Efficiency tool kit

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library set of best practices is gaining ground.

By Tom Duffy
Network World, 11/05/01

Network executives looking to wring greater efficiencies out of their organizations are increasingly turning to an operational framework with a clunky name but which some say holds great promise - the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

ITIL is a set of best practices for managing complex IT environments. Long in use in Great Britain, ITIL has slowly begun migrating to North America. Organizations as diverse as Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar and the government of Ontario are among the early adopters singing its praises.

"It has been an absolutely huge success," says Maria Ritchie, manager of service management for Ontario's Justice Enterprise in North Bay, Ontario. The government organization runs the Canadian province's courts and jails, among other critical agencies.

Ian Clayton, president of the IT Service Management Institute, describes ITIL as a roadmap for implementing and managing technology. "ITIL sets out major goals and directives for each of [10] different disciplines," Clayton says. "It speaks to activities that an organization should do in order to keep processes in control. It can also help determine whether a process is cost-effective." (See graphic, right).

Once a 40-volume set of principles developed by a former British government agency, ITIL has since been reduced to two volumes. Part of the attraction, followers say, is that it's available in the public domain. The books cost about $95 to $130 and are available at www.itilbooks.com. You can also get a variety of related publications at www.itsmf.net, the Web site of the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF).

The books address, among other things, change management, incident response and network configuration. Certification is available at "foundation" and "master" levels, and some early adopters say exposure to the standards through workshops and training can be highly effective.

The Ontario Justice Enterprise adopted ITIL two and a half years ago to help manage growth and to improve service to its internal customers. With 1,000 locations across the province and more than 25,000 users, the challenges of providing services efficiently were immense.

The ITIL initiative spawned a virtual service desk that slashed support costs by 40%. "It's a help desk but it's more than a help desk," Ritchie says. "It's service-level monitoring, service request processing and more. It makes sure the group is working together as a service-delivery chain." The entire Ontario government is now applying ITIL principles.

The Cincinnati consumer products giant Procter & Gamble has realized significant savings since embarking on ITIL three years ago, says Mike Ackerman, the company's associate director of IT. Procter & Gamble launched ITIL with a pilot project for help desks in China and has since taken it companywide.

The company implemented ITIL along with a tool kit standardization initiative aimed at reining in the number of applications that help desks have to support. Ackerman says a study of the savings within Procter & Gamble's finance and accounting IT departments shows a 6% to 8% cut in operating costs and a reduction in technology staff of between 15% and 20%. Once further rollouts of the initiative take place, he expects similar savings throughout the company.

The latest Procter & Gamble ITIL initiative focuses on problem management, which involves root-cause analysis of trends in help-desk requests. The initiative has resulted in a 10% reduction in help-desk calls. "We're doing basically the same amount of work with less people and providing better quality at the same time," Ackerman says.

Caterpillar reports similar results with its ITIL implementation. The Peoria, Ill., construction equipment and engine manufacturer began implementing ITIL 18 months ago and has already realized significant benefits, according to L.J. Sheets, a technical specialist with Caterpillar.

Addressing incident management for Web-related services, Caterpillar found that internal service providers were meeting the target response time of 30 minutes between 60% and 70% of the time. After applying ITIL principles, Sheets says the rate surpassed 90%.

The organization promoting ITIL, itSMF, boasts 8,000 members worldwide. In the U.S., there are about 600 members representing roughly 200 companies. "It has been the larger organizations that have been the early adopters in the U.S.," says Ken Hamilton, the co-founder and chairman of itSMF in the U.S. An ItSMF-sponsored conference on ITIl scheduled for Dec. 6-7 is expected to draw more than 300 people to Orlando.

Like other standards initiatives, support from IT executives is critical. Procter & Gamble's Ackerman says one way to improve interest is to tie ITIL adoption to other company initiatives. Within Procter & Gamble, ITIL was marketed as a way to help meet a companywide directive from the CEO to cut costs by $2 billion over five years.

"As with most things, some people are very receptive and other people are like, 'I don't have time for this stuff,' " Ackerman says. "But if you can make it an enabler for a larger initiative it's like a knife through butter."

Duffy is a freelance writer in Haydenville, Mass. He can be reached at tomduffy62@aol.com.