ITIL strategy guide for the midmarket CIO

For free advice and resources on more IT and business topics, visit our list of Midmarket CIO Briefings.

• ITIL has place in midmarket -- if it's highly focused
• Midmarket slow to adopt ITIL v3
• The Real Niel: ITIL versus MOF
• ITIL at SMBs challenging but rewarding
• ITIL: The Latest Wave in Service Management
• More resources

When considering your ITIL strategy, you've got to ask yourself: Where's the return?

If you can't answer that question, then don't do it, advised Larry Killingsworth, an IT consultant at Pultorak & Associates Ltd., a Seattle-based consultancy firm.

This is especially true for midmarket firms, where resources are limited.

"If you can answer that, then go for it," he said. "To blindly follow because some guru said so is just foolish."

Learn more in "ITIL has place in midmarket -- if it's highly focused." Also:

• ITIL strategies for CIOs
  ITIL is designed to help IT professionals improve processes within their organizations. Learn more about training and educating IT staff on ITIL, configuration management database and IT Service Management with this guide.
• Mediacast: ITIL v3
  ITIL version 3 has arrived! Now what? Get the lowdown on the latest version of the IT Infrastructure Library with webcasts from SearchCIO.com.

ITIL gets a refresh. Does the middle market care? Maybe.

Last summer ITIL released a new version of its best practices framework, dubbed version 3. Published by Great Britain's Office of Government Commerce, ITIL v3 has been touted as a huge leap forward in making IT services cheaper, more efficient and vital to the business.

"The refresh has transformed the guidance from providing a great service to being the most innovative and best in class," ITIL itself promised. "At the same time, the interface between old and new approaches is seamless so that users do not have to reinvent the wheel when adopting it."

But analysts say the actual reception to v3 by CIOs has been more muted than you'd expect from such a purported big advance.

Find out more in "Midmarket slow to adopt ITIL v3." Also:

• Top 10 things IT managers should know about implementing ITIL
  What are some of the best ways to approach ITIL implementation projects? Find out here.
• ITIL V3: Stakeholder coordination is key to success
  In his latest column, Brian Johnson offers tips and advice on how to coordinate the ITIL stakeholders in your organization to successfully meet business requirements by using an IT service design process.

I love ITIL … I just don't use it anymore.

Please let me explain. I have spent much of my IT career in turnaround assignments: Someone decides that IT needs to be "fixed" -- and I'm the fixer. This is grueling work. I often need to repair the IT/business relationship while improving methods and practices, all while keeping the wheels moving. The net result of this is that I am a very high-mileage IT practitioner.

In my first turnaround role, I looked for but could not find some type of standard I could use as a set of ready-to-use best practices. I toyed with the Capability Maturity Model, but it did not help me much with processes, tools and methods. I explored CoBIT, but its focus was (and is) too narrow. I needed something that would describe how I should deliver IT products and services to my business customers, something that covered the range from governance to implementation to maintenance to enhancement.

In short, I needed something that gave me a shortcut for running a reliable, credible IT organization.

Learn more in "The Real Niel: ITIL versus MOF." Also:

• ITIL Works, But I Prefer the Microsoft Operations Framework
  ITIL can give you great results. But the Microsoft Operations Framework is cheaper and less complex, and works just as well.
• ITIL, MOF and the Windows IT manager
  IT managers in the global IT world must learn how ITIL affects their Windows environments. ITIL expert Stuart D. Galup explains why U.S. IT managers have to get on board and how Microsoft Operations Framework relates to ITIL.

Lou Hunnebeck compares the challenges of adopting an ITIL strategy to those of starting a diet: lifestyle changes take some getting used to, and you'll probably still crave sweets.

"IT folks are ones and zeroes people. They want a kit," said Hunnebeck, IT Service Management (ITSM) practice director at CCN Inc., a New York-based ITSM and IT workforce technology provider. "ITIL can be very frightening because it takes a certain amount of trust. It's really about changing culture."

But more small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are adopting the concepts set forth in ITIL, which puts a framework around IT practices and aligns them with business strategy. A revised version of ITIL standards is expected to be released at the end of May, with new instructional materials to follow in about a year, according to Hank Marquis, director of ITSM consulting at Enterprise Management Associates, an analyst and consulting firm in Boulder, Colo.

Find out more in "ITIL at SMBs challenging but rewarding." Also:

• ITIL process success: Get people on your side
  Executive and employee support can be the biggest barriers to ITIL process adoption. In his latest column, Brian Johnson offers advice on how to secure executive support and appoint ITIL champions to lead your internal campaign.
• Gartner analyst warns against common ITIL traps
  Thinking about implementing ITIL? Don't bite off more than you can chew.

A few years ago, CIO Barry Paxman of Cascade Designs Inc., a Seattle-based maker of camping equipment, began investigating ways to improve how his group developed solutions and handled service calls. His efforts led him to the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL -- a kind of CIO playbook.

After further study, Paxman concluded that his 11-person staff couldn't handle the sweeping changes ITIL would require. "The real turnoff for me was the overload of information and the feeling that it was going to be overwhelming for my developers," he says. And so he opted to stick with regular meetings and informal responses to help desk incidents. "Although ITIL has a lot of good ideas, we simply didn't have the time or resources to put them into practice."

Some 300 miles east in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Mike Carper, divisional vice president of technology and operations at Coldwater Creek Inc., a women's apparel company with $780 million in revenue, faced a similar challenge. Help desk incidents would go days without being resolved; nothing was tracked; staffers fixed problems without taking credit.

Learn more in "ITIL: The Latest Wave in Service Management." Also:

• ITIL tough but worth it, says midmarket telco firm
  Just another process? Perhaps. But for one firm, going from no process to being process-centric turned it into a well-tuned IT organization.
• ITIL v3: FAQs from your peers
  ITIL expert David Pultorak answers frequently asked questions about ITIL v3.

• IT Service Management for the midmarket (SearchCIO-Midmarket.com resource center)
• IT Service Management and IT Infrastructure Library (SearchCIO.com resource center)
• ITIL (Official site)