- 1. E-Guide Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service
ManagementPerhaps the most important advantage of ITIL is that it
changes IT to a proac- tive rather than a reactive organization.
The British government developed ITIL in the late 1980s as a
standard operating model for the delivery and manage- ment of IT
services. As IT has become more integral to the business practices
of corporations, the requirement for standard operation procedures
has bal- looned. One important feature of ITIL is that it provides
a dictionary of terms that allows a company to use a common
parlance. Interest in the British-born sys- tem has gotten another
push from federal regulations, such as the Sarbanes- Oxley Act, as
ITIL provides a way of delineating responsibilities and the organi-
zation of IT within a company. This SearchCIO.com E-guide provides
an overview of ITIL and how IT organiza- tions are applying it to
improve IT service delivery and drive business success. Sponsored
By:
2. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service ManagementTable
of ContentsE-Guide Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service
Management Table of Contents: ITIL, A Data Centers Yellow Brick
Road.........................................................................3ITIL
version 3: Perfecting processes to solve
problems..................................................6ITSM
measurement in vogue in the
enterprise...............................................................8Five
steps to creating an ITIL-friendly corporate
culture............................................... 11A
practical approach to implementing ITIL
practices.....................................................
12The FAQs on ITIL version
3............................................................................................14Resources
from
HP.........................................................................................................16
Sponsored by:Page 2 of 16 3. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT
Service Management ITIL, A Data Centers Yellow Brick Road ITIL, A
Data Centers Yellow Brick Road May 16, 2006 | Johanna Ambrosio,
Contributor, SearchCIO.com Using the IT Infrastructure Library
(ITIL) is akin to building a house from a takeout menu, according
to industry watchers and implementers alike. Although ITIL, a set
of best practices standards for IT service management, does provide
the overall framework for process improvement, it's up to the
individual company to cherry-pick the individual components that
make the most sense for any given implementation. "It's more of a
guideline than a prescription," said Tim Norton, founder of
Simalytic Solutions LLC, a Colorado Springs, Colo., consultancy
that focuses on capacity management and application response time.
Norton, who is beginning to do some modeling work with the ITIL
processes, said it's important to know going in that "you're going
to have to put in a lot of effort" for ITIL to really pay off.
Elbow grease requiredAccording to adherents, it's worth the work.
Maria Metcalf, director of program management at UnitedHealth Group
in Minneapolis, has been implementing the change-management piece
of ITIL at the giant insurer. It took about a year to learn the
ITIL lingo, have individuals become certified in the process,
choose a tool and then actually do it. The firm focused on
processes it did not already have in place, Metcalf said, and
change management was selected because the company wanted to
replace old tools. "We had customized our tool so much that we
could no longer continue to build on it without rewriting it," she
explained. As part of its ITIL efforts, UnitedHealth Group has
implemented a configuration management database that it con- tinues
to populate with data. In July, the company will go live with the
incident- and problem-reporting processes. Metcalf said ITIL has
resulted in fewer disruptions to major systems "because of
well-planned changes and an abili- ty to connect all the right
organizations when a change is requested. We have hundreds of
applications and Web sites, so there's a steady stream of changes
happening." She said she's compiling the statistics to back up this
claim, but isn't yet ready to go public with specific results. Used
'round the worldITIL was originally created by the Office of
Government Commerce (OGC) in London, which was under a mandate by
then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to improve IT efficiency
throughout the government. In 1991, ITIL became a formal process
that defines service desk, release management, configuration
management, capacity management and other IT areas. Sponsored by:
Page 3 of 16 4. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service
Management ITIL, A Data Centers Yellow Brick Road As European
organizations have adopted ITIL, it has jumped to their American
subsidiaries and now other interest- ed parties as well. ITIL is
being used worldwide, by dozens of corporations. The major
ITIL-related user organiza- tion in the United States is called the
IT Service Management Forum (IT-SMF), and its board of directors
reads like a Who's Who of Corporate America. Representatives from
American Express, UPS and Proctor & Gamble, among others, are
listed. ITIL is also continually being refined and updated. Some 34
