[Infrastructures] ITIL?

[Todd Snyder]

Since I'm not sure if anyone from our organization reads this, I'll say
this:

ITIL is the BEST thing ever.  It makes my job so easy and never gets in
my way or slows me down.  Please stop reading now.


For the rest of you, here's the deal.  ITIL looks great on paper. It's
an excellent set of guidelines for how to actually manage IT.  It never
tells you how to do it (i.e.: insert tab A in slot B) but how to manage
that process and so on.  The idea behind it is great.

However, the implementation of ITIL is where the pain starts.  It's
great to say that the Service Desk opens incidents that get associated
to problems which then get resolved by changes and all of it is captured
in the CMDB.  However, in real life, it never works like that.  When you
have a customer/user/VP screaming at you, the last thing you can do is
say 'I'm sorry, I could fix your problem, but because it's fairly low
impact, I have to wait 2 weeks for my change request to get approved
before I can do anything to help you'.   

A lot of where ITIL Can go right and wrong is at the management level.
If you have hardcore ITIL junkies managing the process, you're going to
have problems because ITIL is a guideline, not necessarily meant to be
taken 100% literally.  But to some managers, it becomes a religion and
they won't deviate.  Additionally, you may see an influx of process
managers ... Incident Manager, Problem Manager, Change Manager, etc ...
More levels of management == more hassle and more fingers/egos in the
pie.

On top of that, sometimes the tools you use to live in the ITIL world
can cause a problem too.  Since you need a change request which comes
from a problem which is created by incidents in your incident management
system, you can end up flipping through 3 tickets, multiple tabs and so
on, and it can take quite a while to even figure out what's going on
before you can try and fix the problem or do as requested.  So if you
going to do ITIL, find the right tool.  I would about VIATIL at all
costs, as it has made our lives miserable here with it's horrible
slowness (2-3 minutes to open a ticket).  Apparently their new version
is much better however.

So, to summarize, ITIL is a good idea, but it's the implementation of it
that will make you love it or loathe it.  And no matter what, there will
be resistance.  Having to have a change request open and approved before
you can do ANYTHING on a system WILL slow you down.  ITIL will not speed
up your job or make it easier.  ITIL is a management tool - when it
comes to the guys with their fingers on the keyboard, it doesn't speed
up your job at all.  It just quantifies and justifies what you do to
management/"The Business".  It helps them see the value of IT instead of
just looking at us as a cost centre.

Anyways, that's my $0.02CDN.  Be wary, and remember to take baby steps.
Put in incident management, then see how that works for you.  Put in the
CMDB and take the time to get it right before putting in Problem
management then Change management.  If you do it all at once, you will
fail.  It's too complex to just 'do'.

Good luck!



-----Original Message-----
From: infrastructures-admin@terraluna.org
[mailto:infrastructures-admin@terraluna.org] On Behalf Of Sean Kelly
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 12:19 PM
To: infrastructures@terraluna.org
Subject: [Infrastructures] ITIL?

Recently, I've come across the beast that is the ITIL. The part that
could
possibly interest me is the Service Support set, since it covers
Incident
Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Change
Management, and Release Management. However, I am a newcomer to the ITIL
and its philosophies and pricy books.

Is anybody applying theories from the ITIL to their system
infrastructure
or organization in general? Can you give me an idea of how it was
applied?
What parts are you applying? What works? What doesn't?

Any information on this topic would be helpful to help me understand how
heavily and with what urgency I should dive into this.

Thanks.

-- 
Sean M. Kelly
Unix Systems Architect
Division of Information Technology
Creighton University
(402) 280-2264
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