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IT organizations worldwide strive to align their priorities with the needs of the business, and provide IT services in a stable, flexible and cost-effective manner. As a result, many are leveraging industry best practices for guidance on meeting and improving levels of service, while reducing costs. Developing processes from scratch comes with a high cost—and those processes may not deliver significantly better results than existing, proven best practices.
ITIL drives synergy by leveraging common terminology and integrated processes across the IT organization—synergy that is difficult to achieve with function-specific or regionally developed practices.
However, there are several inhibitors to ITIL adoption that organizations must address to completely achieve full ITIL benefits. While ITIL does describe what best practices should be pursued, it does not define how to implement detailed processes and work-level procedures that enable those recommendations. ITIL provides high-level guidance on the goals and objectives of what is recommended, but leaves it up to each business area to adopt best practices to fit unique requirements.
In order to implement ITIL best practices effectively, organizations must:
> Implement ITIL functions together for streamlined adoption
> Integrate and automate best practices using softwarebased tools
> Leverage a configuration management database (CMDB) to increase sharing and accuracy of information across the IT organization
IMPLEMENT ITIL FUNCTIONS TOGETHER
To begin, IT organizations need to group ITIL functions in a way that facilitates implementation and acceptance, and accelerates the time it takes to realize benefits. Choosing to group ITIL best practices that affect a particular organization allows people with a common area of responsibility to implement changes together. For example, many organizations start their ITIL transformation with the incident and problem management disciplines in the support organization. Others start with change, configuration, and release management disciplines that most directly affect an infrastructure-related organization. Grouping helps foster a common vision focused on a targeted set of operational benefits. It accelerates adoption of ITIL and speeds up the time to benefit. Success builds on success, which then helps promote adoption in other functional areas.
Integrate and Automate Best Practices
In theory, you could implement ITIL by requiring people to manually adhere to processes; however, in practice it will quickly become impossible to enforce and monitor. For many organizations, the most effective implementation of ITIL will include a combination of people, process and technology solutions. The adoption of ITIL best practices is often best driven and optimized by software applications and tools designed for the job.
Applications used to integrate and automate ITIL processes should be designed to leverage and institutionalize ITIL best practices. For example, ITIL processes and practices should be standard functions out-of-the-box. Leveraging ITIL-aligned workflows and work procedures delivered by the vendor will speed implementation and accelerate time to value. Tools should also be easily adapted to the unique needs of each organization.
LEVERAGE A CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT DATABASE (CMDB)
Implementation of individual ITIL best practices drives operational improvements. However, organizations must ensure that they do not become silos of data and expertise. To integrate and automate ITIL processes—and expand ITIL adoption beyond the first few ITIL disciplines—the producers and consumers of information should share access to a common data store. The ideal approach to a CMDB features a centralized database linked to other data stores with a federated data model, which carries information from one point to another without the need for duplication.
BUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Business Service Management (BSM) is BMC Software’s strategy for achieving IT and business alignment. BSM delivers adaptable, real-time solutions for closely linking business operations with underlying IT components.
BSM ROUTES TO VALUE
Routes to Value group ITIL disciplines into clear, incremental paths for BSM implementations. Routes to Value mirror how IT delivers value, and are designed to accelerate the adoption of ITIL best practices.
BMC Software provides software solutions that integrate and automate key ITIL best practices outlined in the following ITIL volumes:
> Service Support
> Service Delivery
> Business Perspectivev > Information Communications Technology Infrastructure Management (ICTIM)
> Software Asset Management
The remainder of this guide will review the areas impacted by ITIL, the corresponding BMC Software solutions, the integration and automation capabilities of those solutions, and the benefits.
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