different ITIL books were published between 1992 and 1998. The
eight current core titles are available in three different
versions: CD-ROM, book and intranet license. Standardizing on geek
speakSid Finehirsh, founder and CEO of the CMX Group, a consultancy
in New York that helps clients sort through and implement ITIL,
said he feels the framework's greatest value is in enforcing
precision for how ITers speak about and understand the
infrastructure. "ITIL offers a lot of precision in vocabulary that
we've been using for years. In ITIL, an 'incident' is different
from a 'problem,' which is different from a 'known error.' We've
commonly used these terms interchangeably, but I find it very
appealing that there are definitions for what these terms mean, how
they're dif- ferent and how they're linked." Still, as Finehirsh
pointed out, that precision carries a cost. "It's one of the
challenges of ITIL: If you're going to do it, you need a critical
mass of ITIL speakers. Just training one person isn't going to get
you any results -- you need to understand the language and
processes needed to improve the IT infrastructure." Vendor
hypeAnother caution, according to observers, is to beware of vendor
hype. While there are many products around that are "ITIL-friendly"
or "ITIL aware," there is no single ITIL standard to adhere to. So
anyone that claims to be "ITIL- adherent" is stretching the truth,
at best. The best way to get started, most agree, is to educate
yourself about ITIL. The OGC and IT-SMF sites, among oth- ers, have
some good primers. Another possibility is to take an
ITIL-foundations course, being offered by many con- sultancies,
software vendors and others. It's also helpful to understand how
ITIL is different from other quality-improvement processes. Unlike
ISO 9000, ITIL is not a standard. And where Six Sigma is a
top-to-bottom activity for pretty much all the piece-parts of a
company, ITIL is specific to IT. As Finehirsh said, ITIL "doesn't
require you to re-engineer everything in the organi- zation." What
ITIL does provide, he added, is "an approach. It's a starting
point, a guideline. It has a ways to go" before every single piece
of the IT infrastructure is fully defined. "But I think it's hugely
valuable, beyond a lot of the pre- viously hyped things we've been
doing. ITIL is a substantial and mature approach to improving cost
containment and service delivery." Sponsored by:Page 4 of 16 5. HP
SETTING THE EXAMPLE IN ITSM LEADERSHIP AND COMMITMENT. HP is one of
the key organizations that helped shape ITSM starting nearly a
decade ago. HP professionals helped define ITIL, and today, we have
more than 5,000 ITIL-Certified Professionals and over 500 Master
ITIL-Certified Professionals worldwide. We even proved ITSMs value
to ourselves, implementing it across our own worldwide organization
before offering ITSM solutions to our customers.HPS ITSM LEADERSHIP
HP ITSM Software: Installations in all Fortune 50 enterprises HP
ITSM Reference Model: Based on ITIL and 12 years experience HP ITSM
Education: Over 100,000 professionals trained on ITSM and HP
Software HP Services: Over 14 years experience in ITSM Co-author of
the ITIL V3 material Learn more at
www.hp.com/go/ITServicemanagement 2007 Hewlett-Packard Development
Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change
without notice. 6. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service
Management ITIL version 3: Perfecting processes to solve problems
ITIL version 3: Perfecting processes to solve problems July 01,
2006 | James Connolly, Contributor, SearchCIO.comThere's a sense of
momentum surrounding the Information Technology Infrastructure
Library, commonly known as ITIL. The third release of the library
is due out by year's end. The International Standards Organization
(ISO) is aligning its new standard for IT service management,
ISO/IEC 20000 with ITIL. Consultants and vendors are pro- moting
ITIL certification. And an estimated 200,000 people in the U.S.many
of them midlevel IT managershave taken basic ITIL training. In the
end, ITIL is a bunch of books. Version 2's eight books are being
reworked into five but will be supplemented by sources such as Web
pages and CD-ROMs. The books, training programs, certifications and
consulting services are designed to define how IT should approach
services such as help desk, problem resolution and change and
release management. ITIL gives you a structure for setting up
processes, and it gives you a sense of the order in which you are
going to develop your processes if you are going to have an
effective delivery model for your customers. It doesn't tell you
how to do any of those processes. It says that this is the process
you need to have, and basically forces you to come up with a method
for doing that process, said Don Rolph, associate director of
information services at Amgen Inc. in West Greenwich, R.I. Rolph
began using ITIL almost four years ago. Rolph said one example of
ITIL's benefit is how it guided his organization to a comprehensive
system for tracking incidents. One result is that Amgen Rhode
Island is comfortable with an average 2.5-day backlog for problem
reso- lution. Filling in the gapsYet, the first two ITIL versions
had some holes that the coming revision is intended to address.
