Best IT practice picks up steam

Don Page, who helped write parts of ITIL, says the system is simply common sense.

Have you been ITILed yet? The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of guidelines for IT services management, originally developed by the British Office of Government Commerce.

It has been widely adopted around the world as best practice, and is picking up steam here.

Don Page from British consulting firm Marval Group, who helped write parts of ITIL, was in New Zealand last week spreading the gospel.
"ITIL is documented common sense," says Page.

He says IT is about being able to fix problems, but problem-solving is not taught formally.

"In the industry we employ lots of people whose primary role is to fix stuff, but they know nothing about making sure that it is documented and repeatable. I don't know where we reached that stage where it became not obligatory to say what you did. If you pay a cheque to a bank, it is part of business culture that the teller writes it down. Why doesn't it happen in IT?"

That failure to properly document systems cost business billions of dollars during Y2K, when organisations had to audit, repair and replace code. Page says that experience and the tougher rules on corporate compliance in the wake of Enron and other scandals have spurred interest in management frameworks like ITIL.

"One thing ITIL brings to an IT organisation is accountability - to themselves, to their colleagues, to the larger organisation and to customers," Page says.

The equation is simple. Page says people should stop thinking of IT as being a cost on business and see it as an essential service to business.

"Service quality equals employee satisfaction equals value for customers equals customer satisfaction and customer loyalty," says Page.

On the support side, ITIL covers how to set up and run a service desk, how to work out and manage what IT an organisation needs to run its business, how to manage incidents and problems, how to manage the release of new hardware or software and how to manage change.

On the service delivery side, there are ITIL modules for service-level management, working out the true cost of IT, making sure the system can cope with what is thrown at it, that users can get on the system, and that systems are secure.

Page says by having clearly documented processes, IT departments can for the first time show their value to the business.

"Most IT management information is complete drivel, of no use to anyone. IT will tell you you've achieved 99.2 per cent availability, but that will not impress the florist when the 0.8 per cent of time the system is down is the two days before Mother's Day, when he normally gets 18 per cent of his revenue," Page says.

"IT needs to learn emotional business metrics - not 'We replaced all PCs over three years old' but 'our PC refresh programme saved $100,000 in maintenance costs'."

Page says business now understands how dependent it is on IT.

"Business is starting to take control. It realises management of its IT infrastructure is critical. It is no longer down to whether individuals are doing the best things. Business is asking, 'Are we doing the right things? Is our focus in the right areas to get benefits from?"'

Last month a version of ITIL was recognised as a worldwide standard, ISO 20000.

Auckland-based IT services firm Oxygen was an early adopter of ITIL, and has trained 125 people, more than a third of its staff, up to ITIL foundation level and another 32 to higher qualifications.

Oxygen practice manager Chris Rutter says the focus on clearly defined processes changed the company's culture.

"It allows us to benchmark ourselves against the industry so we can prove we are best practice and can compete, so it is a way to differentiate ourselves in the market," Rutter says.

"Technology is great but unless people follow processes it can become very ugly," Rutter says.

"If you are an operational person, ITIL clearly documents processes so you understand what to do if something happens; you understand continuous improvement, how a call is to be managed if it comes in from a customer.

"When you are implementing major technologies, and we are constantly doing multimillion-dollar IT refreshes, you need a process as to how you release those changes into the production environment.

"Gone are days when our technical team would make a change to the environment without change management."