Business benefits
Ultimately, delivering effective IT service levels will almost always require working with multiple platforms, and any approach tied heavily to a single vendor will always have limits. ITIL is fairly unique in its ability to address this problem. As Gartner's Roberts and Mingay noted: "ITIL is the only non-proprietary, non-tool, non-platform specific, freely available IT service management framework available." ITIL is now "the de facto approach for efficient operation of IT service management processes," says David Ratcliffe, president of Pink Elephant, a specialist ITIL consulting services firm.On one level, ITIL provides a practical means for achieving what has rapidly become the most clichéd of all information systems goals: putting technology into the service of business goals, rather than making the business subservient to the capabilities of the technology. "IT is going to be very much measured by quality of service," notes Schiavello. ITIL provides a set of practices which, if implemented, should see that quality of service increased in a fashion that can be directly measured, providing better budgetary justification. "It's all about creating a continual, repeatable quality process," says Schiavello.
"ITIL's systematic approach is a refreshing change to the historical chaos that has long existed in many IT organisations," notes an assessment by Enterprise Management Associates. "More formalised processes and procedures have been required to take full advantage of the vast investments in IT infrastructure."
"IS organisations are being asked to make the most of what they have and still deliver cost management improvements," says Gartner analyst Kris Brittain. "To meet these demands, many have turned to refinements and efficiency improvements through benchmarking, best practices, processes, and standards analysis. ITIL has been at the forefront of best-practice and process methodology."
ITIL's core principles are also generalised enough that they can be adapted to the needs of each user. Indeed, at times ITIL seems to go out of its way to demonstrate its non-prescriptive nature; see sidebar Are your people an IT asset? for one example.
ITIL consultancy Pink Elephant has identified more than a dozen central benefits to a comprehensive ITIL implementation, including better resource utilisation, increased competitiveness, improving project deliverables and timing, justifying service costs, and providing demonstrable service indicators.
Making it happen
While ITIL may be appealing, make no mistake about it: implementing it can be extremely hard work. A complete ITIL implementation will often take years and require major adjustments to IT processes at all levels, along with significant staff retraining. Nor does implementing ITIL simply mean following blindly a set of invariant procedures. "ITIL does not cast in tablets of stone every action you should do on a day-to-day basis because that is something which will differ from organisation to organisation," says Gerard Blokdijk, managing director for The Art of Service. The rewards can be as large as the effort required, though. In one oft-cited example, Procter & Gamble claimed savings of more than US$500 million in the first four years after adopting ITIL.
Like any best practices approach, ITIL is often implemented in stages; indeed, an all-in-one implementation would challenge even the most resourceful information executive. This will often be tied in with specific technology rollouts. For instance, the introduction of a new service desk application might allow for a business' processes to become more closely aligned with ITIL best practices.
Other processes might require more fundamental changes within the business itself, however, rather than drawing on supporting technologies. "A lot of ITIL processes go across technology boundaries," says Schiavello. "The key is for these disciplines to interact with each other."
This can lead to some fairly radical changes in the functions performed by the IT department. "Identifying the services where internal IT organisations add the most value to the business is key to determining core competencies," notes IBM GSA in its white paper on ITIL. "Core competencies can then be defined on the basis of value-add to the business rather than what the IT organisation does best today."
Technology neutrality, while valuable, also imposes some limitations. "ITIL's development has been slowed by its funding and development model, and will always lag technological advancements, which places an additional load on the enterprise to perform additional process design work itself," Gartner's Roberts and Mingay noted in their assessment.
One lingering question over ITIL is how readily it can be extended from larger enterprises--whose processes are large and costly enough to justify significant revamping--into smaller firms. On one level, this can of course be accomplished by implementing technologies which themselves are based on ITIL principles, as discussed earlier, but this can hardly be considered as aspiring in any way to best practices.
"The perception that ITIL is best suited to large corporations may not be entirely accurate," a white paper from InterProm USA points out. "The list of companies that have adopted ITIL include multiple Fortune 500 companies. They may appear as if they have implemented ITIL company-wide. In most cases this is not a fact. In general we see that small units within these multinationals have implemented ITIL. It is also true that larger companies usually adopt the latest management styles faster than smaller ones. But this doesn't automatically mean that these smaller companies are not able to benefit from these management styles as well."
Indeed, ITIL was adopted as the best practice model by the Managed Service Provider Association, an international consortium of companies providing managed services to businesses, which might suggest a possible pathway for ITIL into smaller organisations. However, the consortium itself eventually collapsed, a victim of the generally lacklustre market for managed services in most areas. Nonetheless, if managed services eventually extend their reach into small enterprises, it seems likely that ITIL will also be making the journey.
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I would like to draw your attention to the recent article entitled "Licensed to ITIL", by Angus Kidman, dated 21 May 2003. I refer specifically to the paragraph describing the ITIL training providers in Australia, as it does not provide enough balanced information for your readers.
Firstly, ProActive Services were responsible for bringing ITIL to Australia, and it was our organisation that conducted the first ITIL course in 1995. ProActive was in fact, the only provider until 1998.
Certified training is currently available from numerous providers in Australia, who provide certified training from two separate examination bodies. This article only highlights the training providers certified by EXIN, the Examination Institute of the Netherlands.
The other examination board is the UK-based ISEB, the Information Systems Examination Board. The ISEB has a number of training providers licenced to conduct training in Australia, of which ProActive is one. In fact, ProActive is one of the ISEB's largest service providers worldwide and has a consultant/trainer who is the only Australian ISEB examiner for the Manager's Certificate courses.
Whilst we appreciate that any news on ITIL is good news, and that the article certainly achieves one of our aims - that of educating IT departments throughout Australia and New Zealand, we would hope that you are also focussed on ensuring your readers receive the right information. We are always happy to discuss ITIL and the status of IT Service Management in Australia both from our own perspective and that of our clients.
Bob Philipson
Managing Director
ProActive Services
www.proactiveservices.com.au