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Processes: ITIL's Third Time a Charm
Our prediction: ITIL v3 aligns business with technology better than its predecessor -- and midmarket companies will love it.
The U.K. agency that in the 1980s developed the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) -- the industry's most comprehensive guide to IT services best practices -- issued version 3 in May. It's the first major revision in seven years and it comes with its own drum roll. Vendors like Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) treated the revised guide like a marketing event.
The latest version incorporates much of the content from v2, say experts, yet recognizes that the practice of IT has matured. In v3, emphasis shifts from enhancing the performance of IT processes to serving the business. The approach goes beyond tactical improvements to strategic advice. One of the big differences in v3, says Jeroen Bronkhorst, IT Service Management program manager at HP and a member of the ITIL v3 editorial team, is that the processes described in v3 help govern IT and set a strategy that incorporates financial principles such as ROI.
"If you look at what has happened so far in the world of IT Service Management, IT has really been focused on organizing the activities within an IT organization, calling them processes," says Bronkhorst, who developed the ITIL v3 process maps. "But if you only focus on how you organize the activities through processes, that doesn't say anything about the value that you provide to the outside world. You can have your activities perfectly organized and still provide rubbish."
Mike Tainter, IT Service Management practice manager at Forsythe Solutions Group Inc. in Skokie, Ill., said he believes ITIL v3 will add clarity and consistency to IT processes and help companies achieve better alignment between business needs, goals and IT processes. Forsythe uses the ITIL framework internally and has implemented many ITIL projects for clients. "V3 should help IT organizations reduce their amount of unplanned work, transforming them from reactive into innovative groups," Tainter says.
Ed Holub, research vice president for ITSM at Gartner, agrees. "This a substantial update," he says. "This version is more strategic. It will probably have more appeal to the CIO-level person, rather than just the people running infrastructure operations." Gartner predicts that by year's end 2010, ITIL will be in use by 30% of companies with 250-999 IT employees and by 60% of companies with more than 1,000 employees. "We do see it as becoming the de facto best practice guidance for IT services," Holub says.
ITIL v3 is not a checklist of to-dos; rather, it can be broken down and implemented in chunks. For instance, if your company is growing through acquisition, you may want to focus on the part of ITIL v3 that enables businesses to more rapidly digest acquisitions. Or the mission at hand might be improving the availability of critical applications or driving down the cost of IT or a combination of these goals. "If you can't implement something in four to six months or have it in place and measuring improvements, then your scope is probably too broad," Holub says.
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