Getting a head start on ITIL

6. ITIL has been around for more than 15 years. Why is it now taking hold in the United States?

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The United States has always lagged behind Europe in the discipline of IT infrastructure management. Go to a bookstore, and you’ll find precious few books on the subject. Go to the universities, and you’ll visit a lot before finding one that teaches it. One reason that this is changing is the increasing impact of European- and Asian-owned companies operating in the United States, all saying, “Hey, get on board! You need to be ITIL-compliant. That’s how we run our shops over here.”

Another factor driving U.S. acceptance is that companies are seeing more than two-thirds of their IT budgets being eaten up in new, nondiscretionary operating costs, over which they have very little control. It’s rare to find an IT shop that can articulate how IT contributes to company’s bottom line.

ITIL changes that by implementing successive waves of mini-projects that target specific business goals with measurable results. Typical goals might include reducing IT costs, reducing service outages, preparing for a major IT initiative, or preparing for a major business change such as a merger, move, or acquisition. These efforts may involve entire ITIL processes or just parts of them.

Finally, whereas IT customers of the past used to be purely internal (staffers, managers, and auditors), these days increasing numbers of IT “customers” in the United States are external -- actual customers of the business itself, interacting via public Web sites. If systems fail, potential buyers are likely to take their business elsewhere; potential damage to corporate reputation is high.

The pace of business change, technology, and legal regulation is moving faster every day, and all these financial imperatives are hard to ignore: As was noted at Microsoft’s 2004 IT Forum Conference, “Recent studies are showing that an IT service organization could achieve up to a 48 percent cost reduction by applying ITSM principles.”

As long as ITIL remains the only comprehensive plan for infrastructure management that focuses specifically on IT service, it will continue to be the only game in town.

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7. Who needs ITIL besides large enterprises? Can small shops or individuals use it?

Any IT shop servicing a company that is undergoing major changes and/or servicing that company’s customers, will benefit from ITIL. For instance, a small shop facing recurrent network outages will find benefits in employing ITIL’s Problem Management process to predict and minimize future incidents. A midsize company with a complex IT infrastructure may find that the ITIL Configuration Management solution provides a blueprint for streamlining impact assessments for changes and new applications. A large organization undergoing a major acquisition or consolidation effort will discover that the consistent, repeatable processes outlined in ITIL make those efforts occur much faster and at less cost.

8. I’m convinced. How can I get started deploying ITIL?

Get trained and certified. Almost every major hardware/software vendor, and a slew of smaller companies, offers ITIL training. Search for “ITIL training” on the Web to reveal a treasure trove of capable vendors who can get you started. Exams and certifications are handled through independent agencies such as EXIN (Examination Institute for Information Science and ISEB (Information System Executive Board).