ITIL, You Til, We All Til

  • Article

Although MeadWestvaco's transformation is still ongoing, to date the company has eliminated more than $100,000 annually in IT maintenance contracts and recognized a 10 percent gain in operational stability. McGrane credits these gains and savings to ITIL. Read the whole article here.

Organizations that are succeeding with ITIL are keeping the silos for management structure, but modifying performance measurement and compensation to begin reflecting enterprise, not silo goals. They are also re-engineering and driving the flow of IT work at the enterprise level--through a consolidated system approach. One system, with visibility for all—going from request to outcome. Properly designed, they are balancing both corporate IT governance needs and local operating flexibility. Read the whole article here.

Using ITIL isn't easy, because it demands major changes in how IT organizations are run. Consultant Malcolm Fry offers some reasons why ITIL projects fail:

  • Lack of management commitment ITIL takes time and a lot of process change. Employees won't commit to either without top-level support from both IT and the business.
  • Complexity IT staff will get overwhelmed if you break each ITIL process into 40 or 50 steps. Ideally, limit the number of steps to five or six.
  • Poor work instructions ITIL gives you guidance, but it doesn't tell you how to actually do anything. You need to spend time figuring out how ITIL's best practices apply to your organization.
  • Misdirected metrics You need to measure quality, not just performance. For instance, often the top metric for service desks is number of incidents resolved in the first call. Customers, however, will define success as not having to make the call in the first place.
  • Diminished momentum ITIL can be a five-year project, and long projects are hard to keep going. You need to develop achievable goals that keep this in mind

Read the whole article, then read some follow-on thoughts from Randyy TN blogs:
How the MOF Process Model corresponds to ITIL guidance
MOF Team Model and mapping ITIL flows to your IT Org Chart
Reducing IT Costs, Design a Service Catalog