Mengapa ITIL sangat diperlukan oleh para praktisi IT?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a globally recognized collection of best practices for information technology (IT) service management. The United Kingdom’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) created ITIL in response to growing dependence on information technology for meeting business needs and goals. ITIL provides businesses with a customizable framework of best practices to achieve quality service and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems. Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft are two businesses that use ITIL as part of their own best practices frameworks.

Some ITIL consultants propose that one must start with Service Level Management. Theoretically, it would be the perfect option, but how are you going to negotiate SLA’s on your MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) if you are not measuring your MTTR through Incident management. This way you will get an idea of your capabilities and of what a realistic MTTR would be for your support teams. It may however be a good idea to start with a Service Catalogue, but that is only one aspect of Service Level Management and not a process.

A lot of people state that one must start with Configuration management. Again, I think that it would be perfect in theory, but in practice it is a different story. How will you keep your CMDB up to date, if you do not have a mature enough Change management process to keep the data up to date? A discovery tool will help, but there is still information that may need manual updates via Change management, e.g. costs, locations, user’s asset tag nr’s etc. Configuration management is also one of the most difficult processes in to implement and show immediate benefits for. It is usually better to start with something easier and something that will show immediate benefit with minimum effort.

The best place to start in my opinion is with Change Management. Gartner reports that 80% of infrastructure failures are caused by changes. So, if you can have ALL your changes under control as soon as possible, a lot of these failures will be prevented. That is definitely a quick win and quick wins is what you want to keep the motivation of support teams up and keep upper management committed to your project. It may be a while to realize the benefits of Service Level Management or Configuration Management.

A good one would also be Incident Management, it is a fairly easy process and you should also be able to gain early benefits.

When Change and Incident management are well on their ways you can start to look at the other processes, especially on the Service Support side.

Oh yes and obviously you will need a Service Desk right from the start…

My take on where NOT to start…

Problem Management - Can’t have it without Incident Management

Configuration Management - CMDB will be out of date in no time without Change Management.

Service Level Management - Can start certain aspects, but no baseline without Incident and Change Management to negotiate SLA’s with the customer.

IT Service Continuity Management - Difficult and expensive, no quick wins, good to have the CMDB first… Don’t get me wrong, it IS important, but not my suggested place to start.

Release Management - You preferably need Change Management first.

Available & Capacity management - Possible to start with, but no real quick wins and more difficult…the ITIL books really get theoretical on these processes.

These are only my views and every IT department will have to look at what’s best for them.

As a qualified and experienced ITIL Consultant - I’d like to set the record straight on a few points.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an excellent set of best practices, carefully organized and edited to provide readers with information and structure for how to plan, implement, maintain and improve the service delivered to an organizations customers.

ITIL is owned by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and is copyright and trademark protected. The IT Service Management Forum (itSMF) is the leading, independent, not for profit, organization that is owned and run by it’s worldwide members – to promote and exploit the benfits of ITIL.

Oftentimes, when people first read one of the core ITIL books; ITIL is always classed as ‘common sense’ particularly by so called practitioners that say to themselves, “yeah, we do that already – so what?”

Well guess what. It IS common sense - but unfortunately it is found all to UNCOMMONLY.

At the heart of ITIL are a set of processes and procedures that any organization can review, customize and configure to their own content. These have been written and enhanced over 15 years from a variety of ITIL/Service/Process experts. This is the whole point of ITIL – it’s a best practice starting point – to be considered, re-worked and carefully implemented into an organization to match that businesses needs. No verbatum, to-the-letter-of-the-book, style implementation will ultimately be more than 50% effective for any organization. Every place is different. Every Business is different. Every customer is different.

Over the last ten years, many thousands of IT Service professionals have provided feedback and helped to enhance the core OGC ITIL texts - so you can rest assured that it is THE #1 place to start when implementing strategic IT Service Management.

Moreover, recently, ISO20000 has been ‘fast tracked’ through the International Standards Committee to become the worldwide standard for IT Service Management. A lot of ISO20000 requires key aspects of ITIL to be implemented, namely IT Service Support and IT Service Delivery processes. Note: ISO20000 does NOT specify that ITIL is a pre-requisite for certification – but it is the logical starting place for best practice adoption.

A few home truths about ITIL - having observed its implementation in various guises into many clients over the last 10 years:-

- It requires investment in time, effort and people’s energy – therefore there’s a cost
- It requires capable and experienced people – people who are ITIL foundation and ITIL managers certified
- It requires a transformation programme to own and guide the effort of many smaller, but still significant projects.
- It requires active, senior buy-in. No buy-in – no ITIL. It’s that harsh.
- It therefore requires to be understood at a senior level and therefore the ROI in ITIL must be deliberately planned and realized
- It’s ‘transformational’ change - so that means people change roles; people have new ways of working and communicating; the organization begins to hardwire the voice of the customer into the heart of IT/Technology

Some further considerations:-

- It’s tough to do; people play politics with their empires; people protect their functional silo’s; people resist change

- It takes time; to plan, to design, to build, to test; to ‘DO’

Essentially you have to change the ‘planes engine whilst the ‘plane is still in flight - meaning – YOU have to transform the way Technology delivers service - without impacting the quality and availability of Service.

ITIL’s all about Service. Not Tools. Not Technology. Not Process. In my opinion, they are just by-products of what the end goal is.

[Incidently - there's NO such thing as an ITIL compliant tool. ITIL is a set of best practices - not a 'standard' that can be complied to. Vendors always incorrectly say their tool is 'compliant'. Gartner agrees with me on this.]

ITIL makes you think deeply about who’s doing what, when, how, with what tools, how well are they doing, could they do better, how does the customer perceive us… these are just some of the constant questions that are raised EVERYDAY when you are implementing and running an ITIL based Organization.

These are the RIGHT questions for IT Service Success!!

The benefits of ITIL are many - but here are a few of commonly reported ones:-

- ITIL breaks down functional silo’s, gets people and information flowing; gets people talking; all for the benefit of the Customer (service recipient).

- ITIL helps to re-organize IT/Technology to be Customer focussed. The roles, responsibilities, information and reporting requirements all converge to push meaningful and timely information towards the right Customer interfaces.

- ITIL makes people think from a Service perspective; not a technology silo perspective.

- ITIL reduces costs and helps with automation to further reduce cost. ITIL also lets you do more with less over time - avoiding future staffing cost increases.

- ITIL can be rolled out in ‘groupings’ of best practice to achieve organizational ‘quick wins’

- ITIL should be fun. A way of doing things around here with people fully involved and included in key decisions.

It boils down to this…

Will the person sitting on a seat do the right thing at the right time at the lowest possible cost - in order to play their part in delivering the service that the customer pays for - keep on doing it right first time - and improve things where-ever possible?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and techniques for managing information technology (IT) infrastructure, development, and operations.

ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which cover an IT management topic. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC). ITIL gives a detailed description of a number of important IT practices with comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that can be tailored to any IT organization.