Consultant David Pultorak, CEO of Pultorak and Associates Ltd. in
Seattle, contributed to the first two ITIL versions, which continue
to be owned by the Office of Government Commerce in the U.K.
Pultorak outlines some of the gaps in the previous versions. ROI.
There's an assumption that it's self-evident that if you implement
best practices you will reduce costs and gain efficiencies. That's
obviously faulty because you can't get off the ground in getting
things done unless you can point to the value of a discrete
initiative. You need to be able to show on an ongoing basis that
you are saving money or increasing the business's capability,
Pultorak said. He also says the new release will emphasize the need
to prove ROI on an ITIL or other IT project, and will feature case
studies showing how others have done it. Sponsored by:Page 6 of 16
7. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service Management ITIL
version 3: Perfecting processes to solve problems Inconsistencies.
Version 2 of ITIL suffered from inconsistent definitions for key
terms, leaving IT staff in different groups to interpret terms in
conflicting ways, according to Pultorak. The books in version 2
also lacked consistency in depth of coverage from topic to topic.
They are addressing it by being explicit in the way stuff is
written, having oversight editing and giving a clear mandate to the
authors to say, 'These are the structures we are looking for; here
is the depth of coverage we are looking for, three pages on this,
and two pages on that.' Changes in IT. The content in the first two
versions of ITIL was static, and didn't easily reflect the dynam-
ic changes in the IT community, Pultorak said. In Version 3, the
books will contain what is seen as timeless, more general content,
while Web vehicles, CD-ROMs and special publications will address
more dynamic issues. For example, the core principles of change
management are unlikely to change, so those can be covered in the
books, while some emerging techniques may be addressed on the Web
or in a special publi- cation. Lifecycle. The concepts in the
previous books didn't follow the lifecycle formats commonly used in
IT, such as a progression through strategy, design,
transition/production, operation and continuous improvement,
according to Pultorak. He cites the example of Version 2's coverage
of service support and service delivery but not service
development, which should be a precursor to delivery and support.
ITIL should help IT syn- chronize its services with business
services, and better support the business, he said. New audienceThe
new release is expected to serve a growing audience. Peter O'Neill,
an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc., said
ITIL, which is already well established in Europe, is drawing more
attention from U.S. companies that want to be compliant with
ISO/IEC 20000. Emphasis on process, not technologyITIL can also
help companies look at how work gets done in IT by breaking the
workflow out of the traditional silos of technology in the IT
group, according to Don Casson, president of management consultancy
Evergreen Systems Inc. in Robesonia, Va. You can't look at the work
from an efficiency or execution of quality standpoint if it's
buried in a silo-to-silo hand pass. That's the gist of the
problem,'' Casson said. He added that managers who take the day and
a half of basic ITIL training become advocates for ITIL because
they see that process matters more than technology. Many of those
advocates are middle managers and directors who bring the message
back to their company. You get it going up the organization instead
of down; it's a grassroots thing that starts to put pressure on as
it goes up,'' Casson said. Sponsored by: Page 7 of 16 8. Benefits
of the ITIL Approach to IT Service ManagementITSM measurement in
vogue in the enterprise ITIL resistanceBut ITIL has to be kept in
perspective. Casson points out that ITIL typically starts at the
help desk and problem resolution, where managers can measure
success. However, when they extend it into areas such as release
management, some companies encounter resist- ance from departments
that may be set in their ways, including their compensation and
rewards systems. It's very common for these people to say, 'Hey,
things are already working fine in my area,' Casson said. Rolph
warns that one danger in how people think of ITIL is they lose
sight of why they are using it. It's easy in ITIL land to get
focused on process at the expense of realizing that the purpose of
this process is to solve a problem, Rolph said. Don't put in place
a process flow that shows how we are going to solve the problem if,
at the end of the day, the problem still remains after we execute
the process. James M. Connolly is a freelance writer based out of
Norwood, Mass. He can be reached at [email protected].
ITSM measurement in vogue in the enterprise July 24, 2006 | Maxine
Kincora, Contributor, SearchCIO.comIT service management (ITSM) has
been embraced as an effective and efficient way to manage
enterprise-level IT stacks and the services they provide.
