ITIL: Unlocking the power of service management

Today, more organisations are turning to service management techniques to manage their IT environments in a disciplined way.

Many are using best practice ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) as a starting point, according to Ingo Tuschardt, a director of Quintica, the local representative of Marval Corporation and Marval Service Management (MSM) application based on ITIL.

Tuschardt looks at the evolving role of ITIL in business today.

Originally created by the UK government in response to increased dependency on IT and the need for process standardisation, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has evolved from a recommended best practice to a global industry "given" for aligning IT services with business requirements.

ITIL drives business value by helping companies share common terminology and integrated IT service management processes.

The ITIL platform, which has also been adopted as the standard for the provision of IT service management, consists of a series of documents that are used to create a framework for implementing service management techniques.

Essentially, this framework defines how these techniques are applied within an organisation. Being a framework, ITIL is completely customisable for specific application within any type of business that has a reliance on IT infrastructures.

The concept of service management is generally divided into two main areas, service support and service delivery.

Together, these comprise the disciplines that embrace provision and management of effective IT services.

Service support is the practice of those disciplines that enable IT services to be provided effectively. The six service support disciplines are:

* Configuration management
* Incident management
* Problem management
* Change management
* Service/help-desk
* Release management

Service delivery is the management of the IT services themselves, and involves a number of management practices to ensure IT services are provided as agreed.

Service delivery consists of five disciplines. These are:

* Service level management
* Capacity management
* Continuity management
* Availability management
* IT financial management

Many service and asset management tool vendors supply applications that support the implementation of ITIL processes, but lack the architecture and training ability to help users act upon the delivery and execution of ITIL tasks.

Therefore, before implementing ITIL it is necessary to first assess the organisation and gain a thorough understanding of the management tools that are in place - and how efficiently these assets are maintaining the alignment of IT services with business requirements.

Building a strong relationship between IT and business facilitates the development of standard and repeatable management services.

To support these services, it is vital to have accurate asset information to help detect, diagnose and resolve infrastructure errors.

Based on the above, a number of processes need to be undertaken. These include an orientation and training phase to give all staff members within the organisation an insight into the benefits of service management.

Equipped with this knowledge, staff members will be able to play an active, participatory role in the implement of ITIL and service management, and maintain dialogue between various internal groups associated with the implementation.

The next step is to design the implementation processes, structure the organisation and establish ownership within the organisation for various projects.

The final step is the coaching of project owners in the execution of the processes and skilling them appropriately.

ITIL implementation success is based on the organisation's ability to create a core of skilled, competent people who are capable of taking their company to the next level of maturity in terms if ITIL.

Competency = knowledge + skill + attitude.

The knowledge is address by training. The skill is gained by coaching. Attitude is achieved by creating confident people who "know" and "can".

Companies are constantly being asked to do more with less. Reduced budgets and growing demands on IT have forced organisations to find ways to cut costs, increase IT resource productivity, and optimise existing investments.

While there are several opportunities to reduce costs, an attractive option is through standardisation of processes.

Companies will increasingly turn to ITIL to provide guidance for their development and increase efficiencies and effectiveness of the service management process.