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White Paper

Words of Wisdom about ITIL and IT (Service) Management

‘With a little help from my friends’

Towards the end of 2011 I was asked to give a short talk

about ITIL. In order to enhance my limited knowledge in this domain, I approached some of the movers and shakers in the IT (Service) Management domain, asking them to share some fundamental. principles and practices on using ITIL

effectively or on ITSM in general. Their contributions, which

remain their intellectual property, speak for themselves and I am very grateful for their generosity in sharing them for the benefit of the IT (Service) Management community.

Mark Smalley, 30 July 2012

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Brian Johnson VP and ITIL practice leader at CA Technologies

• It is pointless as well as dangerous to assume

that any of the ITIL guidance can be applied

without due diligence

• You cannot ‘implement ITIL’. If you want to

‘prove’ the value of your service management

improvement project, refer to ISO/IEC 20000

• Write a business case that shows how you will

use good practices to improve life for the

business

• Make sure the business benefits are predicated on making IT services much more reliable

• Outside of the rarefied world of ITIL, no one cares about it

• More: www.ca.com/us/news/spokespeople/

Brian-Johnson.aspx

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Ivor Macfarlane, @ivormacf Tivoli Marketing at IBM

• ITIL (like all best practices) is a good place to start your thinking and a terrible place to stop

• Your only real metric is whether the customer

thinks your services are useful – so make sure

you know those customers and what they need

to do

• Use best practice like you would in your kitchen – read several cookery books, take ideas for

them all but most of all cook what you want to

eat

• The future belongs to Service Management – not

ITSM; try to see a bigger world than just IT, the

odds are your customer can see more than that

• More: ibm.com/blogs/servicemanagement

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Rob England, @itskeptic IT Skeptic, Owner and Managing Director at Two Hills Ltd

• Start with business outcomes required of IT

• Work out the IT deliverables to achieve those

outcomes (COBIT has some good mappings)

• Select areas for improvement in order to achieve

those deliverables:

– ‘Incident management’ is much too big and

vague. Improve what? Incident tracking?

Incident handling? Communication to users?

Known error and workaround search? etc

– Don't chunk it by process: take a bit of incident and a little problem and a pinch of

CRM... ITIL ‘processes’ are a useful

conceptual way of grouping ideas but they

have nothing to do with the order in which

we should look at them in reality

• More: www.basicsm.com/tipu &

www.itskeptic.org

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Ian Clayton, @ianclayton Outside-In Pioneer, Lean & Universal Service Management Consultant, Author Service Management Body of Knowledge,

Speaker

• ITIL can be adopted and must be adapted into

each environment

• Hug a customer, pick a scenario, understand

what activities your customers perform and why,

and then how that drives your work effort

• Close the (SERVQUAL 1, see figure) gap between customer’s expectations and perception

of supplier’s management what customers

expect

• It’s continuous improvement that closes this

gap, customer by customer, activity by activity.

Not by implementing reengineered processes

• Start at the customer activity, understand why

they do this before you further understand how

this drives interaction with your organization and

its services, the experience customers have

overall, and the basis for their satisfaction.

Work, think and act 'outside-in'.

• More: www.servicemanagement101.com

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Aale Roos, @aalem ITSM consultant, founder of Pohjoisviitta Oy

• Using ITIL is like picking mushrooms

• Out of 30 species you might see in forests, 3 are

delicious, 5 are edible, 6 are poisonous and the

rest are useless

• Also, it is quite easy to get lost in a forest • More: www.pohjoisviitta.fi

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Paul Wilkinson, @gamingpaul Director and Owner of GamingWorks.nl, Director ABC@Work and Chief Cartoonist at at Egor Productions

• Make sure everybody understands the definition of a service (value, outcomes, costs, risks) in the context of your organization

• Engage with the business and users and understand how they use your services, and understand THEIR business impact and priority

• Realize that you can’t implement ITIL: >50% fail because of resistance

• Not one organization has implemented one ITIL process

from 0 to optimized maturity in one go, not one organization has implemented all ITIL processes in one go… therefore ITIL is a Continual Service Improvement

approach… treat it this way! CSI is a core capability. • People (more than processes, products and partners) are

the crucial factor but IT is often uncomfortable in dealing

with people so develop and apply more soft skills • Train people properly – don’t just go for certification!