Unfortunately, too many companies' ITSM implementations
underperform because they're not audited well, if at all.
Naturally, companies want to get plenty of bang for their ITSM
buck, so they're seeking measurement disciplines and tools.
Suddenly performance metrics are back in vogue, like 'flared
trousers,' said Ian Clayton, president of the IT Service Management
Institute in Elk Point, S.D., a consulting and training firm.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no single performance management
framework for us all to use. ITSM methodologies focus on the
results produced for customers, a departure from the traditional IT
systems-cen- tric management. ITSM is really about the shift from
managing IT as stacks of individual components to focusing on
delivering end- to-end services defined by specific service-level
agreements and based on best practice process models such as ITIL,
said Mary Turner, vice president/practice manager at Summit
Strategies Inc. in Boston. Sponsored by: Page 8 of 16 9. Benefits
of the ITIL Approach to IT Service ManagementITSM measurement in
vogue in the enterprise Effectively using ITSM standardsIT
Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of best practices for IT
management, is known as the de facto standard for IT management.
Some organizations use other frameworks, such as Control Objectives
for Information and related Technology (CobiT) or the Microsoft
Operations Framework. The most common mistake made in trying to
measure ITSM success, said Brian Brouillette, vice president of HP
Technology Services, is focusing on IT practices rather than the
ITSM goal of improving business operations and customer results. In
general, good customer results are born of IT practices that ensure
high system and end-to-end application availability and
performance, as well as low total lifecycle cost of IT operations.
These IT deliverables improve cus- tomer service and satisfaction,
reduce business and security risks, cuts operational costs and
enable compliance with multiple regulations. Our general guideline
is 5-10% improvement in operational efficiency in the targeted
areas in year one for an expenditure of no more than 25% of the
savings, Clayton said. Year two is same improvement for 20% of
savings. ITSM measurement targetsWhat areas are typically targeted
when measuring ITSM success? Our sources pointed to growth and
value, costs, risks and communications. Marina Stedman, marketing
director at ITSM solutions vendor Touchpaper Software PLC,
describes the attributes of these key performance indicators
(KPIs): Growth and value: Track revenue growth against IT
investment and utilization, and examine the link between IT
investment and business strategy. Costs: What costs were avoided or
reduced? Did you adhere to your budget? How well did you re-use and
share services related to infrastructure, architecture such as
networks, customer databases, hardware, service desks, servers,
middleware and security? Did you adopt and use standard IT
principles? Were assets used, tracked and kept well? Risks:
Determine the results of risks taken or avoided, in terms of IT
continuity and availability; access management; security
management; integrity and accuracy of information; people risks,
staff turnover and retention; and disaster recovery processes.
Communications: Gauge the value and volume of your communications,
looking at customer satisfaction and feedback; customer awareness
and knowledge. Sponsored by: Page 9 of 16 10. Benefits of the ITIL
Approach to IT Service ManagementITSM measurement in vogue in the
enterprise In-house ITSM auditingIdentifying KPIs was an important
step in developing an in-house ITSM auditing process, said Sherri
Young, director of service management at hosting firm Data Return
LLC in Irving, Texas. With those, we have created a manage- ment
dashboard, a very quick way for an executive and management to look
across our business and see the measurements for the key
performance indicators across each functional area and service
area. From this, they can determine which processes are in a green,
yellow or red status area. Identifying KPIs and acquiring the tools
to measure and analyze them requires in-house expertise. Young
recom- mends that ITSM team leaders get ITIL Foundation
certifications, regulated by the ITIL Certification Management
Board (ICMB). A company can't be certified, only individuals, Young
said. However, an organization that has implemented ITIL guidance
in ITSM may be able to achieve compliance with ISO/IEC 20000, which
Clayton describes as a rapidly maturing international standard for
ITSM. Third-party ITSM auditing optionsData Return didn't get its
ITSM analysis game together overnight. The company has hired
Hewlett-Packard Co., its ITSM solutions vendor, for two audits and
learned much from that experience. They analyzed our management
processes in all the ITIL areas and gave us the score card, Young
said. HP ranked Data Return's ITSM on a process maturity chart with
a one to five scale Their assessment gave us specifics about what
we needed to correct and told us where we were getting better. Most
ITSM software vendors, such as IBM, HP, BMC Software Inc.,
Touchpaper, and CA Inc., have created suites of ITSM analytics,
dependency mapping and service-level monitoring tools and services,
Turner said. Each company has its own approach. Beware of product
bias when dealing with third-party ITSM audits, Clayton said.
