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September 2, 2005

Demystifying ITIL

Making ITIL useful and sustainable in practice means stepping back far enough to see what it is on the whole, and then making the right decision about how to approach it closer so that the effort is not wasted on solving the wrong problem.

ITIL is a highly detailed, highly annotated model of an organization that produces and provides information technology "services" as products.

The details largely cover issues regarding the design of management processes involved in providing services of accountable quality. The annotations largely cover issues regarding:
- the value of the services to the business user.
- the value of the services producer/providerto the business client.

Existing organizations can study and interpret the model in three main ways:
- test examples of how to institute operations
- identify success factors in functional accountability within operations
- identify potential omissions and enhancements, at the functional (i.e., capability) level, in the existing service production/provision system

Because an organization's institutions, accountability methods, and systems are all at stake vis-a-vis ITIL, the organizational model presented by ITIL is always potentially very risky to emulate.

In order to emulate the model, organizational changes are implemented according to the influences of one or more of the three ways that the model is studied and interpreted.

Investments in the changes will likely need to be strategically justified in terms of operational mission, and/or tactically justified in terms of opportunity costs.

The interpretation effort, an early link in the whole chain of ITIL-engagement events, is a typically weak link. Interpretation must be motivated, and the motivation must be shared by the operations managers and the change managers -- or at the least, synchronized .

Together, operations managers and change managers are the defacto organization. (This is keeping in mind that management is more about roles than about job titles.)

Existing organizations that do not want to re-organize can use ITIL as a comparative model.

Existing organizations that are willing to re-organize can use ITIL as a conceptual demonstration of organizational principles, helpful for guidance.

Despite such a practical and simple difference in the purposefulness, approaches to ITIL are often very confused because of the way that ITIL is usually promoted outside of managed communities of practice.

Even from comprehensive introductory coverage like that of the September 1, 2005 issue of CIO Magazine, gaining an authoritative point of view on ITIL is a real challenge due to the range of descriptions applied to each important facet of concern. In this article alone, it appeared that from one authority to another, ITIL aspects could be this, could be that, or could be somewhere in-between:

- A knowledge collection or a framework...
- Organizations or departments...
- Practices or methodologies...
- Management standards or customizable...
- Management functions or processes...
- and management of processes or governance.

The problem is not that these oppositions are mutually exclusive; in fact, they are usually interrelated. But all the terms are somewhat loaded; and the variations make it difficult to coordinate key players around the same high-priority starting point and value proposition -- which is what necessitates an approach that continually markets cross-functional capability maturity.

Does this make a capability maturity model the common denominator of ITIL adoption across all companies? No: the common denominator is strategic urgency, underwriting organizational change management at the executive level. A more complex issue is how to maintain the urgency, and a capability maturity model is instrumental to doing that.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at September 2, 2005 1:15 PM

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