Augusto Perazzo and Glen Willis is the consultant of PA Consulting Group. They illustrate the information about ITIL v3 builds on v2; greatly expanding its usefulness and helping CIOs make the leap to business strategist. Majority of audiences take the ITIL framework to maintaining existing services at a satisfactory level of quality and on increasing operational efficiencies. Oh the other hand, operational focuses are struggling to introduce new services in order to keep up with changing business needs.
How the organizations established ITIL programs with an operational focus facilitate of new services creation and ensure greater integration among project based IT functions, IT operations and the ever changing business demands? ITIL version 3 (v3) comes to the rescue by incorporating a more strategic, innovation focused and integrated view of service management, better aligning the IT service portfolio to the business strategy and providing project teams with an honest and realistic view into the operational realities of an organization's enterprise.
The following section raises the idea on business’s creation, aligning the IT service and Bridging the Gap between Development and Operations within the v3.
From Business as Usual to Innovation
There are many success stories on how ITIL guidance has helped organizations reduce spending on IT operations and become more effective at it. Nonetheless, businesses are increasingly demanding for IT to be an enabler of innovation and to focus on more strategic concerns such as creating competitive advantage through the development of new products and services.
ITIL version 3 builds up on the operational excellence concepts of v2 and extends service management towards a more holistic approach. With the life cycle mindset embedded in v3, IT organizations are better equipped to understand the business needs, to have a closer dialogue regarding business strategy and to best support it through the creation, design and implementation of relevant IT services that are in sync with business requirements. Service Strategy phase in the v3 life cycle provides such guidance. It encourages IT organizations to understand why a service is needed from a business perspective and how to best align to and pursue IT capabilities that are in par with business needs. It places IT as a core strategic asset, participating and often leading the business towards the innovation path. Following the v3 philosophy, you would first catalogue all existing services, understand your customer and make sure that the services you provide are in line with their needs. ITIL v3 would encourage you to continue to monitor the relevance of your services amidst shifts in consumer tastes.
Aligning the IT Service Portfolio to the Business Strategy
The Service Deign phase in ITIL v3 provides guidance on how to build a portfolio of services that are aligned with the business strategy. Whereas the Service Strategy phase is concerned with understanding the why and elaborating on what is needed, Service Design is concerned with how to make it happen. Service Design goes beyond the infrastructure requirements and takes a holistic view of how processes, people and platforms, managed internally and comes together to best support the overall business strategy. Service Design to ensure that all IT services are created with the ultimate end goal in mind: to enable business strategy and innovation at the most cost effective manner.
Bridging the Gap Between Development and Operations
ITIL v3 provides a greater opportunity to address this unproductive behavior. By incorporating the mindset of a service life cycle, v3 brings service management and operations much closer to the way application development groups have been working for years.
ITIL v3 provides guidance on how operational concerns such as availability, capacity and incident management can be taken into consideration when new services are being designed. Through the Service Transition phase, v3 recognizes that a much more structured approach is needed in order to transition a service, its related applications and subsequent modifications from the development group into the live environment. This phase brings the two groups even closer together to ensure a smoother transition. By promoting a service life cycle as opposed to a software development life cycle, ITIL v3 can provide insights to the application development group about service management. Application development groups must create applications inside the greater context of a service.
Those questions that ITIL v3 with the support of the operations group can help elucidate.
- How efficient and effective will this application be in enabling day-to-day business processes once it goes live?
- How can it be changed in the less disruptive way in order to adapt it to new business needs without introducing unwanted risks?
- How to best support users without key technical resources being stripped away from critical new developments?
In my view, I get more details on ITIL v3 Service Design and Transition that changes the application development people’s thinking, as Augusto and Glen’s reported the change to work closer with the business, it is better understand that new business strategies require new services realized by new applications that will eventually transition to the live environment and be supported by operations.
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