Few would argue over the crucial role of IT in today's economy. In our lifetime, we have witnessed IT evolve from a limited service function into a critical core competency of modern organizations.
Stepping out of the shadows and into the limelight has created new challenges for IT, however. Expectations have risen dramatically throughout all levels of the organization and its ecosystem of customers, partners, investors and stakeholders. Everyone expects ? and demands ? more from IT.
Despite the implications of Moore's Law, IT still represents a significant investment for most organizations. Faced with increased demand and finite resources, many organizations have set their sights on three broad goals:
- Reducing IT costs
- Increasing IT efficiency
- Optimizing existing IT infrastructure
Achieving these three goals requires buy-in from top management and serious effort across the organization. Integrating and automating core business processes are requisite steps. Organizations that ignore these requisites will find it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to extract value from IT investments.
ITIL IS THE PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK
Fortunately, a roadmap for achieving the crucial goals already exists. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a common framework of all IT activities. This framework enables companies to identify, define, communicate and implement best practices throughout their IT organizations. ITIL also empowers IT organizations to align themselves with the business goals of the larger organizations they serve.
Additionally, the adoption of ITIL often results in improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery and better delivery of third-party services through standardization around ITIL as the basis for service delivery in services procurements.
The process of standardization and alignment is achieved primarily by defining and automating data center processes. Although most data center tools (monitoring, provisioning, virtualization, service desk, etc.) provide deep task automation within their solutions, they do not automate processes between applications, departments or data silos. This creates a substantial load of additional manual work for IT staff.
Since most IT managers are interested in optimizing the use of their resources by reducing the amount of redundant work done by their staff, there is a strong motivation to leverage ITIL processes by automating them to the greatest extent possible.
Automating ITIL processes requires a platform that orchestrates applications, automates tasks and integrates data between systems. The automation platform should be capable of performing these duties simply, swiftly and effectively to ensure consistent results and steady progress towards the goals of reduced costs and improved service levels.
COMMON IMPLEMENTATION HAZARDS
The experiences of several hundred organizations reveal that ITIL initiatives tend to stumble for a variety of reasons. The top three causes for ITIL implementation problems are:
1. Human Weak Link Failure
It is impractical to assume that humans will follow the rules described in ITIL methodologies to a tee. To be successful, enterprises need to remove humans from the process as much as possible and instead rely on automation technologies to better chances of repeatability and consistency.
2. Process Definition Scope Creep
Oftentimes, enterprises do not put enough thought into the constraints of the definition of processes they want to document and enforce, rather it becomes a "what should we do" exercise versus a "what do we need to do" exercise.
3. Communications Failure
IT personnel often fail to market their ITIL project as a way to drive both internal efficiency and service levels, and try to use the ITIL label as the main message. ITIL projects are costly, therefore, IT staff should be able to demonstrate up front how it will fortify core business processes and make them more reliable. This demonstration will avoid lost budgets or abandoned projects part way through an ITIL implementation.
There is little question about the ultimate value of ITIL to competitive organizations. Indeed, most organizations can rightly expect enormous benefits from ITIL implementations ? if they are done properly.
DEMYSTIFYING ITIL PROCESSES
From the onset, IT executives must shoulder responsibility for taking the mystery out of ITIL processes and making a strong business case for supporting ITIL initiatives by explaining potential benefits clearly and by sharing case studies of successful ITIL implementations.