Vendor tools usually work best with their own products. Some are
more limited than others, he noted. Future of ITSM auditsA lot of
the guesswork in ITSM audits will be gone in a couple of years, our
sources say, thanks to the maturation of ISO 20000 and ITSM
standards, as well as the development of automated, policy-based IT
management automa- tion systems. In the meantime, Clayton said,
work slowly to build in-house ITSM evaluation metrics and improve
KPI ratings, and don't let great expectations derail your ITSM
programs. Maxine Kincora is a technology writer in Berkeley, Calif.
She can be reached at [email protected]. Sponsored by: Page 10 of
16 11. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service ManagementFive
steps to creating an ITIL-friendly corporate culture Five steps to
creating an ITIL-friendly corporate culture October 01, 2006 |
Brian Johnson, SearchCIO.com Achieving ITIL success is just as much
about people as it is about technology. ITIL expert Brian Johnson
offers advice on how to get employees to positively embrace a new
ITIL culture. Organizations that want to embrace change in
processes and performance must also often initiate changes in cul-
ture. Managers that seek to champion change must therefore be
empowered to make relevant changes in attitudes, values and
behaviors if they are going to achieve lasting, tangible results.
What does all this have to do with IT Infrastructure Library
(ITIL)? Everything. ITIL adoption is all about embracing
changewhich means cultural change is a common prerequisite for
success. While technology certainly helps automate ITIL processes,
it can't ensure a successful and sustained ITIL imple- mentation.
Neither can the mere definition of those processes. A shift in
organizational culture is necessary so that stakeholders and
employees modify their behaviors and actions as appropriate to
implement the best practices described by ITIL and make them an
intrinsic aspect of day-to-day operations. Actually, the cultural
change required for ITIL success is often a much greater challenge
than the implementation of any supporting technologies. But a few
tried-and-true methods can help foster acceptance of the changes
required to effectively roll out ITIL processes across an
organization composed of people with widely divergent personalities
and attitudes. These methods include:1. Assess your culture as part
of your overall assessment of your ITIL readiness: In addition to
evaluating your organization's ITIL maturity from a process and
technology perspective, do an assessment of the cul- ture to
pinpoint possible hurdles and barriers to cultural change.2. Gain
C-level support for ITIL initiatives: Present ITIL from a business
perspective rather than a strictly IT perspective. If you can show
the CEO and other C-level executives that ITIL is a catalyst for
business advantage and benefitrather than just another IT
projectyou will gain the support to drive the cultural changes you
need for ITIL adoption and business success.3. Use an adopt and
adapt approach to ITIL, instead of forcing a letter of the law ITIL
implementation. As pointed out in the article A practical approach
to implementing ITIL practices, by-the-book adoption of ITIL isn't
practical. In fact, an inflexible and singular approach simply
exacerbates resistance to change. ITIL can help any organization
make better use of its IT resources. But when implementation of
ITIL becomes some sort of dogmatic end in itself, it consistently
fails. The real winners are those who use ITIL as a catalyst for
change, adapting it to the needs of their organization as much as
they adapt the culture of their organization to its principles.
Sponsored by:Page 11 of 16 12. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT
Service ManagementA practical approach to implementing ITIL
practices4. Present your ITIL initiative as a means of achieving
some agreed-upon goal, such as the creation of a more
customer-focused IT organization. If you present ITIL as some
ideology that everyone has to accept, you run the risk of
alienating the entire group. But if you focus on something everyone
can agree upon, there is no reason for anyone to push back. This is
one of the keys to winning over both your team players and your
Lone Rangers.5. No train, no gain. A variety of training programs
promote ITIL support and willingness to change. For example, one
CIO whose organization went through an ITIL training program that
used a role-playing sce- nario involving the rescue of the Apollo
13 crew said his team gained a personal epiphany that change and
doing things a different way can be very productive and goodrather
than a negative experience. In the training, the team was able to
see all different phases of the process and get a different respect
for the needs of the IT customers. Always remember, ITIL is about
people as much as it's about technology and processes. Change the
way people think and react, and you're much more likely to develop
a culture that's conducive to ITIL success. Brian Johnson is one of
the original authors of the first ITIL books. He has also authored
more than 15 additional books on ITIL or related topics and is the
founder of the IT Service Management Forum, a professional organi-
zation focused on IT service management and ITIL. A practical
approach to implementing ITIL practices August 23, 2006 | Brian
Johnson, Contributor, SearchCIO.com Since the mid-1980s,
organizations have been turning to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
to achieve IT service excel- lence for their businesses. Over the
years, it has become clear that some approaches for implementing
ITIL are more successful than othersespecially when it comes to
delivering long-term benefits to the business and achiev- ing
staying power within the IT organization. Ideally, a successful
ITIL implementation means the people in the organization have
embraced ITIL-guided process- es and procedures into their
corporate culture. The new way of operating becomes infectious to
the entire organi- zation and spreads virally, like a common cold.
