IT is fast becoming a commodity. IT must support more applications, more devices, more connectivity options, and more users than ever before. This also means that as IT workload goes up, tolerance for service variability goes down. Increasing business demand for better IT service is becoming the primary driver for IT. Unfortunately, as most IT managers already know, IT budgets are not keeping pace.
Today IT must “do more for more with less,” and this means working smarter, not harder. Enter Version 3 of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and a new paradigm for IT. In the past, ITIL focused on how to organize IT processes optimally. Over seven years, ITIL Version 2 made a dramatic impact on the industry. ITIL has become the de facto standard for IT service management and ITIL adoption has resulted in improved IT quality and reduced costs for many IT organizations around the world.
The new version of ITIL provides more practical guidance and introduces a service lifecycle approach that reflects how IT operates in the “real world.” Five new core books cover the cycle from IT service strategy and design, through transition and operation, to continual improvement. ITIL V3 preserves and refines previous IT service management processes, while introducing four major changes that will dramatically affect IT and its relationship with the business. These dramatic changes represent some of the most valuable improvements from the latest ITIL refresh:
1. Creation of a new overarching management framework called the Service Portfolio, with a corresponding Service Portfolio Management process. The Service Portfolio is the “spine” that connects all of the phases of the service lifecycle, and represents a superset of the services published in the Service Catalog.
2. Promotion of the Service Catalog to a higher level of importance by creating a new Service Catalog Management process. The Service Catalog is now recognized as one of the most important predicates to achieving IT service quality, business and IT alignment, and control-ling IT costs.
3. The addition of a new process designed to optimize handling of requests by users – the Request Fulfillment process. Request Fulfillment acknowledges the fact that much of the work IT does is repetitious and inefficient – making it a prime candidate for optimization and automation.
4. Recognition that a Service Catalog requires Request Fulfillment to become “actionable,” and that in fact, such an actionable Service Catalog is the backbone of the modern and effective IT organization.
IT Services as an Investment Portfolio
Within the new Service Strategy book, ITIL V3 delivers a new process for managing the portfolio of IT services called the Service Portfolio Management (SPM) process. SPM describes techniques that IT can use to present what it does in ways that allow informed and transparent decisions. Most business executives have a difficult time understanding how their investments in IT deliver business value. Most technical executives have a difficult time explaining how investments in IT deliver business value. To address this challenge, ITIL V3 introduces the SPM process.
The ITIL V3 SPM process considers the entire information technology infrastructure as a portfolio of business investments. IT services are investments, and as an investment follows a lifecycle, so do IT services. The Service Portfolio is the output of the SPM process and includes all IT services at three lifecycle stages: those in the “Service Pipeline” (proposed or in development); those in the “Service Catalog” (live or available for deployment); and those retired.
Managing Demand
Managing IT demand is one of the keys to success for an optimal Service Portfolio and an effective Service Catalog. IT must offer standard services and get out of doing “one-offs;” users must become accountable for their consumption of IT services. The business must now “right size” demand much like IT had to “right size” supply several years ago.
ITIL V3 SPM expands upon the ITIL V2 concepts of Demand Management to provide the means to manage demand by helping answer questions such as:
- Which business units and users consume which services? What services do we offer?
- How much of those services do business units and users consume? How much does this cost?
- What value does each business unit or user realize from their consumption of these services?
- Who benefits from IT investments?
