American ITIL: Best practices win converts

The IT Infrastructure Library, a set of management best practices that has long been popular in Europe, finally is starting to make waves in the U.S.

Some U.S. organizations such as Procter & Gamble have used ITIL to great effect, letting them slash IT spending by tens of millions of dollars and boost IT service delivery. But many more outfits are only now turning to ITIL, largely in response to corporate demands to do more with smaller staffs and stingy capital budgets.

Also: Getting started on ITIL

The framework consists of a set of books (also available on CDs) that outline the steps needed to perform incident, change, configuration and problem management, and about a dozen other IT disciplines. ITIL helps network managers set processes and better document IT actions for future audits, such as those related to new government compliance rules.

The organization overseeing ITIL, the IT Service Management Forum, reports that the number of individual U.S. members in its ranks has almost tripled over the past three years, from 550 to roughly 1,600. Separately, U.K. publisher The Stationery Office, which sells the framework through multiple distribution channels, reports that about one-third of ITIL-related traffic on its Web site comes from the U.S. And industry watchers expect growth to continue: Forrester Research predicts that "2005 will be the year when ITIL goes mainstream."

Now close to 15 years old, ITIL originated with the British government, which initially had the primary responsibility of advancing and improving on the set of rules for how to deliver IT services more efficiently across departments. But control over ITIL has become more distributed, with the IT Service Management Forum reporting 20 cities in the U.S. have their own local interest groups now.

Observers also credit technology vendors with bringing ITIL to life in the U.S.

"Big vendors like Computer Associates and HP are talking about it at their user shows," says Brian Johnson, director of product management at Pink Elephant, an ITIL consultancy in Burlington, Ontario.

Vendors such as BMC Software, IBM and Micromuse also have gone to great lengths in the past year to detail how their management software supports ITIL tenets.

Market research firms also are talking up ITIL. Gartner says fully adopting an IT service management strategy can cut an organization's cost of IT ownership by about 50%. Forrester says until recently U.S. companies were trying to define for themselves what ITIL was, but with more vendor direction the best practices system is becoming clearer to them.

"Implementations will be tightly connected to the infrastructure management tools that companies use, as these tools contain more and more ITIL best practices out of the box," a Forrester report says.

ITIL stands to become more valuable as more vendors start using similar terminology and reporting methods in their products. For example, the ITIL framework includes details on how IT staff should request and document making a change, say, to a network router.