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January 12, 2006

Compliance versus Compatibility in ITIL implementations

A key challenge of organizing service management practices along the guidelines of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the issue of focusing on the objectives of practice as opposed to the mechanics of practice.

ITIL addresses this challenge by describing what differentiating effects of the practices are the ones that service managers and service customers should see in common as an outcome of any of its given management processes. These differentiating effects are where value in management improvement is measured.

The virtue of the followup process recommendations is that they link to those values by describing proven approaches to generating measurable and relevant results from the execution of the service organization.

The important execution results fall into two broad categories: interactions and outputs.

That may seem obvious, and it reflects the ITIL adopter's natural emphasis on processes. But what most organizations must remember to observe is that execution involves procedures, priorities and decisions blended together. Processes are just a mechanism for predictably binding those components of execution together, given the resources and culture of the particular organization that is responsible for conducting the process. By definition, the process cannot "override" those organizational elements because it is made up of them.

Every organization has specific characteristics of its resources and culture that can significantly vary or even disagree with those of another organization -- and even between one part and another part of the same organization. These differences stem from business requirements, funding histories, current knowledge, and other preconditions. Yet these disparate organizations have in common basic business functional responsibilities such as managing IT services.

In acknowledging that, ITIL clearly refuses to specify any particular resources or culture, but instead it provides operational objectives, along with numerous models for supporting them in the form of management processes.

When the organization prepares a service management process from an ITIL model, the process is said to have a degree of compatibility with ITIL.

The main goal of an ITIL Adoption initiative is to establish a known and measurable level of management process compatibility with ITIL.

Management processes have three fundamental purposes that link the ITIL compatibility to typical business needs for cost management, procedural effectiveness, and adaptability. Within the constraints of expense, target impacts, and change, the purposes of the needed management processes are, generally, to account for:
- why something should be attended to;
- what kind of attention it should get; and
- ensuring that appropriate attention is applied.

The first purpose is to establish regularity in associating response procedures with identified demand. Service stakeholders need to have a good idea of how demand will be handled before the demand is urgent. Key tasks to perform include:
- classifying and monitoring demand
- defining procedures and their scope, and
- granting permissions to both requestors and responders.

The second purpose is to establish the terms by which historical and current events will be described for triggering assignments and for analyzing changes in conditions. Key tasks to perform include:
- establishing quality-managed information repositories
- tailoring communications to fulfillment and auditing roles
- regulating the capture and transmission of critical event data

The third purpose is to prescribe enforceable responsibilities in the participation of all parties to a procedure. Key tasks to perform include:
- defining roles
- allocating resources
- tracking interactions and results

Meeting those three general obligations will result, respectively, in the development of rules, terminology and authorities. These management artifacts are typically used as building materials for organizational functions-- and can normally be used to compare a current organization against another current or any future proposed organization. However, those materials are not inherent indicators of functional performance; as with any resource or construction, their value to performance comes from how they are used, not from what they are. This reiterates the primary importance of objectives in the scheme of things, and that the notion of best practice is rooted in the objectives rather than in the procedures.

To sum up the above observations, an organization takes on an initiative to adopt ITIL guidance of the development and implementation of management processes that are compatible with service management objectives.

The guidance proactively reinforces desired levels of consistency with known best practices, but the guidance does not specify an organization's particular processes.

Rather, it helps to model process design and development for effective support of the key objectives of the service provision and relationship.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at January 12, 2006 12:26 PM

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