ITIL v3: Bridging the Gap Between IT and Business

Home Source: http://www.cioupdate.com/reports/article.php/11050_3737921_3

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.

Ten Tips for Successfully Implementing ITIL

Home Source: http://www.cioupdate.com/article.php/3554001

Isabel Wells is a consultant represented some tips on ITIL implementation successfully; which tips come form the PA Consulting Group. As majority audiences know, the benefits of implementing globally consistent, ITIL-based processes include:

• Improved availability, reliability and security of IT services.
• Increased IT project delivery efficiencies.
• Reduced TCO of IT infrastructure assets and IT applications.
• Improved resource utilization including decreased levels of rework and elimination of redundant activities.
• Provisioning of services that meet business, customer and user demands, with justifiable costs of service quality.
• More effective and better third-party relationships and contracts.

Many CIOs are not seeing the improvements they expected—despite heavy investment in ITIL. ITIL deployment should be set within the context of a business; any IT change program will encompass organizational, process and technology elements. The tips are drawing from PA's experience, they provide these ten tips about CIO's strategy and program directors can use to approach effective ITIL implementation with confidence.

For the organization area, the tips as coming:

• Approach ITIL implementation as part of the IT-wide strategy, and use it to guide all other strategic initiatives.
• Consider the post-ITIL organization before completing the process design.
• Engage, engage, engage. Continuous communication is required at all levels of the organization.
• Set realistic expectations about benefits realization and establish a baseline from which to monitor improvements.
• Engage existing suppliers early.

Focuses on the processes, the trips are next:

• Identify and deliver the quick wins.
• Maximum benefit can only be achieved if the impact each process has on another is understood.
• Prioritize process selection based on current maturity; don’t bite off more than you can chew!
• Use success as a springboard for further improvement.

Executiom on Technology, trip is next:

• Combine process and tool activities from day one as part of a single solution approach.

Playing on the technology, the tip is “Combine process and tool activities from day one as part of a single solution approach.”

Excluding the previous ten tips, Isabel Wells also mention, implementing ITIL is not just about evaluating and revising processes, it is about change: changing the way people work and are rewarded; changing technology platforms; and changing behaviors across an entire organization.

Regarding to this article, I can see the ITIL induction impacts widely, the current service management structure, people, services quality, organization culture every things. Those impacts on business and IT are significant and not isolated, closes as a family and interactive together.

First Bank integrate information management flow by ITIL

Home source: http://www.ithome.com.tw/itadm/article.php?c=46695

The following information reported by First Bank the vice-president of Information center. According to the First Bank's medium and long-term strategy plan, the information center has two important development phases, one carries out ITIL at 2008, other establishes the information cost model. After carries on the ISO 20000 authentications in 2009. In fact, First Bank had inducted ITIL to the business operation several years ago, because of some risk event's reason. First Bank decided that makes the information security aspect first on ISO 27001. According to the ISO 27001 Induction experiences, First Bank discovered that ISO 27001 have many methods with ITIL framework is interlinked. Moreover, if First Bank gets the certification on ISO 27001, that mean can also match to the information security requirement on ITIL framework. Although First Bank enters ISO 27001 first, actually it was also equal to has made part of ITIL.

ITIL covers domain bigger than ISO 20000, such as information service's valuation model which doesn’t cover in ISO 20000. for the future, First Bank wish the information department change to the service orientated model, the cost valuation model must been done, therefore, the First Bank expected that carry out ITIL truly, though ITIL framework link all the information management flow together.

Focus on the auditing, financial industry has frequently the internal and external auditing since long, the control point had already in the work flow and the management flow, but looking from the ITIL angle, First Bank still had the improvement. An example as First Bank has a unification foreign information service desk, also have the version control and release management, but these two works have not established contacts in the same place, therefore, troubles still occurrence. For example: a new edition system already online, but service desk has not informed. Until receiving the telephone which the user carries, delay solving the question time immediately.

Because the connection between each flow's is completes depending on the manpower, not system automatically. Therefore sometimes unavoidably loses in control. With ITIL framework, these change management and Release Management, Service Desk, Problem Management and such will integrate together and automation. In First Bank has many information management flow originally, and these information management flow probably already covered ITIL requirement, just missing the connection on automation integration. That integration, processes improvement and carry on the ITIL implementation are the First Bank's mission in 2008.

