* What are the ITIL and CMMI standards?
If you’re considering adopting either the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or Capability Maturity Model for Integration (CMMI) – or both – for managing and maintaining your IT organization, it’s worth considering hiring professional services experts. They can help thoroughly train you and your staff, and help you understand the esoteric, but important idea-to-implementation bridge so you can develop your shop into a finely-tuned machine.
It’s great to send your people through ITIL or CMMI training, but at the end of the day, if they can’t tell you how to implement ITIL or CMMI in the wild, then the training does you no good. Here’s the trouble: ITIL and CMMI suffer from the problem of being wonderfully well-developed ideas. But their translation to the practical hands-on side of the house – the area where most of your employees are at, is a difficult one to traverse. This is where outsourcing comes into play. Professional services in these instances really stand out as a must-have option: to train and help deploy.
Over the past few years, ITIL and CMMI have emerged as two distinct separate models for managing and maintaining an IT organization. Like any good standardization effort, the ideas arising out of ITIL and CMMI might seem nebulous, even daunting to the neophyte. European entities have had a chance to hear what is actually being said and to implement accordingly. Now these two models are rushing headlong into the U.S.
Some people think they are two competing standards for the management of IT organizations. Let us look at each to more fully understand their higher-level elements. ITIL and CMMI are far-reaching and quite complete in what they deal with – a full immersion into either requires training and almost Zen-like devotion to the subject. Our purpose here is to give you some talking/thinking points as you go forward into either brave new world.
We start with ITIL (http://www.itil.org). Originally developed for the U.K. government by CCTA (now OGC), ITIL has become a standard for service management in the IT genre. The ITIL publications involve two high-level subject areas: Service Support and Service Delivery. Included in Service Support are a series of best practices on topics such as Service Desk, Configuration Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Release Management and Change Management. Service Delivery includes best practices on topics such as Service Level Management (SLM), Financial Management, Capacity Management, Availability Management, IT Continuity Management and Security Management. Taken together, these best practices represent a complete, factual ideology about what it takes to manage an IT operation.
Microsoft, for one, has adopted ITIL as an important operations strategy, and has developed courseware and training around ITIL, called the Management Operations Framework (https://www.microsoft.com/mof). Microsoft has also created curricula around systems development, called Microsoft Solutions Framework (https://www.microsoft.com/msf).
CMMI (https://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi), on the other hand, was developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute to use as process improvement models to identify and strengthen an organization’s software or systems engineering functions. Included in CMMI are ideas on product and process improvement and supplier sourcing.
CMMI (formerly called CMM-SW) now folds in other models to create a cohesive environment for those interested in improving the processes and associated output of their shops. You start by assuming your systems – or software – development efforts are at some maturation level in their ability to deliver systems or software through established, uniformly implemented and maintained processes. In other words, you probably have in mind a capability level your shop has attained in terms of the systems it can push out.
A Level 0 shop has incomplete capability and probably hasn’t done much in terms of developing a standardized end-to-end operation. Think of a Level 0 shop as one in which projects arrive on an ad hoc (i.e., non-standardized) basis and they are created exactly the same way. One project might be developed differently than another, generally with minimal regard for standards, policies, project management principles and so forth.
Level 1 shops are at what is called a performing level and so on, through to Level 5, the optimized level. If you are familiar with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the similarity, while loose, is nonetheless apparent. Level 0 shops struggle to uniformly develop systems. Level 5 shops are self-actualizing, knocking out projects in a uniform, consistent, orderly way. Chances are your shop is somewhere between Level 0 and 3.
Which of the two standards should you consider? The short answer is both. In pure maintenance and operations settings, ITIL is the way to go and should be applied to the operations side of the house. Standards are well-formulated and in place to help you navigate your way. Vendors have modified or are modifying their product offerings to reflect ITIL best practices, and outsourcers stand ready to help TDMs understand the ramifications of implementing such a broad-brush change.
CMMI, on the other hand, is designed to leverage systems and software development environments. If you have an applications development shop, you might want to think about adopting CMMI models – the goal ostensibly being to strive for a Level 3-5 environment. Vendors wouldn’t necessarily be able to help you write code at a CMMI Level 3. Instead, through outsourced coaching to gain performance improvements, you gently coax your shop into a Level 3 setting (no doubt passing Levels 0, 1 and 2 on the way). The path to CMMI Level 5 nirvana may involve business process re-engineering, another area in which outsourced assistance can be of great help.
