Introduction
to ITIL: Early US Adopters Show Business Value
by
Elizabeth Ferrarini
What’s
ITIL? A Question Every IT Professional Should Ask
When asked
if he knew about ITIL, a former CIO from a major brokerage firm paused
for moment and then said, “I can’t say I ever heard of it.”
After all, it’s not a subject that has become fodder for Northern
American IT trade publications nor is it a standard term in a lot of American
IT professional’s vocabulary. On the other hand, IT executives at
Procter & Gamble and Caterpillar have turned their IT
departments into efficient powerhouses by becoming early adopters of an
IT process-driven framework for service management. Despite its highbrow
name, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL
holds great promise, according to industry analysts.
Established
in 1989 by the United Kingdom’s former Central Computer and Telecommunications
Agency (CCTA) to improve its IT organization, ITIL consists of an inter-related
set of best practices for lowering the cost, while improving the quality
of IT services delivered to users. To achieve these goals, the IT department
must work collaboratively with users to create new business opportunities
for the organization.
ITIL, which
is widely adopted throughout Europe and is closely tied to ISO 17799,
nudged its way into North America in the 1990’s and now appears to
be gaining momentum with CIO’s looking to overhaul their IT departments.
After all, during the past five years, IT departments here have gone from
warding off the hazards of Y2K, to overbuilding capacity for e-business,
and now learning to do more with less in a tight economy.
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 if job descriptions should be changed.
ROI:
The Payback from ITIL
Carrying
out ITIL principles has bought more than good news to a handful major
North American corporations and government agencies. Some early adopters
have tallied up their cost savings and productivity gains directly attributed
to ITIL principles. Consider the following vignettes about early ITIL
adopters:
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. During the past four years,
Procter & Gamble has reported to have 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 which 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,
thus making sure everyone is working together as a service delivery
chain. As a result of this agency’s experience other Ontario federal
government agencies have adopted ITIL principles.
The ITIL
Publications
ITIL got
its start as a 40-volume set of principles developed by the CCTA, which
has been incorporated into the UK’s Office of Government Commerce
(OGC). Today, ITIL principles come in several volumes of "best practices"
published and maintained by the OGC. The ITIL publications cover Business/IT
perspective, application management, service delivery, service support,
and infrastructure management. The
two most popular volumes address the five disciplines of service support,
and the five disciplines of service delivery respectively. All
of these disciplines work together to deliver service management to an
organization and the users of IT systems. Users can include the employees
of the organization or partners and customers which use the organization’s
IT services.
Service
Support
This volume
consists of the day-to-day processes that support delivery of IT services.
These processes consist of the following:
·
Incident Management includes the timely coordination, diagnosis,
correction, and restoration of interrupted IT services
·
Problem Management helps to identify and permanently remove the
root causes of actual and potential problems.
·
Change Management helps to maximize the business benefits of
infrastructure change while reducing risk of making changes.
·
Configuration Management helps to establish control of critical
IT configuration items.
·
Release Management helps to improve software release, distribution,
and maintenance process of configuration items.
Unlike
these five disciplines, the service desk functions as more than
a traditional help desk for fielding users’ calls citing problems.
Instead, it functions as the essential, operational interface between
the IT organization and its users for achieving the organization’s
goals. The service desk’s main responsibilities include the following:
·
Receive and record all calls
·
Provide initial assessment and attempt first time resolution
·
Monitor and escalate all incidents
·
Provide timely feedback to users
·
Produce management reports
Service
Delivery
This volume
focuses on the long-term planning of improvements in IT service delivery.
These processes consist of the following:
·
Availability Management helps to optimize and ensure the availability
of IT services to support business objectives.
·
Capacity Management helps to optimize the capacity of IT resources
and services in alignment with business requirements.
·
IT Service Continuity Management helps to ensure the availability
and rapid restoration of IT services in the event of a disaster.
·
Financial Management provides a way to measure, control, and cover
costs to IT service.
·
Service Level Management helps to establish, to report on, and
to maintain the delivery of agreed upon IT service levels to users.
Support
for ITIL principles has grown from a cottage industry with vendors offering
workshops for ITIL certification, to major system vendors offering a platform
of tools to support all the processes in each ITIL discipline.
Based in
the United Kingdom, the not-for-profit IT Service Management Forum or
itSMF (www.itsmf.com) promotes
ITIL through its 8,000 members worldwide. In the U.S. itSMF has about
600 members representing about 200 major corporations, such as IBM and
Hewlett-Packard.
Challenges
of Carrying Out ITIL Initiatives
Getting
a company-wide ITIL initiative underway can have its challenges. Governance,
which aims to address and correct bad habits, makes up the core of practically
all IT standards. IT governance outlines policies, highlights procedures,
requires meticulous documentation, and establishes a precise plan for
constant improvements. Carrying out these tasks often involves introducing
formal changes that cause friction in the organization. In fact, the two
ITIL volumes offer considerations for dealing with potential roadblocks
in each of the 10 different disciplines.
Senior executives
need to lead the charge by rallying the troops and explaining why the
need for changes and how and why ITIL principles will shape them. Linking
other organizational initiatives to ITIL can help increase its acceptance.
For example, Procter & Gamble marketed ITIL as a way to help meet
a companywide direction from the CEO to cut costs by $2 billion over a
five year period. On the other hand, CIO’s can’t continue to
maintain law and order if they need to improve results by cutting staff
and overall spending. To this end, CIO’s might want to start with
an ITIL initiative in one discipline, get some measurable results and
buy-in from the IT department, before going forward with other initiative
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