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December 3, 2007

by Elizabeth Ferrarini

 

Most organizations have some sort of an IT help desk staffed by individuals who field calls from users, and then go into firefighting mode to solve users' problems. However, some IT organizations have transformed their inefficient help desk into a proactive, service desk that offers high productivity and efficiency, but at a lower cost than before. Major companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Caterpillar, have accomplished this goal by adopting ITIL initiatives, a standard set of best practices for lowering and improving the quality of IT service delivery.

 

The Role of Service Desk Based on ITIL

A service desk designed according to ITIL initiatives functions as the day-to-day operational interface between the IT organization and its users for achieving the organization's goals. The service desk also becomes the focal point for integrating the five disciplines in ITIL's service support management processes -- incident, problem, configuration, change, and release management. To this end, service desk staff must be able to communicate effectively with users, via a number of different channels, as well as use technology, in order to close the loop on tasks in each of the five ITIL disciplines.

 

How to Get Started

The first step in developing a service desk calls for identifying where you are starting from. Assessment should include a formal review of processes and procedures based on the guidelines in the ITIL Best Practice for Service Support volume. These guidelines will include measuring service performance against targets, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and aligning services with customers' requirements. You need to compare similar operations and benchmarks to gauge improvements.

 

ITIL guidelines call for you to define the key service desk processes, not just what they are, but how they operate, and what affect and significance each process has to your organization. These definitions will encompass the following:

  • Staffing -- quality and number of people
  • Daily operational procedures
  • Incident processes
  • Request handling and workflows
  • Incident monitoring and tracking
  • Escalation and closure
  • Management information
  • Call volumes, workload, performance, and trends

 

The outcome of all this should provide you with a better understanding of user requirements, service level agreements, and the operational level agreements that underpin them.

 

Select the Right Staff

ITIL guidelines place a lot of emphasis on getting the right people from the start or training the staff you already have. A proactive service desk must have a motivated and positive staff. A good staff becomes a service desk most precious asset. So invest in your staff. This effort might mean recruiting new staff and supporting them with training, tools, and resources to be effective. Soft skills, such as good verbal and written communications, hold as much weight as technical or business knowledge. Don't forget to involve the staff with decisions about the service desk.

 

Think Service Always

ITIL guidelines call for thinking service desk. To this end, make sure your organization includes the service desk when it considers new business or new direction. Prepare the service desk to handle a new product, or service, or new users. The service desk needs to be involved from the start and have plenty of time to plan for any changes in priorities and workloads. Staff should help define service processes and priorities. The staff should get involved with transition teams to help ensure smooth running of a new business or a merged organization.

 

User perception of the service ranks alone side of how the was improvement. In some cases, the service desk staff might find it appropriate to work with users to integrate some of their processes with those of the service desk. Such an effort could provide a seamless support environment. For example, an organization might want to incorporate second line support, problem management, and change management facilities into its own service desk operations.

 

Insist on the Appropriate Technology

The ITIL guidelines stress using technology appropriate to meet the organization's required service levels. The service desk needs to maintain or have access to a wide range of information and facilities that can be provided to users. Some of this might include reference material, such as the corporate file storage structure, contract documentation, process definitions and scripts, and frequently asked questions. Some material might have been interactive, such as links to message boards, intranet services, and external Web sites. Some material might be designed to coordinate service and change management capabilities. For example, this material might enable the service desk staff to manage problem resolution or enabling to assess, coordinate, and deliver service more effectively to users.

 

Recent advances in service desk tools have included remote (virtual) desktop, and network and application support. (See Tips for Evaluating Service Desk Tools) Service desk tools now incorporate facilities to identify and to resolve incidents before they affect users. In many cases, the tools can resolve problems without intervention from the service desk staff. When a user needs to contact the service desk, he or she has a range of self-help facilities, such as Web and intranet access, incident logging, incident status reports, and other information can help the individual to resolve the problem. These tools can reduce the need for users to contract the service desk for mundane reasons, and thus free the service desk staff to focus on more pressing tasks.

