Implementing ITIL

The state of Michigan's gradual rollout of ITIL's best practices has eased growing pains.

How do you convince your network and IT professionals to adopt "best practices" when they think they already have them? Simply, selectively, realistically and patiently, says Robert McDonough, IT manager for process development and support for the state of Michigan in Lansing.

"There's only so much change you can inflict on folks at any one time," McDonough says.

Last January, the state's 2,000-person IT department began using parts of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a set of best practices meant to ease IT management  pain by creating uniform, well-documented processes for tasks such as problem identification and resolution, hardware or network changes, software updates and disaster recovery.

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How do you convince your network and IT professionals to adopt "best practices" when they think they already have them? Simply, selectively, realistically and patiently, says Robert McDonough, IT manager for process development and support for the state of Michigan in Lansing.

"There's only so much change you can inflict on folks at any one time," McDonough says.

Last January, the state's 2,000-person IT department began using parts of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a set of best practices meant to ease IT management  pain by creating uniform, well-documented processes for tasks such as problem identification and resolution, hardware or network changes, software updates and disaster recovery.

But ITIL lacks a set of best practices for its own adoption, so McDonough's team worked out their own.

"We were trying to change the culture," he says. "We started out with the idea of learning a common language [for IT processes]. That let us insert ITIL in a manageable way."

Cataloging change

"Too often, IT departments become their own worst enemies," McDonough says. "Something breaks and we fix it, and then that fix breaks something else. We wanted to formalize the process so we're not trying to upgrade a server at the same time someone else is trying to back it up."

The Michigan team found in one case that on-call staff were repeatedly - albeit promptly and efficiently - fixing a server that consistently lost connectivity during the night, which pushed up the state's overtime bill. But because there was no consistent way to capture this data and identify a persistent problem, the root cause of the disconnections was never addressed.

ITIL-based problem resolution identified the cause and created a permanent fix. The state is saving thousands of dollars just in this one case, McDonough says. As yet, there's no overall savings estimates, but ITIL has dramatically reduced the number of changes gone bad. All changes now are scheduled and visible, and changes are only approved if they have a "back-out plan" - a process for restoring the system to its original state if the change fails for any reason.

Because ITIL focuses on best practices, it lends itself to an approach of small steps. One of McDonough's first small steps was forming a cross-disciplinary team of IT workers. The goal was to create what he calls a "consistent baseline" - a standard description of the current processes in the IT department. He focused on incidents or events that affect the quality of a given IT service, such as e-mail, and on problems, which ITIL defines as a recurring incident patterns.

"ITIL will say, 'Here are the best practices for organizing this process, here's what you need, who you need, and here's how information should flow between the various people and groups,'" says Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president at Forrester Research. "You can start with this and then adopt or adapt ITIL to other processes in the IT group."