Government Technology

You could never call ITIL ‘the elephant in the room’ – indeed, it’s a topic that has been hotly debated by its champions and detractors alike. But has it become too big for its own good? Or is it a framework for which the service desk is all ears?

Before going into the pros and cons of ITIL – or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, to give it its full title – it’s worth establishing what exactly ITIL is and, more importantly, what it can deliver to the service desk.
    
Essentially, ITIL is a collection of best practices in IT Service Management (ITSM), providing a framework that can be utilised in any organisation to improve capabilities and service management. Originally released in the late 1980s by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) – an independent office of HM Treasury, established to help government deliver best value from its spending and then known as the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency – it grew to become a collection of 44 books. ITIL V2, a set of seven books based around the two key books, Service Support and Service Delivery, was released early in 2000.
    
May 2007 saw the launch internationally of ITIL V3, which was based on the service lifecycle approach. According to itSMF – the forum for IT service management professionals – that has increased synergy to other best practice, such as COBIT and CMMI: “… it talks more about business benefits delivered by IT and reflects many new practices in our industry, like outsourced service models and cultural change factors”, itSMF states.

Framework, not cookbook
But what does ITIL do and how does it function? “ITIL does not set in stone every action required on a day-to-day basis, because this is something that will vary from organisation to organisation,” states itSMF. “Being a framework and not a cookbook that requires the exact ingredients, ITIL provides an outline and models that specify the goals, general activities, inputs and outputs of the processes that can be incorporated and generally used in varying degrees of maturity in most organisations.”
    
And this is where so much of the criticism of ITIL seems to originate from – an expectation that you somehow wind it up, set it loose in your organisation and watch it transform the business. If only life were that simple.
    
Instead, ITIL has to be driven by people, preferably from the top down, as Susan Storey, an associate trainer for a number of organisations, including the Service Desk Institute, is at pains to point out. “The service desk is the face of IT and behind that lives the whole vast area where ITIL can deliver consensus. It can help you to partner up with the business, enabling you to use all of your resources to give greater value and allowing the service desk to shine. It is the face of IT and needs all of the knowledge it can get. ITIL empowers the service desk and shows how the whole IT infrastructure can be improved to benefit all of the organisation.”
    
V3 has taken this a step further by providing organisations with the means to put together a clear and coherent business case. “It helps them to put a value on the business and demonstrate that – from the service desk right through the 27 processes that allow you to value your service and even how much it would cost you to implement your IT processes.”
    
Both the itSMF and Storey see ITIL as delivering a proven method for planning and implementing common processes, roles and activities, with appropriate reference to each other that defines the lines of communication between these processes. More importantly, ITIL provides a common language that is an essential ingredient in the successful implementation of any improvement programme.

Vital role
Even the IT Skeptic (www.itskeptic.org), renowned for his often acerbic take on many aspects of ITIL and ITSM, agrees that ITIL has a vital role to play for businesses. “Every organisation needs the processes ITIL describes. Every organisation already has them. ITIL is just one way of defining a standard approach to performing them. You may not need ITIL, but every IT shop needs to be doing what ITIL describes, one way or another.”
    
There is nothing magic about ITIL, he adds – any project built around it should be justified and managed and held accountable in the same ways as any other. “ITIL is a useful tool in the context of a broader cultural change initiative to change the way people approach delivery of service. If there is a real need, and if there is a justifiable business case, then ITIL can usefully be employed as one input to culture change and process improvement, where it provides a template for generally agreed good practice.”
    
However, some ITIL initiatives should never see the light of day; he argues, or, if they get that far, they should be put out of their misery. “The ITIL fad/hype/cult phenomenon creates proposals that are not an optimal use of resources. ITIL appeals to the IT taste for instant product solutions to complex problems. It looks like a nicely packaged, formulaic fix to service-culture issues. It is not, but that has not stopped the vendor/consultant/analyst community from hyping it as such, and building consulting, training and software markets off the back of it.”

Under-utilised
Yet many organisations are still failing to use ITIL to its full capability, it seems. Most organisations are still implementing the most commonly adopted ITIL V2 processes of incident, problem and change management under the name of V3, while maturing their ITSM deployments in readiness for new ITIL V3 processes, such as request fulfilment, service catalog and event management.
    
More than 500 executives and senior managers from both commercial and government organisations took part in a survey, entitled ’ITIL State of the Nation’, which looked into international adoption rates of ITIL V3 since its launch in June 2007 and the associated drivers for, and barriers to, its deployment.
    
According to the survey, the majority (56 per cent) of respondents are still using ITIL V2, with the remaining 44 per cent using ITIL V3; of those 44 per cent, 13 per cent have adopted ITIL V3 from scratch, whereas 31 per cent have moved to ITIL V3 from their existing ITIL V2 implementations.
    
Of the organisations currently using ITIL V2, one third (32 per cent) intend to remain with ITIL V2, but introduce some ITIL V3 concepts; one quarter (24 per cent) are considering upgrading to V3, with a further 8 per cent having an ITIL V3 project underway; one fifth (19 per cent) have not yet considered ITIL V3; and a further fifth (17 per cent) of respondents claim they are unlikely to consider moving to ITIL V3 or have already ruled it out completely.
    
Although the service lifecycle approach is cited as the top driver for adopting ITIL V3, it is not being implemented. Most organisations are deploying ITIL V3 simply to ensure they are up to date with the latest version. In practice, many are still just implementing the most commonly adopted ITIL V2 processes of incident, problem and change management under another name (V3).