 

Links between system management and service management tools can provide invaluable insight into the performance of the complete technical infrastructure and can even highlight where attention is required to fix emerging problems. With early warning of failure, missed thresholds, and poor performance, a department manager can decide on the most appropriate actions to eliminate the causes.

 

The most advanced service desks, as described in the ITIL guidelines, also support functions such as inventory management and software distribution. Integration with each vendor's Web site can provide an additional layer of service that be provided seamlessly to users. For example, one such service might include allowing users to order and download upgrades and new software. Vendors might even be prepared to fund part of the project in return for the benefits they receive.

 

Seek Support from Other ITIL Adopters

Never feel that you are alone in carrying out a proactive service desk based on ITIL guidelines. You're not. Seek out IT professionals at other organizations who might have faced similar challenges to you and might be happy to share them with you. Visit these individuals and see how they work. Look at the processes you can adopt and check out businesses in other sectors. Most of all, joint the not-for-profit IT Service Management Forum or itSMF (www.itsmf.com) promotes ITIL through its 8,000 members worldwide. Be prepared to share ideas by attending itSMF seminars and itSMF regional groups.

 

Transforming your help desk into a proactive service might sound like a daunting task. You can lessen the task with careful planning and sensible implementation using ITIL initiatives.

 

Guidelines for Evaluating Service Desk Tools

When it comes to selecting service desk tools, you might want to narrow your search to those process integrated tools that completely support the five disciplines in the ITIL Best Practice for Service Support volume. For example, a service desk tool integrated with change management can reduce disruptions in the IT infrastructure. This type of tool can locate critical components with performance problems, which can help service desk staff solve user problems more quickly.

 

If the service desk tool can expand the concept of service management to include other increasingly important processes, such as capacity planning, then IT department can reuse and integrate the knowledge that is captured in this tool. For example, ITIL guidelines provide a problem-management process where an IT professional spend time investigating the root cause of a problem to prevent the problem from reoccurring. A service desk tool should have the capability to relate incidents to problems so that a service desk staff member can make use of the knowledge that is captured with the problem record for faster resolution. Integration between the service desk tool and the systems management environment can enable planned-outage planning support based on specific service levels.

 

When evaluating service desk tools, consider if the service desk tool dictates how to organize the service goal, or if the service desk can tailor the tool to suit its own way of working. Look for a tool that is based on ITIL's recommendations for the basic organizational structure of the service desk. At the same time, you should be able to tailor the tool so that it can integrate seamlessly with the existing organization infrastructure. Each organization will have unique escalation procedures, notification rules, and approval processes to which the service desk should conform.

 

So, when evaluating service tools, ask yourself these five questions.

  1. Is the tool completely based on ITIL?
  2. Does it have the capability to define and to map IT service and their components?
  3. Out of the box, does it integrate with the following:
    • A confirmation or asset management module?
    • A change management module
    • A workflow management module
    • A service level management module
  4. Does the tool allow you to forward of events being generated by a network or systems monitoring tool and communicating back any status change of the incident recorded in the service desk application.
  5. Can you easily learn to use the tool, navigate with it, and tailor it to your needs?

 

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Additional Reading - Sponsor Links:
Why You Should Take a Holistic Approach to ITIL and Service Support
Streamlining Service Request Processes: A Key to Business Success
Taking the Service Desk to the Next Level


Elizabeth Ferrarini is an IT consultant and freelance writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Elizabeth can be reached at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

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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've ever heard of it." After all, it's not a standard term in a lot of American IT professionals' vocabularies. 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 interrelated 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 1990s and now appears to be gaining momentum with CIOs 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 whether job descriptions should be changed.

 

ROI: The Payback from ITIL

Carrying out ITIL principles has bought more than good news to a handful of 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. 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.

