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The recent momentum of Unified Communications (UC) and the disruptive enabling technology of IP Telephony have created a convergence between Voice Engineering and IT departments that is unprecedented – even since the advent of computer telephony integration. However, despite rapid and significant advances within these technologies, many enterprises, even the early adopters, have not fully embraced the alignment of these two worlds.
The alignment of Voice Engineering and IT has not occurred due to the fact that project lifecycles have evolved individually, yielding separate terminology as well as different priorities and methodologies. This scenario will likely continue for some time due to differing skill-sets and backgrounds that make the separation of the two worlds an operational necessity in most large enterprises. Should the inherent uniqueness of these two worlds be an impediment to the success of a properly executed Unified Communications vision? In most cases the answer is NO as best practices provide a combination of next generation policies and technologies that can, and will, straddle the divide.
As voice and data continue to converge under the umbrella of the technology-enabled business, the need to bridge these two “universes” becomes essential. With an emerging consensus that Voice should be viewed as another application under the overall IT purview, communications groups will benefit greatly by adopting workflow best practices from the IT industry that can close the gap.
One such initiative that is quickly making inroads is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of best practices that creates a high-level IT services workflow, to accommodate both existing environments.
ITIL, born in the 1980s did not fully reach the IT mainstream until the 1990s. It has since grown in the new millennium and considered the de facto standard for IT service delivery across many industries. Given the pressing need to optimize IT service budgets and resources, while reducing costs and improving organization-wide productivity, ITIL offers the framework companies need to make operations more efficient and responsive.
ITIL continues to be embraced because it provides a best practice-based framework that integrates and centralizes incident management, problem management, configuration management and change management. As a framework, companies of all sizes can benefit from ITIL in ways that are unique to their organization. For instance, large multi-national companies with tens of thousands of employees can implement all business processes covered under the ITIL framework, while small companies with just a handful of team members can integrate only the specific processes most appropriate for their needs.
The ITIL mindshare is phenomenal within the IT world. However, in the universe of IP telephony, ITIL has been virtually non-existent since most have incorporated the traditional Plan Design Implement Operate Optimize (PDIOO) methodology.
As organizations reap the benefits of a UC strategy, the paradigm shift now becomes apparent as these large, complex deployments are rivaling even the largest of IT project implementations within the enterprise. As IT departments increasingly adopt the internationally recognized ITIL best practices to ensure large IT projects are successful, the business-critical need to adapt that same mindset with UC deployments remains. There needs to be a transition and total transformation within the enterprise to “unify” IT implementations led by the chief IT architects and UC deployments driven by their counterparts in voice engineering or network engineering.
Once these adversarial forces embrace a collaborative IT and IPT model, then a UC infrastructure, built on the commonalities of ITIL, can nurture the alignment between Voice and IT to truly bridge the gap.
This white paper will provide an overview of ITIL while translating the differences, synergies and unique benefits from traditional PDIOO approaches. Finally, this paper will discuss the tangible benefits that organizations achieve when they commit to incorporating ITIL as part of their IP Telephony strategy to better align business and IT.
WHY IS ITIL RELEVANT FOR IPT NOW?
With roots in UK government, ITIL has evolved into an aggregation of books compiled over years that is built on a cadre of best practices when implementing IT projects. This repository of best practices combines experiences, templates, case studies, presentations and reading topics originally collected by the UK government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. Over the years, ITIL has gained widespread acceptance as a best practices methodology and continues to be updated on a consistent basis.
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