In this case, I can see banking is more easier inducts ITIL framework in their business operation and lets the processes become automation. Because they already has many information management flow, which probably already covered ITIL expectation. Compare to other industry, banking should get the ITIL certification shortly.

Understanding ITIL Key Process Relationships

Home Source: http://www.computereconomics.com/article.cfm?id=1074

Robert Boyd a Contributing Research Analyst for Computer Economics. He explains the processes relationship on Incident, Problem and Change. ITIL is divided into three major areas: Service Support, Service Delivery, and Security Management. Understanding the differences between those area and the relationships among, these processes is an important first step in implementing ITIL. He takes an example to explain the process relationship on Incident Management and Problem Management. The objective of Incident Management in Service Support category is to restore service as quickly as possible. Therefore, an incident is active until service is verified as restored. The objective of Problem Management in Service Support category is to minimize the economic impact of service disruption by diagnosing the root causes of incidents, gathering information on known errors and by providing work-arounds, temporary fixes, and permanent fixes.

While an incident is active only until service is restored, a problem continues to be active until appropriate fixing solution are published and implemented. This means that incidents and problems are not synonymous. Neither do incidents become problems. Rather incidents, problems, and changes each have a many-to-many relationship with the other two. It is also important to note that not all problem requests are created because of an incident. Some problem requests are initiated by proactive problem control discovering a likely cause of future incidents.

In case, an instance of a problem may have no related instance of an incident. The problem may initiate a change request to implement a permanent fix. In another case, the incident control activity of the Problem Management process may discover that multiple incidents have the same root cause and link all these incidents to a single instance of a problem. Another incident may implement a temporary-fix created previously by the problem control activity of Problem Management.

These relationships can become quite intricate. During the training phase it is easily getting confusion about the relationships between incidents, problems, and changes. Support personnel do not have to know every possible permutation of these relationships, but they should understand that incidents, problems, and changes are not synonymous and can have quite complex interactions.

In my opinion, I strongly agree Robert Boyd's explanation on the relationship between Incident Management, Problem Management and Change Management is important during ITIL implementation. These complex relationships are not easily to the detriment and clearly define instances of incidents and problems. If audiences confuse on those processes, the ITIL implementation will have more pressures.

Does ITIL still matter?

Home Source:
http://www.misweb.com/magarticle.asp?doc_id=26167&rgid=5&listed_months=0

John Lui reported a CEO's opinion on ITIL is important to any organization, but not always, just for IT services management. ITIL may not cover all the area or industry. Don Page the CEO of the Marval Group, he has more than 20 years of experience in IT service management.

Don Page strongly argues that ITIL is beneficial to organizations of any size. Whether is in the private or public sector. But it has a bit different in term of the organization size. Smaller organizations are at greater risk simply because of their size and dependency on key staff. They need to position themselves where key services are not dependent on individuals. Based on this, having well-defined policies, processes and procedures could be the difference between success and failure. Small and medium-sized organizations should seriously consider ISO 20000 as their IT service framework.

If the organization want to improving the IT services, but no the wholes one; just for the critical part as processing or governance aspect. Don Page advice is, if you are an IT service department, all you need is ITIL and ISO 20000. ITIL provides the underpinning process framework and ISO 20000 the IT governance controls and evidence. There are complementary best practices and standards, in different area take different standard. He would use on a service improvement project. For example; PRINCE 2 for project management and ISO 17799 for security. Many frameworks are specifically designed to meet the demands and regulatory requirements of a specific industry sector. (For example, ETOMS for the telecoms industry, Six Sigma for manufacturing, COBIT for auditors). ISO 20000 is a standard, whereas ITIL is a best practice. The area is covered on different requirement.

From an IT service management framework perspective, there is only ITIL. ITIL will continue to thrive and evolve for two main reasons: 1) because it underpins and aligns with ISO/IEC 20000, the new worldwide auditable standard for IT service management. 2) ITIL's development is driven by the IT Service Management Forum, which has the largest group of practicing IT service management experts and professionals in the world today.

