ITIL and System Center 2012

If ITIL is the Why , the What and the When of IT operations System Center provides the how..

I have been quite harsh with the tick boxes here, for example you could argue that part of Service improvement could be to redesign a process and this could be done in System Center (Orchestrator), and validation and testing management is in yellow as this requires Visual Studio Team Foundation Suite with its Lab Manager extensions to Virtual Machine Manager.  However I can’t see System Center being used for evaluation management particularly as one of the choices being evaluated could be System Center itself!

ITIL is vendor agnostic, and so it isn’t dependant on anything from Microsoft and because of this it is more focused on the management structure rather than how things get done.  To turn those broad concepts into practical reality in a Microsoft world, there is the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).  This is not a product, it’s a free solutions accelerator designed to help you get the most out of your Microsoft infrastructure using ITIL like best practice, and included in it is a cross reference between MOF 4.0 and ITILv3. 

MOF is constantly updated, not just to keep up with the best practice to deploy the latest versions of SQL Server, Exchange etc. but also  to stay abreast of current infrastructure thinking like Private Cloud. 

No one seems to have time to change how to do IT in a very lean economy and adopt these processes, however we do all seem to have time to rework, patch and fix the the less than efficient methods we have in place today.  Therefore all I am suggesting is to free up a little time planning and getting to grips with ITIL (and MOF if you are a Microsoft based outfit) to save lots of time fixing later, which I believe is more rewarding for you and for your business.