Mark's profileIn-Cider KnowledgePhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
September 22 Speaking IT Common SenseOne thing that I think will be pretty big over the next year is ITIL. ITIL has been around for the best part of 10 years, so why big in the next year? Simply, people have been waiting for ITIL version 3, years in composition, to be released.
I have mentioned ITIL a couple of times before on this blog, most recently after I attended an "ITIL Foundation" course earlier this summer and posted some thoughts here. I talked about it then as "documented common sense", and probably didn't make the best case for people attending the course! However, time has effected my opinion of this course. I have to admit, when I was on the course and then after it just finished, I saw ITIL almost like an extra few boxes to tick when starting a new service. Actually, the opposite has happened: because the processes, practices and framework in ITIL make so much sense, when you see services (either new or ones that have existed for some time) in your organisation and you see they don't have a change management process, for example, it seems like a whacking great big hole in the quality of that service. If they are services that you are involved with, it gives you the momentum to fix this big hole in the service. This has happened to me, where with one major service I am heavily involved with and that effects pretty much every student and member of staff at the University, I now feel the communication of changes within the service is too weak, and as such I am looking into how to radically overhaul it. It might seem strange but without the ITIL course, I doubt I would have seen this. It effectively gave me the ability to properly stand back from a service and see it objectively.
However, there is something even more significant. I have found a remarkable thing when talking to others who have been on the course, especially in meetings: the language. When you are talking to other people who have been on the course, the language is now interspersed with vocabulary we picked up on the ITIL course. So, we talk about things like "incident management" and "change management" and both know what we mean by this. This is a massive boon because it means we know exactly what we are talking about when improving services and get on with actually improving services. The vocabulary is also important because to me, the term "change management" is now native, understandable, but to someone who hasn't been on the course, its confusing and scary (eg. they think: the "management" part means filling in forms and making everything slower and is nothing more than a hassle and "change" is never a good thing). This is one of the key reasons that organisations need a good strategy for ITIL adoption. It needs to be part of a multi-year strategy of adoption and you need to get a good set of people onto a Foundation course. These MUST NOT only be from Management layers, because you are dealing with services and many of these services can only be helped by having people onside on the "front line". Get a few up further than this and they can teach the rest - at least the basics, the framework and the language!
The reason organisations are looking towards ITIL now is that Version 3 has taken some time to come out, finally coming out early this summer. However, it doesn't take away from probably the biggest reason many organisations will be looking into it: it works. This is not a management fad. It has a long standing reputation worldwide. The other big reason is that a few years ago, many companies suddenly had IT Governance slammed into them thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and ITIL is seen to be a major way to both enforce the practices and processes as required by SOX, whilst adding the extra benefit of making for a generally more high-quality service. IT Governance isn't going to go away, so its best that companies use the right framework.
Now, all I need, is a ITILv2 Foundation to ITILv3 bridging course... TrackbacksWeblogs that reference this entry
|
|
|
