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.