Why are organizations adopting ITIL?

(http://www.itsmwatch.com/news/article.php/3486416)

Virtually non-existent in the US prior to 2001, the ITIL process framework will be adopted by nearly 40% of US-based organizations by 2007. During this time, change, problem, and configuration management will be among core process targets.

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(http://www.itilnews.com/index.php?pagename=itil_faq_why_adopt_ITIL)

The adoption of ITIL provides the opportunity for an organization to become more cost efficient and effective through the improvement of existing and the introduction of new process and disciplines. Most organizations are probably undertaking elements of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), but more often than not in isolation from other disciplines and often not across the whole of the IS or IT department.

So if you are still in doubt consider why it is recognised globally across all industry sectors and is deemed to be the only proven methodology, which underpins the only internationally recognized standard, ISO/IEC 20000.

Another consideration is the fact that adoption of ITIL can provide competitive advantage not only from improved internal cost savings, but also from the improved availability of your IT services and systems. In addition the ability to bring identified market opportunities to fruition in a reduced lead-time whilst protecting existing 'production' services or systems, in other words it enables IT and the Business to become more proactive as opposed to reactive.. By the way if you are still doubtful can you afford to wait, because if you are thinking about ITIL there is a good chance your competitors are also or are they already starting adopting ITIL!!!!

Finally, recruiting ITIL experienced and certified staff and resources is eased by the fact that ITIL is complimented by an education program allowing individuals to become certified at various levels of ITIL. Ultimately an organization can therefore specify the level of experience required when going out to the market place for resources. The various levels of ITIL include the:

• ITIL Foundation Level - general understanding
• ITIL Practitioner Level - Specific area(s) of ITIL e.g ITIL Change Management
• ITIL Managers Level - In depth understanding of all the areas of ITIL Service Support and Delivery

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(http://www.ashfordglobalit.com/kc/why-the-defense-industry-is-adopting-itil-training.html)

ITIL is currently employed throughout most of the modern world in every industrialized nation. ITIL has been adopted by the governments and business organizations of Europe (including Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland). It is also widely employed in Japan, Singapore, Australia, Canada and the United States.

ITIL embodies the practices of proactive management in realizing the optimal IT infrastructure to provide reliable, dependable and continually improved service within the organization. With that goal foremost established, ITIL identifies management processes to monitor and control applicable interfaces (groups, departments, etc) within an organization to ensure IT availability, reliability and consistency remain constant while monitoring all impacting elements.

Reflection on Remote Team Work

Issues identified during the case studies of implementation of ITIL

Strengths and Weaknesses of an ITIL framework

STRENGTHS

(http://www.itilcollege.com/ITILBenefits.html)

ITIL is the IT Infrastructure Library and ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark and a Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce. Developed in the late 1980's by the CCTA (now the OGC), by the mid 1990's it had become the world-wide de facto standard in service management. ITIL has become very popular as it is a public domain framework which is scaleable. Very large organizations, very small organizations and everything in between have implemented ITIL processes. ITIL focuses on best practice, and as such can be adapted and adopted in different ways according to each individual organizations needs.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices standards for Information Technology (IT) service management. The United Kingdom's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) created ITIL in response to the growing dependence on Information Technology to meet 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. ITIL is organized into sets of texts which are defined by related functions: service support, service delivery, managerial, software support, computer operations, security management, and environmental. In addition to texts, ITIL services and products include training, qualifications, software tools, and user groups such as the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF), all of which you can find details of on this website.

Let’s see the ITIL Benefits: ITIL offers a systematic, professional approach to the management of IT service provision. Adopting its guidance can provide benefits such as:

* Increase Customer Satisfaction with IT services
* Reduce the risk of not meeting business requirements for IT services
* Reduce costs when developing procedures and practices within an organization
* Better communication and information flows between IT staff and customers
* Standards and guidance for IT staff
* Greater productivity and better use of skills and experience
* A quality approach to IT services

ITIL Benefits to IT service Customers, such as:

* Reassurance that IT services are provided in accordance with documented procedures that can be audited
* The ability to depend upon IT services, enabling the customer to meet business objectives The identification of contact points for enquiries or condition changes
* Provision of feedback from SLA monitoring

ITIL is from the concept no check list, as one has to develop the ideal-typical management of a IT infrastructure. The advantage and ITIL Benefits are rather in the fact that one falls back with the structure of an individual IT management to documented Best Practices and so that can jump over expensive learning curves. In addition the advantages of the standardization represented by ITIL are obvious: Modules and process goals of the IT management are defined and can be compared and evaluated with one another.

Many organizations have embraced the ITIL concept because it offers a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision along with other ITIL Benefits. There are many benefits to be reaped by adopting the guidance provided by ITIL. Such ITIL Benefits include but are not limited to:

* Improved customer satisfaction
* Reduced cost in developing practices and procedures
* Better communication flows between IT staff and customers
* Greater productivity and use of skills and experience

ITIL provides IT professionals with the knowledge and resources they need to run and maintain an effective and efficient IT Infrastructure that meets the needs of their clients while keeping costs at a minimum.

ITIL Benefits of using the ITIL framework:

* Increase customer satisfaction with IT services
* Reduce risks and costs
* Standards and guidance for IT staff
* A quality approach to IT services

Let’s see Why ITIL Can Help along with other ITIL Benefits: Many executives express frustration as they attempt to reign in the chaos and expense associated with their IT investments but find little in the way of substantive guidance. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has emerged as the worlds most widely accepted approach to the management and delivery of IT Services.

