I suppose one of the big objections I have every time the ITIL matter comes up is people usually tend to describe the situation as black-and-white--if you don't have ITIL, your business is chaotic, SLAs aren't uniform across the enterprise, you have redundant and inefficient work being done, processes aren't standardized and so on.
The portrayal repeatedly is the Beavis and Butthead model vs. the ITIL model and if you're not doing ITIL, you're Beavis and Butthead. So when I say, "Where are the cost savings?" people chime in with the old, "Well you get cost savings through better processes, standardization across the enterprise, improved efficiency, uniform SLAs, consistent documentation..." but that assumes that the organization in question ISN'T ALREADY DOING THOSE THINGS WELL. Clearly *any* process is better than *no* process, but my contention is, in organizations with solid processes and toolsets already in place, how is ITIL/ITSM going to make things better? That's where I want to see the evidence. -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of William Rentfrow Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 10:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OT -- Sort Of: Computerworld reports on ITIL Obviously this thread touched a sensitive nerve that's aching for a lot of people. It's kind of interesting to remember how ITIL started - the British Government wanted to standardize the framework for IT service delivery. Their focus was on them as a customer - "How is our tax money being spent on IT and are they following any guidelines to support us [the government]?" This all started in the 80's and really got rolling in the 90's. It was of course adopted outside the UK much later and most of us started hearing about around 2001 or so. The purpose of ITIL is not to force change in processes or to consolidate services that are spread out among different groups in the organizations - although both of those certainly happen. More on that in a second... The real purpose of ITIL is to make sure that service management is standardized within an organization and meets some industry norms. More importantly, it is (in theory at least) put into place to make the business more effective overall. The costs could be higher or lower for an IT organization putting ITIL in place. However, that is not the best way to measure it. The real measure is whether or not it makes revenue generation (or cost savings) throughout the entire enterprise more effective. An additional cost of $100,000 to an IT department for a project may be cost prohibitive - but if it will save the company $2,000,000 a year in other departments it's a no-brainer. Successful ITIL implementations also forces organizations to look at the "big picture". Many IT organizations have dozens and dozens of local groups with good "tribal" knowledge that provide excellent services. However, what is an IT manager who is implementing ITIL supposed to do when they see that they have 15 different support groups with 15 different methods of measuring the SLA to the same set of customers? Should the tech support division of a giant communications company respond to a customer faster or slower than the billing department? The answer from a customer perspective is usually "no". So why would an IT Manager want to install 15 different SLA tools that all measure the same way? The redundancy in hardware alone makes the costs skyrocket. In regards to BMC Remedy ITIL is neither a good or bad thing. As others have said it's more about the effectiveness of implementation. I will be willing to wager (but not more than $1 since I'm no real gambler...) that all "failed" ITIL implementations are ones where top management didn't buy into the process and take the time and dedication to work through the big picture items. William Rentfrow, Principal Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] C 701-306-6157 O 952-432-0227 ________________________________________________________________________ _______ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
