The Security Blog

In this, his fourth article in the series, my friend, David Moskowitz, continues an elaborates his discussion of ITIL.  Enjoy. 

Article 4 in the ITIL Series: Adopting the ITIL Part 2

By David Moskowitz

This is the second part of Adopting the ITIL (Part 1 of Adopting the ITIL can be found here). It continues an approach to the ITIL adoption that suggests using aspects of Continual Service Improvement (CSI) and Service Transition (ST), two of the five core ITIL books.   Organizational change is a foundation for adopting the ITIL. Don’t take our word for it, consider this from the CSI volume: 

Improving service management is to embark upon an organizational change programme. Many organizational change programmes fail to achieve the desired results. Successful ITSM requires understanding the way in which work is done and putting in place a programme of change within the IT organization. This type of change is, by its very nature, prone to difficulties. It involves people and the way they work. People generally do not like to change; the benefits must be explained to everyone to gain their support and to ensure that they break out of old working practices."

• Organizational and stakeholder change – Reflecting the holistic nature of change that Service Transition must be based on, organizations do not transform their IT service by only changing the IT services. Modern innovations mean that the organization itself will also inevitably change to make use of the new and changed services available.
• Communications – One of the major traditional weaknesses in Service Transition has been the inability to deliver sufficient prompt understanding of the implications, benefits and usage of IT services.

While expressed in the context of change and Service Transition, that’s exactly what an ITIL adoption effort is. One of the topics discussed in the Service Transition volume is changes to organizational culture. One of the steps to adopt the ITIL is to form a (Service Transition) Team:

"The Service Transition team will soon become familiar with the need to change attitudes and the operation of converting culture…. It is important the Service Transition team members are capable of understanding the impact of their work on others, and therefore tailoring their own approach to the stakeholder audience. Ultimately, the Service Transition team’s goal is to build enthusiasm and commitment to the change, while ensuring that all stakeholders are clear about how the changes will impact themselves, and what will be expected of them in the coming months."

This provides a basis for not only how to improve services and process, but also how to introduce and adopt the ITIL. It starts with management commitment that includes funding and moves quickly toward understanding of the process to adopt the ITIL. As suggested in the quotations above, people are uncomfortable with change. Some people will attempt to torpedo the effort if they don’t thoroughly understand the benefit and the goal as it relates to them, personally. This makes communication and stakeholder involvement critical aspects of successfully adopting the ITIL. 

Now what??

There must be a business purpose driving the effort — it’s about the business, not about the technology. The core champions of the effort really need to be subject matter experts (SME) in the impacted business and impacted IT areas. This isn’t a single person, rather the suggestion here is that both business and IT have a stake in the outcome and should be champions of the effort. In addition, this doesn’t mean they all have to be certified in the ITIL, but it would not hurt. We’ll cover certification in the next article. These individuals should have the management authority and visibility combined with a long term view and commitment to the transformation.

I’m not suggesting that moving to an ITSM-centric viewpoint is easy, trivial or a short duration project. Is it something the organization can do on its own? I do know that it’s likely to be easier with help. The key, it’s not about, Doing Implementing. The extracts from the CSI and ST volumes say, in effect, that, "Doing ITIL isn’t about doing ITIL." It is about ITSM as a discipline. I’ve talked about ITSM in every article. The ITIL definition of IT Service Management (from the Service Transition volume) is simple (though not easy):A set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services. Where "capabilities" take the form of the right teams of people and appropriate tools/technology combined with processes to manage IT services over their lifecycles.

See the side bar for some indicators, and contra-indicators, to determine if your organization is a candidate to consider adopting the ITIL as a means to achieve IT Service Management. The same posting also include some sample questions to ask about the effort. 

One of the first steps is to evaluate where the organization currently is either using an internal assessment or a standard assessment (e.g., ISO 20000 or CMMi). it also means that people in the organization will need to understand what the ITIL REALLY is and represents.
 

Adoption of the ITIL is About Customer Value

Consider the following Short excerpts from the CSI volume:

"(The CSI) volume provides instrumental guidance in creating and maintaining value for customers through better design, introduction and operation of services."

The stated purpose for the CSI volume is:

"This publication aims to provide practical guidance in evaluating and improving the quality of services, overall maturity of the ITSM service lifecycle and its underlying processes, at three levels within the organization

• The overall health of ITSM as a discipline
• The continual alignment of the portfolio of IT services with the current and future business needs
• The maturity of the enabling IT processes required to support business processes in a continual service lifecycle model."

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