Don Page mention another idea, ISO 20000 gives ITIL the teeth it needs. To maintain a competitive advantage, many businesses need to have the confidence to measure and benchmark their IT organization to maintain business confidence and demonstrate to stakeholders how they measure up against a recognized industry standard or their competition. That mean practice on ISO 20000 is easier than ITIL standard.

In my view, if the organization's IT services management is not at the mature stage, may be take the ISO 20000 first, when all the processes and working flow are running well then consider face to more high level on ITIL framework again.

ITIL standard has mass appeal

Home source: http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39170242,00.htm?r=1

Tim Ferguson provides some information for ITIL framework which has be used in IT services improvement in the world wide. As he reported “Two-thirds (66 per cent) of companies around the globe are using IT infrastructure library (Itil) - the IT service delivery framework - to help manage their IT infrastructure.” Information about the performance, this information comes from the Dimension Data which is a managed services company. ITIL scored an average of three out of five - higher than any other framework - in a survey of more than 370 CIOs in 14 countries.

In term of the survey on taking ITIL framework in organization’s size, they found the size of organization has an impact on ITIL adoption with companies of less than 100 employees rarely using ITIL compared with 87 per cent of companies of more than 10,000 employees using it in some form.

In Tim’s report, he also mentions have another best practice drop off the ITIL implementation in organization. The Engagement best practices as Prince 2, ISO, CMMi, ASL, CoBIT and TQM.

Regarding to Tim’s report, ITIL framework has a good reputation round the world. Even the engagement best practices are coming up, but I believe ITIL framework will continues being used on IT services improvement.

Introduction to ITIL: Early US Adopters Show Business Value

Home source: http://enterpriseleadership.org/content.php?cid=1445

Elizabeth Ferrarini is an IT consultant and freelance writer from Boston, Massachuetts. There have three examples this information about the ROI from the ITIL implementation. In Elizabeth’s report, he mention a news how ITIL support audiences getting benefits from Grater group. The news as following:

“Gartner Group describes ITIL as a roadmap for carrying out repeatable steps for managing technology. It sets out major procedures, goals, and directions for each of 10 different disciplines -- everything from incident management to service-level management -- that can turn IT into a service delivery system rather than an infrastructure made up of discrete processes. ITIL addresses those activities that an organization should do in order to keep processes in control. It can also help determine if a process is cost effective or not, and whether job descriptions should be changed.”

Also Elizabeth takes three successful examples to justify how ITIL framework improves the audience business. Three examples include Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar and Ontario Justice Enterprise. The information as next:

Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based consumer products giant, embarked on ITIL in 1999 with a worldwide effort to streamline the number of applications help desks have to support. In just the past four years, Procter & Gamble has reportedly saved about $500 million. A study of savings within Procter & Gamble's finance and accounting IT departments showed a six percent to eight percent cut in operating costs and a 15 percent to 20 percent reduction in technology personnel. Procter & Gamble's most recent ITIL endeavor involved root-cause analysis of trends in help-desk requests. This initiative resulted in a 10 percent reduction in help desk calls.

Caterpillar
In 2000, Caterpillar, the Fortune 100 construction equipment and engine manufacturer based in Peoria, Illinois, used ITIL methods to address incident management for Web-related services. The ITIL team found that internal service providers couldn't meet the target response time of 30 minutes between 60 percent and 70 percent of the time. Now service providers surpass the 90 percent mark.

Ontario Justice Enterprise
Ontario Justice Enterprise, an agency that handles the Canadian government's court system, adopted ITIL in 1999 to help manage growth and to improve service to its internal customers. With 1,000 locations across Ontario serving 25,000 individuals, the agency was under intense pressure to provide more efficient services. The ITIL initiative spawned a virtual service desk that helped slash support costs by 40 percent. The service desk improved service-level monitoring and service request processing, ensuring that everyone worked together as a service-delivery chain. As a result of this agency's experience, other Ontario federal government agencies have adopted ITIL principles.

To sum up, even though the previous examples no more details to talk about the ITIL five basic elements, business perspective, application management, service delivery, service support and infrastructure management, but those examples represent the values from induction the ITIL framework to the business is quite shine. I got more senses from Elizabeth’s report, but the feeling is rough and not enough.