Managing with ITIL
While ITIL can be broadly categorised as dealing with service management, it encompasses several specific disciplines within that broad heading. These include the following areas (though this is not a comprehensive listing):- Incident management. Incidents range from individual user problems to catastrophic network failures.
- Problem management. ITIL defines a four-stage process designed to ensure that information from individual incidents is used to resolve more fundamental structural problems.
- Change management. Systems for measuring and managing changes to IT infrastructure.
- Configuration management. Allows tracking of both system configurations and individual assets. (This is an area where software vendors frequently become involved.)
- Software release and distribution. Ensuring software is up to date, legal, and relevant. This includes the perennially unpleasant area of patch management.
- Service level management. Defining acceptable and affordable levels of service delivery.
- Cost management. Creating and maintaining a costing and charging system.
- Availability management. Ensuring maximum uptime.
- Capacity management. Making sure that systems are neither over or under-utilised, and that service levels will be maintained over time.
- Contingency planning. Everyone's other perennial favourite, how to recover in the event of a disaster.
Many of these disciplines will sound familiar when encapsulated in this fashion. One crucial difference is that ITIL views them as necessary for enhancing business performance, not merely as means for solving existing technical problems. Thus availability management is important not just because it means the network is up and running, but because numerous business processes depend on the network.
"The focus of ITIL in all its disciplines is on defining the best practice for the processes and the responsibilities that must be established to effectively manage the business's IT services to drive forward the objectives of that business in service delivery and revenue generation," note Computer Associates technologists Mike Stephenson and Eli Egozi in a recent white paper.
Executive summary: ITIL at a glance
If you haven't already heard of the IT Infrastructure Library, chances are you will sometime soon. Here's what you need to know about how it will work in your business.
- ITIL defines best practices. First initiated by the UK government in 1989, ITIL outlines a series of best practices for ensuring optimised IT service delivery within your organisation. These were created via industry consultation and have been subject to a process of ongoing revision.
- ITIL emphasises services, not technologies. ITIL is designed to provide a means of managing services and measuring how effectively they are contributing to your overall business. As such, they make minimal reference to specific technologies. This can make them confusingly abstract on occasion, but has ensured their long-term applicability.
- ITIL certification is available for your staff. A variety of training courses is available to build ITIL expertise within your business. Examinations are supervised from a central European location, but can be taken throughout Australia. Certification isn't essential for implementing ITIL, but provides a useful metric of staff knowledge.
- ITIL is increasingly supported by vendors. Virtually without exception, network management products and frameworks are now promoted as being ITIL-based. However, you won't be able to "implement ITIL" simply by installing these products; they simply provide a support framework for more accurately measuring the performance of your services.
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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