- Transforming ITIL to Agile
- Visualization Coolness
- Change Detection
- Green IT Machine
- Continuous Training
- Community and Cooperation are the Keys to Success!
- Ignoring the source code is akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand
- Remember when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
- My downloads is bigger than yours!
- It's all about working together
May 12, 2006 | Comments: (0)
IT trouble often starts with inconsistency in process
A few years ago, I attended an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) training session at a major financial services company with >$3-billion annual IT spend. Each of the line of business IT managers being trained had about 100 people working under them, and each had multimillion-dollar IT budgets.
So at that time, one of the first steps of ITIL training was to ask these folks what the process was for some common scenarios. For example, if they needed a new exchange server for their group -- who did they order it from, who installed it internally, and how long would the whole process take, start-to-finish?
And what we found was that all nine of them had different answers ... there was a complete lack of consistency across the processes.
The point of ITIL is to get your IT organized in such a way that you're as streamlined as a McDonald's burger assembly line. When someone needs something, that's a service that you provide to them. Getting an Exchange server up and running, for example, should be a very well-baked service, with very exact costs known.
ITIL also draws an important distinction between "incidents" and "problems." Time and again, IT groups work to fix incidents rather than problems -- for example, tinkering away at an FTP server (that no one is using internally), when an Exchange server is down (a 'service' that might be worth more than $50k to that type of business).
The ITIL principals suggest that the proper way to run an IT organization is like a service provider, and large enterprises today are increasingly charging individual business units for IT services. These so-called "operational level agreements" are getting more common every day.
Posted by Harper Mann on May 12, 2006 01:08 PM
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Yes, consistency is what made McDonald a successful business. Hence, Business departments refer to this consistency "McDonalization". Presently, ITIL is the de facto framework. It layout the service support and delivery and provide some sort of measurement to them. However, ITIL doesn't tell how these processes are implemented. I guess that is left for the specific environment, and that is why it is called "Framework". I think for ITIL to be successful more robust control and performance measure is needed. Hence, I think it would be a good idea, if ITIL is augmented with something like COBIT for control and performance measures and Sigma Six for service quality.
Posted by: Mirghani Mohamed at May 12, 2006 08:13 PMI believe your reference to "Operational Level Agreement" should actually read "Service Level Agreement". According to the framework, an OLA is more commonly used as an internal IT document that defines the working relationship between internal IT functions and their associated responsibilities. An SLA is typically the formal negotiated document that defines the terms of a particular service provided to a customer.
Posted by: MJ at May 15, 2006 12:59 PM
