Taking on IT service management

DENVER - Despite the growing popularity of best-practice frameworks such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, network managers shouldn't underestimate the challenge of adopting service management processes and technologies, according to those knee-deep in ITIL implementation projects.

ITIL and its framework for instituting standard processes across IT departments last week dominated discussions among some 2,000 attendees at the HP Software Forum.

From shipping giant DHL to the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) to Toyota Financial Services, large organizations say the benefits of getting their IT houses in order are numerous. But they also warn that IT managers must endure a lot of hard work before they can sit back and enjoy the fruits.

"I worked to get a set of repeatable processes in place that would enable IT staff to respond in a reasonable amount of time," said Gary Long, general manager of IT at GTAA. "It's been four years in the making."

GTAA is not alone. Other examples include: Lucent, whose project started more than one year ago; Toyota Financial Services, which began its efforts nine months ago; DHL, which is at one year and counting; and ChoicePoint, a provider of identification and credential verification services in Atlanta, is a year into its second attempt at ITIL. IT managers advise others to plan to commit at least a year to getting ITIL adoption started and to devise creative strategies to keep momentum going for years after.

Long described his efforts to overhaul the GTAA network and streamline processes as a "work in progress," and plans to use the IT service management framework he now has in place to add applications, expand services and adopt technologies such as RFID and wireless. The benefits aren't always easy to see at first, he said.

"It's going to continue to be a challenge to add head count, so the more efficiencies I can build into our processes, the better chances I have containing costs going forward," he said.

More North American companies are warming to the idea of IT frameworks - a recent Forrester Research survey of 135 IT managers found that about 20% use ITIL and another 20% rely on the tenets of the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology, a framework that also provide guidelines for IT process and governance. Yet industry experts say plans to adopt best practices often hit roadblocks. In a recent report, Malcolm Fry, one of the original contributors to ITIL, details why IT framework implementation attempts often fail.

Among the top 10 reasons Fry says ITIL rollouts flounder are lack of management commitment, loss of momentum, poor organization and performance-based measurement standards.

"Most IT monitoring activities concentrate on performance, while ignoring quality and processes," Fry writes in the report. "For example, most service desks can report how quickly they escalate incidents, but few can report how often they escalate incidents to the wrong person."