However, unlike the typical cold, ITIL should never go away. The
cult approachOne approach to ITIL is to implement it by the book in
what could be considered a cultlike fashion that attempts to
implement ITIL to the letter. This path to ITIL implementation
typically means you read every book, hire a con- sultant who can
translate the books into indigestible bits of process and procedure
and then disseminate those processes and procedures throughout the
organization. But is that a practical approach? Is it one that will
readily be embraced by the typical corporate IT organization?
Perhaps by the book is indeed one way to go about implementing
ITIL. But before taking that draconian approach, one should focus
on several often-overlooked facts about ITIL: Sponsored by: Page 12
of 16 13. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service Management A
practical approach to implementing ITIL practices Fact One: The
books themselves are meant to guide; they are not steadfast laws.
None of the authors, contribu- tors or publishers ever expected
organizations to adhere to every word of their publications. Fact
Two: You can't implement ITIL with just processes and technology.
You must address the people involved as well. ITIL demands
attention to three components: people, process and technology.
Changes in process improve efficiency and effectiveness. Changes in
technology reduce costs and accelerate responsiveness. But you
ultimately have to change people to develop the culture you need to
better support the business and optimize availability of critical
IT services. Paying close attention to the people element of ITIL
and embedding cultural change in the organization ensures that IT
improvements are widespread and lasting. If you neglect the people
and use the cult approach of throwing a pile of books (or processes
based solely on the books) at a workforce that doesn't have a
proper understanding of what to do with them, you're wasting time
and money. That 'cult approach' to ITIL fails to deliver a method
of sus- taining itself in the organization. The practical
approachThere is a much more practical approach to implementing
ITILone that offers a far greater likelihood of effective,
sustained adoption. It is to first assess the needs of the
organization and then integrate and automate ITIL, consid- ering
all three elements: people, process and technology. This approach
to ITIL is more customized to the unique needs of the organization.
Because it considers the people and issues of cultural change, this
approach makes it easy to spread and sustain ITIL processes
throughout the organization. As ITIL becomes the default way of
doing things, ITIL processes are selectively chosen from the ITIL
canon and adapted appropriately to the organization's environmentso
they become part of the culture. The cult approach only works for
as long as the cult leader has influence; the practical approach
works long term because ITIL is seen as a way of creating a common
understanding of customer service. When an ITIL implementation
begins with an assessment of the organization's business needs and
a plan is devel- oped to help implement ITIL to address those
needs, everyone benefits. The IT organization can be assured that
the need to invest in ITIL is well-understood and that the
implementation will be supported by the business. The business
itself benefits because the IT organization is focused on its
requirements, rather than the minutiae of implementing procedures.
In the end, the cure for the common cult of ITIL by the book is
ironically practical ITIL, successfully implemented. Brian Johnson
is one of the original authors of the first ITIL books. He has also
authored more than 15 additional books on ITIL or related topics
and is the founder of the IT Service Management Forum, a
professional organi- zation focused on IT service management and
ITIL. Sponsored by: Page 13 of 16 14. Benefits of the ITIL Approach
to IT Service Management The FAQs on ITIL version 3 The FAQs on
ITIL version 3 November 06, 2006 | Brian Johnson, Contributor,
SearchCIO.comA new version of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
is on its way. This third iteration of the ITIL guidelines will
draw upon lessons learned from earlier ITIL efforts to help IT
organizations further improve efficiency, effectiveness and
business alignment. Here are some frequently asked questions and
answers about the soon-to-be-released ITIL version 3. How will ITIL
version 3 differ from ITIL version 2? According to the Office of
Government Commerce (OGC), the version 3 books will deliver ITIL
with an emphasis on IT service strategies, design, transition and
continuous service improvement. In the next version, five books
will replace the current nine books, and the focus will be
positioning ITIL processes at appropriate, multiple points in the
development of IT services and their subsequent release to
customers. The OGC has also stated that guidance for currently
implemented ITIL processes will be part of the new volumes. How
will I be able to migrate from one strategic approach (process-led,
as in version 2) to another (service design-led, which is the focus
of version 3)? The scoping documents and the new books will address
how to best migrate from a process approach to a service approach.