Train them to translate theory into practice, and ensure that what they learnt is transferred into their daily work

• Make sure that every process or every improvement can

be justified in terms of value, outcomes, costs and risks and how it contributes to managing these

• More: www.gamingworks.nl & www.abcatwork.nl

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James Finister, @jimbofin EMEA Competency Lead for IT Governance, Service Integration & Service Management Excellence at Tata Consultancy Services

• You need principles that drive values, strategies, actions. They’re not in ITIL or ISO 20000

• Do not be seduced by the low hanging fruits. Seek out and eliminate constraints in the system

• Don't "Chose which bits of ITIL to implement“.

There is a risk as a result of leaving something

out or doing things in the wrong order

• Don't leave something out just because it is

difficult – they’re often the true game changers

• Don't do a maturity assessment against ITIL –

do an assessment of what you are doing that is

hurting the business

• More: coreitsm.blogspot.com

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Theo Thiadens Emeritus Professor at Avans and Fontys Universities of Applied Science & Functions at various levels in public and private

organisations

• Use frameworks to create organizational

clarity/transparency – use ASL, BiSL, ITIL etc as

examples and choose a way of working that

suits your situation

• Quantify IT governance and IT management –

develop metrics so that you know what you (and

others) are talking about

• Govern IT ‘with the windows open’ – continually evaluate outsourcing/cloud options in order to

become/remain competitive

• More: www.ict-management.com

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Maarten Looijen Emeritus Professor at Delft University of Technology & Rector Osei Tutu II Institute for Advanced ICT Studies Ghana

(2002-2012)

• IT Management manifests itself throughout the

whole lifecycle of information systems

• Significance of IT Management? Think about

implications in case of failing management

and/or manifesting calamities

• Well-known is Risk = Probability x Consequence

but don’t forget Impact = Risk x Perception

Impact is mostly taken more seriously than Risk

• Quantify IT Management as much as possible;

non-quantification includes non-qualification

• Statements like ‘Cloud computing will change IT

Management radically’ demonstrate ignorance of

reality

• Aim to ‘Manage IT Management’

• IT Management needs a prominent position in

education and research programs

• Teach me ITIL and I’ll forget, show me ITIL and

I may remember, involve me in ITIL and I’ll

understand

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Charles Betz, @CharlesTBetz Research Director, IT Portfolio Management at Enterprise Management Associates

• The business of IT is complex. Enterprise

architecture techniques are proven means for

handling complexity in any business domain

• Frameworks like ITIL, COBIT, and CMMI are

useful inputs, but enterprise architecture can

illuminate ambiguities in those frameworks and

guide the practitioner through pragmatic

implementation challenges

• The IT function can and should be viewed as a dynamic system, consisting of the interaction of

results-oriented IT business processes across

long IT lifecycles, subject to emergent chaotic

and complex behavior

• More: www.enterprisemanagement.com/

about/team/Charlie_Betz.php, www.erp4it.com

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Troy DuMoulin, @TroyDuMoulin Vice President Professional Services at Pink Elephant

• By necessity we design and model services

based on systemic relationships

• However, when we move these services to

production we manage each component as if

they live in mythical isolation

• Gaining emotional agreement of the various

groups that a common management system is

required for optimizing the IT Demand Chain is

often the first and most difficult tasks

• Frameworks like ITIL only provide a definition of

what can be achieved if they are introduced into

a receptive environment. They do not in and of

themselves create that environment!

• More: blogs.pinkelephant.com/index.php?/troy

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Editor

Mark Smalley is responsible for global promotion at the not-for-profit, vendor-independent ASL BiSL Foundation and is an IT Management

Consultant and Principal Technology Officer at Capgemini in the Netherlands. He is specialized in Application Lifecycle Management and

IT Governance. Mark is a regular speaker at international conferences, where he has reached out to thousands of IT professionals.

Follow & engage with Mark on Twitter @marksmalley Email: mark.smalley@aslbislfoundation.org

Further details, publications & speaking engagements at www.linkedin.com/in/marksmalley