Gartner measurements on ITIL Benefits show that the overall results of moving from no adoption of IT Service Management to full adoption can reduce an organization’s Total Cost of Ownership by as much as 48%. ITIL currently has over 100,000 certified (trained) professionals and consultants, primarily in Europe, Australia and Canada, with only a small fraction of those certified professionals residing or practicing in the U.S.

By adopting IT best practices, what type of ITIL Benefits can an organization expect?

Beyond the quantifiable ITIL Benefits, delivered from the implementation of ITIL, there are also qualitative ITIL Benefits. Successful introduction of IT Service Management with ITIL should deliver type of ITIL Benefits to organizations:

* Improved Customer Satisfaction
* Improved ROI of IT
* Improved Morale of Service delivery and recipient staff
* Reduced staff turnover
* Lower costs of training, especially as the ITIL standard become widely adopted
* Improved systems/apps availability
* Improved IT employee productivity
* Reduced cost/incident
* Reduced hidden costs that traditionally increases substantially the TCO
* Better asset utilization

The economic impact of an organization adopting ITIL along with other ITIL Benefits will be felt in all of the areas listed above. The ITIL Benefits can also be viewed in terms of direct savings and indirect, the later being derived as a result of the strategy but not directly related to the actions being taken, such as minimizing the missed opportunity costs, the cost of not been able to operate. These indirect ITIL Benefits as well as the direct benefits may vary greatly from one organization to another.

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(http://www.itilnews.com/index.php?pagename=itil_faq_what_are_the_benefits_of_ITIL)

The following is not a definitive list, but hopefully conveys some of the fundamental benefits, if we have missed any benefits that you believe should be included then please let us know.

* A documented approach
* Global recognition
* Accredited educational companies
* Increased and improved effectiveness and efficiency of an organization
* Potential to positively effect an organizations profits and share prices
* Improved interaction and functioning within the IT/IS department
* Improved interaction and functioning with the Business and Customer community
* Vocabulary and terms understood by all who have undertaken ITIL education irrespective of industry sector, country or continent
* Recruited ITIL qualified personnel are potentially able to integrate into another ITIL organization so much easier
* Specific roles can be recruited so much quicker and easily
* Outsourcing companies can be audited against ITIL best practice
* ISO /IEC 20000 provides the confidence for customers and purchasers of an organizations services, on both a country and global basis

WEAKNESSES

Setup Costs and Ongoing Costs

Background & History of ITIL

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library)

Responding to growing dependence on IT, the UK Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations. It recognized that without standard practices, government agencies and private sector contracts were independently creating their own IT management practices.

The IT Infrastructure Library originated as a collection of books, each covering a specific practice within IT Service Management. ITIL was built around a process-model based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to W. Edwards Deming and his plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle.

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(http://itsm.fwtk.org/History.htm)

The ITIL concept emerged in the 1980s, when the British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them was not sufficient. The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now called the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), was tasked with developing a framework for efficient and financially responsible use of IT resources within the British government and the private sector.

The earliest version of ITIL was actually originally called GITIM, Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management. Obviously this was very different to the current ITIL, but conceptually very similar, focusing around service support and delivery.

Large companies and government agencies in Europe adopted the framework very quickly in the early 1990s. ITIL was spreading far and, and was used in both government and non-government organizations. As it grew in popularity, both in the UK and across the world, IT itself changed and evolved, and so did ITIL.

In year 2000, The CCTA merged into the OGC, Office for Government Commerce and in the same year, Microsoft used ITIL as the basis to develop their proprietary Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).

In 2001, version 2 of ITIL was released. The Service Support and Service Delivery books were redeveloped into more concise usable volumes. Over the following few years it became, by far, the most widely used IT service management best practice approach in the world.

In 2007 version 3 if ITIL was published. This adopted more of a lifecycle approach to service management, with greater emphasis on IT business integration.

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(http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/An-Insight-Into-The-History-Of-Itil/1065837)

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or as it is more commonly referred to, ITIL is essentially a set of standards for the most efficient application of Information Technology services within a business environment. But just where did it all start?

ITIL started life known as GITIM back in the 80s and was initially brought about by the Margaret Thatcher led British Government belief that there was a need for some globally applicable IT standards. At that time, the British Government alone was spending 8 billion in Information Technology every single year and was also witnessing the rapidly growing reliance that companies up and down the country had on IT. This convinced them that a set of best practice guidelines was necessary.

They, however, were not the first to see this need. Back in 1972, IBM had already begun to research effective implementation of IT services within business and this led to the publication in 1980 of Volume 1 of IBM's 'A Management System for Information Business.' This is commonly said to have been one of many influences for what eventually became the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

The Government's own research into best practices for IT was commissioned in 1986 and then in 1988 it published its official guidelines for the implementation of information technology services within government. It was published under the title, 'Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management' and was widely referred to by its abbreviation, GITIM.

However, the name was soon to change in order that the standards would become marketable to private organisations and by the early 90s, uptake had been huge. Organisations all over the world were using the standards for the most effective implementation of IT services within their businesses. As we know, IT continues to develop and grow. So too does ITIL in line with those changes. In 2001, version 2 was released and in 2007, version 3 came about. As IT reliance is now at an all time high, more and more companies are using the standards and investing heavily in ITIL training for staff.

Outline briefly what ITIL (or the alternative framework) offers;

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library)

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for managing Information Technology (IT) services (ITSM), IT development and IT operations.

ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic.

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(http://tanmia.sfd.gov.sa/workshops/ITIL%20Presentation.pdf)

ITIL is the application of the science of management to information technology. This knowledge is captured in a library of over forty books that outline a process-based set of best practices for IT Service Management (ITSM).

ITIL is all about which processes need to be realized within the organisation for management and operation of the IT infrastructure to promote optimal service provision to the customer of the services at justifiable costs.

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(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library)

Sections of ITIL