The ICT department exists for one reason: to support an organization, its business processes, and its internal users. It’s a service department where the (internal) customer always comes first. Your best approach is to set a clear ICT department mission and to create a solid framework to make the identity of the ICT department clear and tangible for the organization and the employees in the ICT department.
The framework you build should take care of at least two things: safeguard support to all users within the organization and limit downtime.
The ITIL framework focuses on precisely that. When implemented correctly, it can significantly help an organization in cost savings and quality improvement. The secret of a successful ITIL framework is that you need to make it suitable for your organization. The art of omission is critical in setting up a successful ITIL framework: keep it simple and prevent unnecessary bureaucratic processes if they don’t add value.
In this post, I will show the basics of ITIL and how ITIL can be of added value to organizations. I will also introduce pitfalls you should avoid in creating the best ITIL framework that suits your organization.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a publication of “best practice solutions” in Information Technology management. In other words, guidelines that indicate how an ICT service provider can best ensure that its (internal) customers get the products and services they demand. These “best practice solutions” have been compiled by involving many people, including experienced IT managers, executive staff, experienced (end) users, and consultants.
You can compare ITIL in ICT to setting up a restaurant. ITIL is nothing more than a set of guidelines (global recipes) to set up the primary conditions for the realization of a restaurant. However, to execute your “restaurant” correctly, you require more than a master cook. To excel, you need a complete set of staffing members, including logistics, purchasing, a good location, an image, and much more. ITIL addresses all these topics, translated in ICT terms: the processes.
You can summarize ITIL as a set of booklets (recipes/guidelines) describing the key processes essential for an IT service provider to deliver quality. These processes are interrelated and documented in many booklets that you call “the library.”
Blindly applying ITIL without looking at your organization’s current situation is particularly dangerous and can have the opposite effect of what you intend with an ITIL implementation.
Do your homework before implementing ITIL: analyze existing business processes, define desired results, and evaluate the available budget. When you do this right, ITIL can turn a poorly run “restaurant” into a flourishing business. But only if you do this correctly.
ITIL Origins and Structure
ITIL originates in the UK government agency CCTA (Central Computer & Telecommunications Agency) in the 1980s. These were the days of large data centers. The CCTA inventoried and described standards and processes, resulting in a set of best practice solutions (so-called “best practices”) in the field of Information Technology management. The CCTA documented all these practice solutions in a series of books (currently more than 45). These books describe how to achieve good quality ICT management.
The structure of ITIL consists of three parts:
- ITIL Foundation
- Service Support Set
- Service Delivery Set
ITIL Foundation
The ITIL Foundation intends to create a solid set of qualified employees in the field of management of an ICT infrastructure. These employees have to be able to work within work processes that are (or will be) set up using ITIL, including employees in:
- Helpdesk
- Problem Management
- Change Management
- Configuration Management
- Administrators of computer systems, printers, and networks
- The employees that manage the ICT assets at their location and the ICT contacts within non-ICT departments.
ITIL Service Support
The ITIL Service Support focuses on setting up a user support organization. The aim is to give the ICT services you offer a quality character, i.e., with as little disruption to business processes as possible where your (internal) customer always comes first. ITIL describes how you manage the operational world by using a process-based approach. Part of the Service Support set are the following core processes:
- Incident management (how do I remedy and prevent disruptions)
- Problem management (how to structurally solve problems)
- Change management (controlled implementation of changes with minimal risks to have fewer follow-up disruptions/modifications)
- Configuration management (keeping track of the managed objects and their relationships to support previous processes)
ITIL Service Delivery
The ITIL Service Delivery focuses on ensuring service delivery. Critical processes in this are:
- Service level management
- Capacity management
- Cost management
- Availability management
- Reliability
- Maintainability
- Serviceability
- Performance
- Contingency planning
- Disaster Recovery
- Business Contingency
Implementing ITIL
A thorough Roadmap and Implementation plan are necessary to introduce ITIL in your organization. Besides the rough framework provided by ITIL, you need to fit existing and new tools into the organization. Introducing ITIL will undoubtedly entail changes in many employees’ processes, functions, and work.