 

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 releases,  distribution, and maintenance processes of configuration items.

 

Unlike these five disciplines, the service desk functions as more than a traditional help desk for fielding users' calls citing problems. 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 began as a cottage industry, with vendors offering workshops for ITIL certification; these days, major system vendors offer 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 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 the need for changes, and how and why ITIL principles will shape the organization. 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. CIOs 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 initiatives.

 

ITIL stands for the "IT Infrastructure Library" -- a series of guidelines  developed by the OGC for the British  government. The de-facto standard in the area of service management, ITIL contains comprehensive, publicly accessible specialist documentation on the planning, provision, and support of IT services. ITIL provides the basis for improvement in the use and effect of an operationally deployed IT infrastructure. IT service organizations, employees from computing centers, suppliers, specialist consultants, and trainers helped develop ITIL, which describes the architecture for establishing and operating IT service management. Apart from guidelines for service management in book form, ITIL provides its users with a range of other products; for example, in the areas of:

  • Training and coaching
  • Vocational and professional examinations
  • Consultancy

 

ITIL books are best-practice guidelines for service management; the  guidelines describe what rather than how. Service management is tailored to the size, the internal culture and, above all, the requirements of the company. The impartial view of the external consultant may help to break away from the rigid structures.

 

The books provided by ITIL make up the only comprehensive, non-proprietary and publicly accessible, process-related library in this field -- a unique and valuable product for all IT professionals.

 

Overview of Service Management According to ITIL

Service Support

Service Desk

  • Configuration Management
  • Incident Management
  • Problem Management
  • Release Management
  • Change Management

Service Delivery

  • Service Level Management
  • Financial Management
  • Capacity Management
  • Availability Management
  • IT Continuity Management
  • Security Management

 

Benefits of ITIL

ITIL describes a systematic, professional approach to managing IT services. The library emphasizes the central importance of meeting company requirements economically. Adhering to the best-practice approach described in ITIL has the following benefits for an organization:

  • Support for the business processes and the tasks of IT decision makers.
  • Definition of functions, roles, and responsibilities in the services sector.
  • Reduced expenditure in developing processes, procedures, and job  instructions.
  • IT services that meet the requirements of the particular business.
  • Improved customer satisfaction through better and measurable availability  and performance of the IT service quality.
  • Improved productivity and efficiency through the purposeful use of knowledge  and experience.
  • Basis for a systematic approach to quality management in IT service  management.
  • Improved employee satisfaction and reduced fluctuations in personnel levels.
  • Improved communication and information between IT personnel and their  customers.
  • Training and certification of IT professionals
  • International exchange of experience (www.itsmf.com)

 

An unconditional willingness to become more customer and service-oriented is a prerequisite. In many enterprises, this will necessitate a change of the predominant service culture.

 

In addition, with the help of ITIL, a clear body of terminology is to be  created in the service management sector.

 

Contents of ITIL

ITIL comprises the following five basic elements:

  • Business perspective
  • Application management
  • Service delivery (provision of IT services)
  • Service support
  • Infrastructure management

 

"ITIL is a registered trade mark of OGC - The Office of Government  Commerce"

 

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Elizabeth Ferrarini is an IT consultant and freelance writer  from Boston, Massachusetts. Elizabeth can be reached at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

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by Malcolm Fry

 

Over the last few years ITIL has become the flavour du jour in the US whereas in Europe it has been part of the main course for quite some time. As someone who spends his time split between Europe and the US I am intrigued by the difference between the two continents I regard to Service Management. Same ingredients but a different recipe. By the way I agree with you that I have now over-cooked the food metaphor.

 

I have often wondered whether the difference lies in the culture of the two continents or is it because ITIL was developed in the UK and has had longer to establish in Europe. Everybody knows that the US and European cultures are different and I am sure that we all have examples so I will let you supply your own example. However the main cultural difference that intrigues me is the attitude towards service.

