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February 1, 2007

I.T. Without ITIL

The most exotic thing about information technology has always been terminology. It is the key to the scientific success of the field. But quite naturally, the complexity of the science also has meant that the terminology works steadily against any increase of ease in the field's practical management. More and more cats pop up that need to be herded. The net result -- a nightmare of semantics -- caused what the Gartner industry analysts noted over five years ago: the overwhelming majority of cost in I.T. comes from not technology complexity, but management complexity.

Perhaps that's why it is that in these last three years or so, the I.T. Infrastructure Library, or ITIL as it is commonly now known, gained traction with the kind of momentum carrying an industry standard. ITIL describes a huge range of management processes using a vocabulary of enormous logical consistency, which can make the semantics of management suddenly unambiguous despite IT's complexity.

At the same time, the sheer scope of ITIL is fear-inducing. Many of those who would use it fall into one of two groups: those who look for evidence that there is actual practical import to sticking the toe in the bathwater; or, those who religiously convert. Analysts like Forrester Research say that the former group is about 60% of the gang, while about 10% are fully pious and immersed, leaving the rest either just thinking it over or dabbling.

On the spectrum between the larger and smaller group, the larger keeps its practitioners cordoned off (but not quarantined) in a swim lane... handling the semantics of ITIL as another special expertise hoped to achieve some natural ascendency, the same way an innovation outstrips or obsoletes legacies. The smaller "immersion" group swims the rough open waters of large-scale revolutionary change in culture. Because ITIL is primarily documentation, there is not a real threat that either approach will alter it's ability to provide consistent guidance. But giving good advice is not the same as causing it to be followed. The top obstacle to following ITIL, ironically, is still confusion. Why is this the case? Simply put, corporate IT groups are forced to move at a pace that is much faster than their ability to absorb ITIL, and they are loathe to risk, much less give up, hard-won benefits from pre-ITIL practices. Yet behind those benefits, they often don't have an effective overview of where they already are. Thus, following along ITIL's paths, they constantly run into forks in the road that don't offer the obvious correct choice. Net: ITIL is a maze.To get over this hump, they still need a way to see, in short order, how they can connect the dots between their current practices and ITIL's.

Following suit, the perspective represented in the picture below simplifies the identification of the pre-ITIL circumstances, locating the starting line for a move to ITIL without the threats of disruption or of time running out.

The key assumptions in this picture are as follows.

First, no one really cares about I.T. except for whether it is perceived and proved to be useful.
Second, there are only two major points of view on that utility: the lifecycle of items composing the IT infrastructure; and, the production that composes IT operations.
Third, all of the IT management, whether in infrastructure or in operations, is essentially about two things: how things are (i.e., states), and how things happen (i.e., transactions).
Those three assumptions, when aligned as shown, organize every critical aspect of driving value from IT utilization. From this point, the rest is a matter of additional levels of detail.

Since management is popularly understood to be impossible without measurement, and since measurement can't happen without semantics, it is hugely important that the perspective drawn so far does not rely on confusing semantics and meanwhile shows analysis as an ordinary, not exotic, activity covering the field.

Within the general framework, four main phenomena surface as the major management subjects. Driving these down into daily practices makes sense under the assumption that the point of the practices is to establish value in the utilization of the info technology involved.

The utilization is established on two fronts. One is to give form to the actual information technology that users can ultimately access and exploit; this is what is called "IT Services". The other is to give form to the mechanism that creates and sustains that access and exploitation; this is what is called "Support Services".

In an unconventional but easily proved distinction, IT Services is about the provision of the IT configurations; whereas, Support Services is about linking the IT to usage requirements, as systems for use. (These systems are essentially and primarily logical, and secondarily take on physical form as the peculiarities of the company hosting them might allow them to at any time.) Usually, in effect, it's the difference between supply and demand, between service level management and service level agreement, and so forth.

As seen in the picture, the two kinds of services cover (i.e., attend to) the four major subjects in a certain way.The types of services relate to each other because they work on the same subjects. But the services differ from each other in what it is about the subjects that are the key points of their respective concern and influence. These key points are added into the framework's quadrants to clarify the high-level of analytic detail that really matters for the services. This level of detail is the one that initially accounts for the co-existence and co-influence of the two generic types of services (IT and Support).

For followers of ITIL: the difference between IT Service and Support Service is not indicated in the normal ITIL vocabulary. Instead, the generic concept of "management processes" proxies Support services that bring IT services to the user or customer. ITIL largely provides a taxonomy of those management processes, and most observers first engage the taxonomy of "delivering" IT Services (defining and developing them) versus "supporting" IT Services (maintaining and optimizing them). But at least half of the trick in adopting ITIL is to orchestrate its management processes into standing "Support Services" as described in this discussion's framework, which is oriented towards managing the value of utilization.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at February 1, 2007 4:50 AM

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