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May 20 ITIL: IT Services meets Common SenseLast week I got the chance to study for my ITIL Foundation certificate. For those who haven't examined ITIL, it is a framework for best practise in IT Services - not solutions for IT Services, but practises. I have heard ITIL described as nothing more than "documented common sense".
Everyone in IT Services uses common sense, so its surely pretty pointless? You'd think that, but the truth is IT Services is incredibly lacking in common sense. One of the fascinating things about this course was at the start you are pretty cynical about it, and look at some of the examples, some of the explanations as "that doesn't really count for us, because we do things differently here". As the course carried on, this started to changed to being more, "I can understand why they are saying that, it does seem better that way" and as you thought more and more about it, it became "hang on, why the hell don't we do it like that?".
It is because of this, that in order to bring in ITIL practises in an organisation, you need to get buy in from a lot of staff and not just managers. A big reason for this is, simply, ITIL could make IT Services basically more boring, because there is better incident management, more control of change management, more documentation. It alters the culture of IT Services.
One of the most interesting areas I found was Change Management. Users know exactly how bad many in IT Services are at this. They are using their computer one day, happy, turn it off and then switch it off. They turn it on the next morning and a message comes up as Windows boots that something or other is installing. They log in and a message comes up and every time they run a program an error comes up. They and a hundred others phone support, who don't know about the change. Someone from support goes to the computer eventually figures out the change and then goes off to try and find the person who made the change, who is oblivious of the hell they have caused. Change Management is about controlling the entire process of changes from authorising the change request, organising the creation of the change, the stages of testing, documenting the change and communicating the change. Its also really interesting to me because no one make more or bigger changes to the circa 10,000 machines in the Managed Desktop at the University of Edinburgh. I like the concept of Change Management because I am quite the opposite of the gung-ho guy making unannounced changes and the Change Management process I currently adhere to is a dangerously paranoid quadruple checking of every step before and after I have made the change (which is why I never make changes on a Friday, or else I'd spend my weekend concerned about the change I made!).
Service Level Management is another area I find interesting. The main aspect of this are Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - contracts between the IT Services and the customers that define services provided, the level of service, metrics judging the service and what is expected of both IT Services and the customer in provision of this service. What is interesting about this is that many IT Services organisations have had this sort of thing for some time, except they tended to be one sided (the onus has only ever been on the IT Services side), toothless (written with find-in-the-air metrics and with service levels defined which are easy to match) and often the customers don't know they even exist. What is interesting about SLAs is that they are agreed between the customer and IT Services and so, both sides know the boundaries. It allows for better control of the services, allowing better services for everyone though sometimes at the detriment of the well-placed individual. A good example of this is a file store. Let's say you give everyone 100 MB quota on this file store. Let's say 5% run out of space but they know someone who in the past has up-ed their quota. They phone this person who does this for them. However, what if the file store physically runs out of space - the person using only 50MB tries to save a document and gets a "Disk Full" error? The 95% can legitimately complain that IT Services are not matching their SLA for that service. That's not to say you can't help the other 5% out, its just if they want a better service, they need to provide the resources for it. In other words, pay more! Of course, it you find that 20% or more run out of space, it may be a case you need to look at Capacity Management , look to find the resources to buy in new servers so next time you renegotiate the SLA, you can offer 200MB or more.
The course I did was 3 days long and pretty intensive and what I've said above is barely scratching the surface. After all, I haven't even mentioned probably the most crucial part: the CMDB, I haven't even mentioned the Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, and many other aspects of it. If you happen to be in Service Management, don't just get yourself interested in it - its crucial that you get the entire organisation behind the idea. Its an idea that could change IT Services radically. TrackbacksWeblogs that reference this entry
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