Michele Hudnall, director of service management at software vendor Managed Objects, talks about the realities of ITIL and how corporate IT shops can make the most of their implementations.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is designed to help cut costs and streamline IT operations, and is finding converts seeking to maintain regulatory compliance as well. Initially popular overseas, ITIL is growing in use in the U.S., where four out of 10 organizations will adopt it by 2007, according to Meta Group (now part of Gartner). Former Meta analyst Michele Hudnall, now director of service management at software vendor Managed Objects, recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie about the realities of ITIL and how corporate IT shops can make the most of their implementations.
What’s behind ITIL’s rise in popularity?
There has been a push on technology organizations to map technology to business for quite a while. Organizations struggled to do that, and they were looking to automate that. Instead of starting with a blank sheet of paper and trying to define how to operate the technology organization, the ITIL processes give you a good starting point in defining what various operational processes might look like.
Where are we at in terms of ITIL adoption in the U.S.?
We are peaking. About four years ago, the ITIL adoption curve was starting to ramp up, but I rarely talk to an organization today that is not looking at ITIL in some respect.
How can vendors help IT organizations adopt ITIL?
Technology cannot be ITIL certified. It’s only a consultant who helps an organization deliver the process that can be certified. And what is really being certified is their knowledge of the process and their ability to be able to put it in context of the organization. Look for good adoption of the ITIL terminology within the configuration of setting up and deploying the various technologies. Vendors can provide canned templates within the technology that leverage the high-level structure of ITIL so that IT staff isn’t starting with a blank sheet of paper.
What are the stages of process maturity for ITIL?
There are five components: how well the organization defines the process; the people, roles and skills that deliver and support it; how well you can measure it or communicate the outcome of that process; how well it’s integrated to the various other processes; and then how well automated that process is.
What is a good place to start with ITIL?
A good configuration management process, because it forms an underpinning for other processes. It will help IT departments understand what services they are providing to the organization. Then incident and problem management become high priorities. Then the change management process becomes another key area: now they want to manage that configuration, and audit and control how it changes. Because of some of the other compliance requirements that have come into organizations, IT departments are having to manage the systems and illustrate when there are changes to the configurations or to the systems that support financial systems, for example. Because systems are being used to support those functions, they are having to be audited as well with a more stringent change and configuration process.
How should IT departments install a configuration management database?
Anyone who really embarks on a single configuration repository is being set up for failure. Even if parts succeed, it’s a very lengthy process. There is data that comes out of many systems, developed prior to this notion of a service-oriented organization, and IT shops that recognize this and leverage existing investments are most successful. They seek to find a method with which to integrate the data from multiple systems. At the foundation of ITIL and configuration management is the definition of relationships that things have to one another. Looking for technology to help integrate and bring the pieces of data that are most relevant out of those systems is really the most successful approach.
What are the most common obstacles to implementing ITIL?
A lot of folks look at it as a silver bullet that defines specific tasks, such as “if you do this, you will receive this benefit.” And it’s really not defined at that level. You really have to take it as a best practice and a starting point. And you really have to put it into context for your organization. The organization may be at various levels of maturation so you would experience varying levels of benefit. Folks who take it as a silver bullet definition tend to stumble. The other place IT shops stumble is in thinking of it in end-to-end terms across the IT organization. You really want to better manage and get a better handle on those things that most impact your organization. Those that try to apply this level of management across the board make their systems more costly than is probably necessary.
How do IT governance and management relate?
You have operational management, the day-to-day management of the operational processes, and the efficiencies in handling those silos. And then over the organization are the governing principles of how that organization is run. Who has access or privileges to data that may be financially sensitive, for example. It’s difficult to meet the governing principles if you don’t have a good operational foundation from which to draw. Vendors need to be aware of the governing principles; those that focus only on the operational data tend to be very siloed.
Tell me a bit about your role at Managed Objects.
I joined Managed Objects in April. I had left the Meta Group during the Gartner/Meta acquisition. I had spent a great of time at Meta, and Tivoli prior to that, covering and consulting in the areas of service-level management, service desk, problem and incident management. I’ve come over to Managed Objects in a very similar area, expanding more of the ITIL and service management functions into business service management, working mostly with prospects and customers about how to deploy technology in their environment and to support business service management in their environment.
Why has there been an uptake in interest in business service management in the past 18 months?
A lot of organizations have business units that leverage technology for the organization, but with distributed systems and complex infrastructures, people really want to understand what that investment means to the business. You really have to go through the business planning of what it costs to run a service, as well as the value it’s providing you, to make decisions on how you allocate resources, such as hardware, software, people that would support that service. To be able to do that, you have to understand that complex infrastructure in order to understand the cost and apply value to the business service.
How can vendors help customers get a better understanding of their business services?
The hardest thing to do if you have a very complex infrastructure is to understand the relationships of the components and elements within the infrastructure and defining the configuration of the services. That includes the people and the technology components that are related in delivering that service. Businesses have turned to the ITIL process definitions in order to understand what their configuration management is. That really sits at the core of understanding how things are related to each other in order to define that overall service as a mixture of various elements. It’s really how IT organizations are getting to the point where they can understand the process of service delivery. And that is a very tedious thing to do manually, to keep track of what those configurations are and manage those services. As IT processes mature, IT people are looking to apply technology to automate those processes. They are starting to look at technology that can help them create further efficiencies in the definition of these service configurations, service catalogs, service-level management and operational process management of the technology organization.
How can IT start to bring business process data into their business service management tools?
They are two different, distinct components. You have business services or defining technology service configurations in terms of the business, which tends to be an application or a function, such as a financial services application. Then at the next level of true business alignment, you have to instrument the applications and the infrastructure to take the business service to the next level, which are transactions and processes embedded within that application. They become enabled by services-oriented architectures and Web services where you can now also see the business processes embedded into the services. Until the technology is instrumented to that level, it’s very difficult to see the business process data, such as what does this transaction cost me, how many transactions do I have running through this system and at what times are they happening. With that information at a transaction level, you can apply it to what vendors are calling on-demand or adaptive computing and allocate resources according to the demand of those transactions.