An exemplary implementation plan defines prerequisites for keeping costs under control and making the adoption of ITIL in an organization a success. In practice, many organizations find that introducing ITIL increases costs by creating a robust foundation with possibly slightly overcapacity in resources. However, if done appropriately and controlled, ITIL is cost-reducing in the long run precisely because of its solid foundation making it easily scalable and duplicable to other locations.
Briefly summarized, a successful ITIL implementation is mainly beneficial in the following areas:
- Quality Assurance
- Service Level Increase
- Cost Reduction
- Increase in efficiency and effectiveness of information provision
- Unambiguity/uniformity (e.g., drafting and agreeing on an SLA)
Implementing a modular design based on the above areas makes implementation manageable.
Although quality is challenging to measure without using good measurement tools, there is a whole range of possibilities. A periodic customer satisfaction survey is one of the possibilities to steer quality, but face-to-face talks with your internal customers even work better. You usually get more valuable feedback by talking to your users instead of sending a survey by e-mail: speak to your colleagues!
I would also advise positioning your support department in your organization’s center and making it very approachable with a “customer always comes first/ready to serve” mentality.
ITIL Pitfalls
If you take the guidelines (recipes) literally, ITIL is a paper monster that can completely cripple an organization (including employee motivation) with rules and procedures. To prevent this, you need to apply ITIL pragmatically, meaning you need a pragmatic, hands-on manager to achieve quick and well-defined results.
Another pitfall is assuming that a tool can embody the complete ITIL concept, resulting in organizations making significant investments in supposedly “ITIL-compliant” tools. These tools then turn out to be entirely out of sync with the rest of the tools and/or are misused: “a tool with a fool is still a fool.”
ITIL Tools
The comment in the previous paragraph about tools doesn’t mean that tools that support the ITIL approach are all bad. Depending on the ITIL processes, you must implement some essential, controllable tools. One of the most important tools is a support registration system. Also called a management tool or helpdesk tool. Your helpdesk uses the helpdesk tool to register complaints and questions reported by end users. Other tools include incident and change registration and follow-up tools for problems and changes from the problem change management process.
Organizations that suit the ITIL approach
ITIL has a very positive track record in huge, complex organizations. Still, it also shines in agile, fast-growing organizations with a continuous stream of new users that quickly grow by mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
Also, smaller organizations can profit from an ITIL approach. When you apply ITIL principles within smaller organizations (small ICT departments), management needs to be particularly pragmatic. Using the “paper tiger” principles from a government or sizeable administrative organization and then applying them to a small manufacturing organization can pose significant dangers. These dangers include disinvestment, destruction of capital, employee frustration, lack of innovation, stress, a hostile atmosphere, and more: never underestimate these issues.
The key takeaway is that you should not blindly implement every part of ITIL: only the functions that benefit:
- Your organization
- Increase in efficiency
- Increase in flexibility
- Increae in reliability (for instance, less downtime)
- Etc.
- Your users
- Increase in ICT service level
- Training & Education of your users
- Maximizing utilization of applications
- Etc.
Final Thoughts
To manage the increasing complexity and changes in the world of technology, you require structured methods that lead to streamlined and well-organized management. Because of the growing complexity of technology and fast-paced technological changes in combination with a 24/7 economy, it is also essential to maintain, safeguard and improve service levels to your internal users, providing as much support to users as possible to keep “ahead of the game.”
Don’t introduce ITIL with a “big bang,” but introduce ITIL step by step in a “scrum” approach, only implementing the parts that add value to your organization and start with the most beneficial features for your organization and its users.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions or in case you have any additional advice/tips about this subject. If you want to keep me in the loop if I upload a new post, make sure to subscribe, so you receive a notification by e-mail.
