ITIL - The New International Standard in IT Best Practise

ITIL - The New International Standard in IT Best Practice

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an indispensable resource for the delivery of high quality IT services. ITIL contains best practices that have been developed over a decade of work by world-wide data processing professionals. The authority that ITIL possesses is a result of the comprehensive depth and breadth of the issues it covers. ITIL is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for IT best practices.
This article provides a synopsis on the ITIL best practice concept and will help the reader understand the key issues. An appendix of links follows..

Where can ITIL help you?
Business executives struggle to control budgets for the large capital expenditures on hardware, software, and maintenance that are entailed the delivery and integration of IT services. Costs can be reduced and ROI improved by using ITIL best practices in the integration, management and delivery of both internal and outsourced IT services.

ITIL has already become widely adopted by such organizations as Procter and Gamble, IBM, Shell Oil, and Boeing. Gartner Dataquest indicated that moving from a zero base, with no IT service management, to the full adoption of IT management services, could reduce the organization’s total cost of ownership by as much as 48%. Procter and Gamble publicly attributed nearly $125 million of cost savings per annum to the adoption of ITIL. Shell Oil announced that they created a potential saving of 6000 man days and $5 million in recoveries when they employed ITIL best practices and were able to overhaul 80,000 desktop platforms and implement software upgrades in less than 72 hours.

What is the best place to start with ITIL?
• A good configuration management process will profit from the application of ITIL best practices because they will help IT departments understand what services they provide to the organization as a whole.
• When services are better understood, IT departments will employ ITIL best practices to set priorities and improve incident and problem management.
• Change management employs ITIL best practices for the cost effective audit and control of configuration changes.
• Compliance requirements impose more stringent reporting and management practices upon IT departments regarding the delivery of confidential and secure systems like financial services. ITIL best practices again provide efficiencies in both the delivery and compliance of these services..

How should IT departments install a configuration management database?
Implementing a single configuration repository to integrate data from multiple systems is a complex process. Data comes from many sources. IT departments need to recognize that ITIL best practices can provide guidance and efficiencies to enable IT personnel to build upon existing systems and investments successfully.
ITIL and configuration management are founded upon the definitions and relationships of varying entities. ITIL best practices will help a businesses determine what technology will integrate the most relevant data best.

What are the most common obstacles to implementing ITIL?
ITIL is not a silver bullet, and identifiable benefits will be difficult to quantify at the outset. It should be viewed as a best practice—a starting point. Expect benefits to vary depending on the degree to which systems are already integrated in your business. IT departments often get into difficulty when they consider ITIL best practices to be an end-to-end solution. ITIL best practices may be costly overkill for some processes. The most effective approach is to identify those issues which have the most impact on your organization and concentrate on them.

The ITIL Framework
The ITIL framework provides a comprehensive set of best practices, which an organization should adopt or adapt judiciously. Mission critical and secure systems will probably require ITIL best practices, but other less critical systems may not. ITIL best practices will help organizations realize important IT service management objectives..
1 Aligning IT services with the current and future needs of the business
2 Improving the quality of IT services, and
3 Reducing the cost of providing the IT services.

REFERENCES TO MORE IN DEPTH RESOURCES
Best Practice for Service Delivery: 2001. 376 pages ISBN0-11-330017-4
This standard covers the planning processes required to deliver quality IT services. The planning processes consider “forward looking” aspects that have a medium to long term impact on the quality of IT services.
Best Practice for Service Support: 2000. 306 pages ISBN 0-11-330015-8
This standard covers support processes required to maintain the quality of IT services during day to day operations. The support processes consider aspects that have an immediate to short term impact on the quality of IT services.
Planning to implement Service Management: 2002. 208 pages. ISBN: 0-11-33087-9
This standard covers areas related to implementing and improving ITIL processes within an organization. It addresses areas related to ITIL process adoption like organization change, cultural change, project management and process improvement.
ICT infrastructure management: 2002. 283 pages. ISBN: 0-11-330865-5
This covers areas related to managing the ICT infrastructure. ICT infrastructure provides the underlying support infrastructure to provide the IT services. The areas covered include management and administration, Design & Planning, Technical Support and Deployment & Operations.
Application Management: 2002. 158 pages. ISBN: 0-11-330866-3
This covers application lifecycle phases i.e. requirements, design, build, deploy, operate and optimize. It includes guidance on IT service management considerations for the application lifecycle phase.
Security Management: 2002. 124 pages. ISBN: 0-11-330014-X
This standard covers the IT security management process which addresses the security aspects of information, IT services and ICT infrastructure. Security management process includes aspects on how to plan, implement, evaluate, maintain and control.

Brief on BS15000
BS15000 is the first global standard on IT service management. BS15000 and ITIL complement each other.
BS15000 consists of two parts:
Part 1 (Specification for service management) is the standard itself, which specifies the compliance requirements for an organization to achieve the certification against the standard.
Part 2 (Code of practice for service management) called the “code of practice”, elaborates on the requirement specifications and offers guidance to organizations aspiring for the certification.
An associated publication that can be useful is the PD0015 workbook. It’s an associated self-assessment workbook. PD0015 helps organizations assess current practices and can be used as part of a Service Improvement Program.

Relation between ITIL and BS15000
BS15000 standard is derived from ITIL. ITIL provides proven best practice process guidelines and BS15000 provides a level of quality for these activities, which can be audited.
BS15000 provides a certification to an organization’s claim on deploying best practice, because an independent, external, evaluation against the whole formal standard has been carried out by an approved audit organization.
Organizations aiming for a certification in IT service management would get themselves assessed and certified through BS15000.
ITIL best practices framework provides the necessary reference and guideline to the team preparing the ITSM policy, processes and procedures. ITIL is the glue between the BS15000 Standard and the organization’s individual ITSM policy, process and procedures.
BS15000 is a standard and hence is prescriptive in nature as against ITIL, which is a best practice recommendation. It is currently being fast-tracked through ISO and will eventually become ISO 20000.