In a recent newsletter, we pointed out that poor WAN management processes cause the majority of WAN outages. We also noted that in spite of this fact, most network organizations focus much more on evaluating WAN technologies than on improving WAN management processes. That’s because process re-engineering is a difficult task - but that difficulty can be reduced by using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
The ITIL was originally defined in the 1990s by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency of the U.K. government. The goal of ITIL is to provide detailed, vendor-neutral process definitions with the intention that these process definitions can be adapted to any IT organization.
It appears as if ITIL is gaining in popularity. One major proponent is the Information Technology Service Management Forum (itSMF), an international, independent user group that has become a major influence on the best practices of IT service management. The group has embraced ITIL for service management and has become an active contributor to ITIL’s process definitions.
ITIL provides process definitions in 11 key areas, including change management, configuration management, problem management, incident management and capacity management.
We would like to hear from you. If you have used ITIL to structure how you re-engineered your IT processes, how did it go? If you looked at ITIL and decided to not use it, why did you make that decision?