Lifecycle approach
There is evidence that some of the ITIL V3 processes designed to aid the lifecycle approach to services are being adopted. Some 37 per cent of respondents have already implemented a service catalog, with a further 41 per cent developing one currently. Similarly, 42 per cent of respondents have already implemented a configuration management system (CMS) or database (CMDB), with a further quarter (24 per cent) planning to develop one in the near future.
    
When asked about the timeframe for implementing ITIL V3, an overwhelming 63 per cent of respondents who plan to move to ITIL V3 intend to do so within the next two years, indicating that many organisations are committed to maturing their existing ITIL V2 processes before moving on to ITIL V3. This reflects the overriding belief of survey participants that the more ITIL processes adopted, the more mature the IT services delivered, and the more likely the key goals and objectives of the overall business or organisation are met.
    
The long timescale involved in moving to ITIL V3 also suggests the significant level of planning required for migration from one version of ITIL to another. 54 per cent of respondents believe they will have implemented most, if not all, the processes within each lifecycle phase of ITIL V3 by 2014.

Targeted training
Meanwhile, how well are those responsible for promoting ITIL certification – namely the training providers and APMG UK, which specialises in the accreditation and certification of organisations, processes and people within a range of industries and management disciplines – serving the user community?
    
On that score, Alan McCarthy, director at Pink Elephant EMEA, is not overly impressed. He believes any training should have (at least) two objectives: to develop the individual and to benefit the organisation – through knowledge gained on the course and applied to improve things ‘back at the ranch’.
    
“So let’s stop thinking ‘expert’ and get back to thinking ‘practitioner’ or ‘manager’,” he advises. “Everything that APMG and the training providers do to promote the ‘new’ ITIL certification scheme – new? It’s almost two years old! – is geared around steering the individual towards becoming an ‘ITIL Expert’. This is providing value to the individual by increasing his/her qualifications and marketability, but what’s the value to the organisation? Exactly how is an organisation better off, if its staff are amongst the most qualified in the industry and are prime targets to be head-hunted away?”

Money machines
McCarthy says Pink Elephant is hearing a lot of criticism from its customers lately about the V3 ITIL courses – such as “they’re just a money-making machine for the training companies and examination institutes” or “they’re just designed to get people through an examination”. Some of that criticism is true, he agrees. “For example, Pink Elephant stopped delivering the V2 to V3 Foundation Bridge, simply because it was there to get people through the exam – not to give them a real understanding of the differences. And we do know of trainers out there in the marketplace who can only really train to ‘get the examination’. If the delegate wants to go ‘off piste’, asking questions that aren’t in the syllabus, the trainer gets stumped!”
    
What is needed far more is carefully targeted education and training, aimed primarily at delivering value to the organisation. “So let’s get back on track with the ITIL Certification scheme,” he urges. “It’s not about the number of examinations that the examination institutes can sell; it’s about delivering knowledge to individuals who can then make a difference in their organisations. And it’s not just about being an ‘expert’; it’s about gaining real, practical knowledge.”

Right approach
In all fairness, ITIL is far less at fault as a concept than the hype and spin that have grown up around it. Maybe the right approach for any organisation is to expect benefits to vary, depending on the degree to which systems are already integrated within the business. IT departments often find that things start to backfire when they approach ITIL best practices as something that will deliver an end-to-end solution.
    
Also, ITIL may just not be right for everyone’s particular way of working, where ‘best practices’ may turn out to be costly overkill. A piecemeal approach to ITIL might be the solution here – to identify those issues that have the most impact on the organisation and concentrate on those, rather than seeing ITIL as indivisible and set in tablets of stone. Where ‘total ITIL’ would prove unwieldy, unworkable and, ultimately, unnecessary, taking a hammer and breaking it down into small, workable units might well bring the anticipated benefits.

Massive failure
The results of a recent survey carried out by Hornbill – ’ITIL State of the Nation’ – reveal that the majority of so-called ITIL V3 implementations today are failing to adopt a lifecycle approach to IT service management (ITSM), in reality taking a bite-size approach to the latest version of the ITIL best practice framework.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems, comments: “One notable aspect of ITIL V3 is its orientation towards business services, moving IT away from a pure technology play. Whichever version of ITIL organisations are looking to adopt, the drivers are the same: improving service quality and increasing customer satisfaction. Process can only take you so far. It is people that make the difference between poor and excellent service. This is what Hornbill calls the ‘human touch’ – putting customers at the core of everything we do and developing technology that can be used to drive excellence and prevent process stagnation.”
    
The service desk is IT’s shop window and, by ensuring that it is run by the right staff, with the right attitude and the right tools, IT can tackle service quality and customer satisfaction head on, instead of expecting processes alone to make a difference, Sweeney contends. “The challenge for IT remains to demonstrate some quick wins to secure business attention, then forge ahead with the more strategic aspects of ITIL V3, complete the service lifecycle and demonstrate the true benefits of ITIL.”

ITIL champions
Clearly, ITIL works for many organisations, with some household names amongst those that have embraced it. These include Procter & Gamble, IBM, Caterpillar, Shell Oil, Boeing and the US Internal Revenue Service.

All have reported great success and significant operational cost savings as a direct result of ITIL adoption. Procter & Gamble publicly attributes nearly $125 million in IT cost savings per year to the adoption of ITIL, constituting nearly 10 per cent of its annual IT budget. No small achievement.
   
Similarly, Shell Oil utilised ITIL best practices when overhauling its global desktop PC consolidation project, encompassing 80,000 desktops. With this project completed, it can now do software upgrades in less than 72 hours, it reports, potentially saving 6,000 working days and $5 million. It was also able to overhaul 80,000 desktop platforms. ITIL non-believers might have some difficulty explaining that one away.

For more information
To download a copy of Hornbill’s survey and white paper, go to: www.supportworld.co.uk/industry-resources/research