However, the real question is why should you have to migrate to the
new design if the current process-led approach already meets your
goals for IT/business alignment. ITIL is not a rule book or
instruction manual; it is more like a map or street directory thats
designed to allow IT organizations to achieve IT service excellence
by following a variety of routes or guidance depending on which
process improvement initiatives they have set as their goal or
destination. Should I wait for the templates and process models
that will be published in version 3? The short answer is no, dont
wait. Generic templates are like ITIL booksguidance. They still
require the organiza- tion to define its business and IT
requirements. If those requirements are not defined, no template or
version of ITILwhether its one, two or threewill help. The best
approach is to get together with trusted colleaguesfrom both the
business and IT sidesand brainstorm what the business needs and how
IT can support it. A generic template is a guide and is no
substitute for critical thinking. Process models are best derived
from modeling your own as is processes and analyzing them for
improvement. Thus, a useful member of the brainstorm team would be
an analyst with modeling skills. Above all, remember that using the
ITIL guidance and processes sensibly depends on the IT organization
itselfnot the ITIL authors, publishers, educators or other third
parties. Sponsored by:Page 14 of 16 15. Benefits of the ITIL
Approach to IT Service Management The FAQs on ITIL version 3 Since
the ISO/IEC 20000 standard, which defines the requirements for an
IT service management sys- tem, now exists and is based on ITIL
version 2why bother with a version 3? The ITIL version 3
development team is required to ensure that ITIL version 3
continues to support ISO/IEC 20000. The current ITIL guidance
successfully puts IT organizations on the path to ISO/IEC 20000, so
dont abandon cur- rent projects or become concerned that IT will
not reach its goals with the arrival of ITIL version 3it will
support this standard. Of course, good practice theory (like the
processes implemented in an organization) will continuously be
improved over time, so it is not unreasonable to consider updating
guidance such as ITIL or ISO/IEC standards periodically. ISO/IEC
20000 will transition over time based on requirements of the
international community. Brian Johnson is one of the original
authors of the first ITIL books. He has also authored more than 15
additional books on ITIL or related topics and is the founder of
the IT Service Management Forum, a professional organi- zation
focused on IT service management and ITIL. Sponsored by:Page 15 of
16 16. Benefits of the ITIL Approach to IT Service
ManagementResources from HP Resources from HP Guide to Operational
IT Service Management This white paper details an approach to
significant and lasting improvements in service management
outcomes. Learn how to improve day-to-day service activities,
achieve consistent, high-quality service, and develop a service
improvement plan. IDC: Deploying a Best Practices Approach to
Integrated IT Service Management Discover a comprehensive and fully
integrated IT service management approach based upon the processes
and best practices of ITIL. See how 11 surveyed companies decreased
operational costs and increased ROI. IDC: Gaining Business Value
through IT Services Management IT organizations are continuously
working to improve IT operations and to better align IT with
business needs. Read about three HP customers that are implementing
solutions that improve IT compliance, increase ROI and support
higher availability. HP is a technology company that operates in
more than 170 countries around the world. We explore how technolo-
gy and services can help people and companies address their
problems and challenges, and realize their possibili- ties,
aspirations and dreams. We apply new thinking and ideas to create
more simple, valuable and trusted experi- ences with technology,
continuously improving the way our customers live and work. No
other company offers as complete a technology product portfolio as
HP. We provide infrastructure and business offerings that span from
handheld devices to some of the world's most powerful supercomputer
installations. We offer consumers a wide range of products and
services from digital photography to digital entertainment and from
computing to home printing. This comprehensive portfolio helps us
match the right products, services and solutions to our customers'
specific needs. Sponsored by:Page 16 of 16