 

In the US the eagerness to give and receive good service is ingrained in the way of life, although 'Have a nice day, sir' can sometimes grate on the nerves. In general Americans are more outgoing and speak their minds freely whereas Europeans are often more private and keep their opinions and thoughts closely guarded. So when it comes to IT Service it is not surprising the Europeans like etiquette and rules whereas Americans just want to get down to the basics as soon as possible.

 

Europe is also a continent of many cultures as anyone who has travelled around Europe can testify. Imagine a call to a Service Desk in the UK from a customer in Greece about a piece of software developed in Germany that is maintained in France. There are enough cultures here to start an epidemic. It is no surprise therefore to see why defining best practices, complete with a common vocabulary, is important in Europe.

 

Originally ITIL was developed in early 1980's to standardize the UK government data centres, as they were called then. At that time the various data centres in the government agencies had processes that were similar but not the same, for example they all had change control but different ways of managing change, they had a vocabulary with different words, and phrases, meaning the same thing. Ironically this also describes IT around the world.

 

Once the UK government had developed the ITIL best practices they quickly became popular because many of the cultural barriers were immediately removed and a common It language was desperately needed. Very soon Government agencies around Europe started to adopt ITIL and ask for ITIL compliance from suppliers, including IT Service Management software suppliers. Very quickly large software suppliers found themselves losing government contracts because they were not ITIL compliant.

 

This is a key turning point in the story of ITIL because very quickly the large software suppliers needed to get their software ITIL compliant because ITIL was beginning to spread outside of governments. As if not being able to win large government deals was not enough. So the software companies began to make their products ITIL compliant.

 

Meanwhile in the US a different phenomenon was occurring - certification. Not just academic qualifications but certifications from hardware and software vendors to show competency in managing and supporting their products. Suddenly if you weren't certified you were an outsider.

 

So now these two mighty tsunamis began to meet Europeans were being told by vendors that they needed certification and Americans told by the same vendors that they needed to adopt best practices. Common denominator? The vendors. As a result we have a Bridge beginning to appear across the cultural divide. The beauty of ITIL is that for the Europeans it is a best practice that has certification whereas for Americans it is certification that has a best practice.

 

For Europeans ITIL has grown organically and been adopted and pruned accordingly by most organizations. Whereas for Americans ITIL is an introduced species and like all introduced species has caused some problems with the existing IT ecosystem. This has been, to some degree, overcome by the latest refreshed versions of the ITIL books and the involvement of largest American vendors, such as Microsoft, getting involved in some of the newer publications.

 

When I first started visiting the US I was surprised by the number of focused conferences and organizations with numerous chapters, for example the Help Desk Institute has very focused conferences and about 50 chapters. In Europe there are much fewer conferences, possibly because Europeans on average have 4-6 weeks vacation per year, and Europeans do not like attending after work events. Here ITIL has an ace up it's sleeve because the ITSMF, which provides chapters and conferences, perfectly fits the American model so if ITSMF really gets going the we can expect to see ITIL grow very quickly.

 

My experience shows that ITIL fits both cultures perfectly and because it is the public domain is neither expensive or is it restrictive. As a last point be aware of restricted practices, these are developed and owned by a vendor, that are based around ITIL, some are excellent but be careful what you commit to because as I said one of the biggest strengths of ITIL is that it is the public domain.

 

So y'all should adopt ITIL old chap.

 

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Malcom Fry, a recognized IT industry luminary with over 35 years experience in Information Technology, serves as an independent executive advisor to BMC Software, and Remedy, a BMC Software Company. Malcolm offers an unparalleled breadth of knowledge and experience in IT business and technical issues. Malcolm is the author of four bestselling books on IT service and support, and he has had many other articles and papers published. Technology journalists regularly use Malcolm as a valuable source of information, and he is also the solo performer in a highly successful, bestselling video series made for the Help Desk Institute. He has Masters-level ITIL certification.

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