Who's taking the ITIL bait?

In an industry known for its hype, it's understandably difficult for many managers to make heads or tails of new technology trends. In the case of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), however, a growing body of success stories confirms that this is one trend you should definitely be on top of.

Essentially a large how-to manual for getting your IT operations in order, ITIL has in recent years become a rallying cry for companies eager to convey their strong governance capabilities to auditors. Because the ITIL specification offers a broad range of both technology-dependent and technology-agnostic guidelines, careful adherence to its dictates offers as good a roadmap as any to helping businesses finally align their IT and business strategies.

This promise has proved more than enough to attract the interest of the world's largest companies -- and many of their smaller counterparts. The recent itSMF conference in Brisbane saw 528 attendees -- a 70 percent increase over last year and ten times the attendance at the first conference just four years ago. All are looking for a way to clarify the roles and responsibilities of their IT organisations, putting a broom through years of entrenched inefficiency and staff confusion about their proper roles and responsibilities.

Case studies highlighting the benefits of ITIL are starting to pile up: Victoria's widely watched State Revenue Office, for one, became fully ITIL compliant in August 2005 and cited the project as a major factor in slashing its IT budget from AU$12m to AU$10m a year while improving its overall capabilities and clarifying its IT vision.

In this feature, we highlight the experiences of four Australian organisations at various stages along their ITIL vision. Western Australia's St John of God Healthcare, for one, blew past its internal rate of return projections after using ITIL to standardise service delivery across 11 hospitals.

A New Zealand integrator used ITIL to begin the service improvement exercise that it believes will improve its service offering for customers on three continents. Deakin University has nearly tripled its IT support volumes without adding additional staff, while the Victorian Department of Education and Training has found ITIL to be a major part of its overall IT governance efforts.

Such benefits show the potential success awaiting companies that embrace ITIL and all that it stands for -- and things are about to get better still. The current ITIL v2, widely embraced and criticised at the same time for functional breadth but lack of specifics, is being reworked into a more comprehensive ITIL v3 that will effectively provide separate business and IT-focused manuals designed to ease ITIL implementation.

Although it's still an optional service strategy, ITIL's growing legitimacy means few organisations can afford to ignore it. -There's going to come a point where, unless you're an internal service provider, you're going to be outsourced," says Brian Johnson, ITIL practice manager with CA and a key player in the evolution of the ITIL standard.

-[ITIL] is very important in the self-preservation of internal IT organisations. People will tell you that ITIL tells you everything you need, but as a business and IT alignment framework it's much easier to draw everything together using ITIL as the middle piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Version 3 will provide more emphasis on depth, providing more how-you-do-it so it will be much more obvious about what companies should do next."

As companies continue to wake up to ITIL's possibilities, the market is certain to see a flood of experts eager to cash in on ITIL's newfound popularity. In fact, the biggest challenge facing most companies interested in ITIL may well lie in sorting the wheat from the chaff to find a consultant capable of effecting meaningful ITIL-led change. With the right combination of people, business motivation and real desire for change, however, ITIL continues to offer unprecedented opportunity to finally get IT functioning like a well-oiled machine.