change management processes, the number of help desk tickets are measurably reduced (more than 30% of some customers) and those tickets that are created can be resolved in half the time required without effective processes in place. In these instances, the real value isn't necessarily in the time savings from a help desk perspective, but in the uninterrupted services IT is providing for the business and, ultimately, the customer.

The value of ITSM and ITIL also extends into the area of regulatory compliance. For any organization that is subject to audits already and has been responding using a combination of scripts and spreadsheets, adopting ITSM or ITIL Best Practices should again provide substantial value in the savings received on audit preparation and the length the auditor must be on-site to gather information.

If you haven't taken a serious look at what ITSM or ITIL adoption could do for your organization, I highly recommend you take a hard look now.