System iNetwork

October 16, 2007

ITIL: System Management's Stylish Business Suit

Although it's not getting much mileage so far in the System i world, for quite some time there has been a system-management methodology on the scene that might be worth a look, especially for companies at the larger end of the SMB scale. It's called the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Although its origins have been traced as far back as IBM's "yellow books" of the 1980's (that was a four-volume series of books titled A Management System for Information Systems), ITIL is a nonproprietary, conceptual framework that embodies methods of managing IT services. Originally offered by the U.K.'s Office of Governmental Commerce, ITIL is a five-volume library that focuses on, respectively, service strategy, service design, service transition (i.e., change management), service operation, and continual service improvement. (Ultimately, there are 34 volumes dealing with separate issues.) ITIL's initial goal was to provide guidance for a central IT authority for the U.K. government, an idea that eventually succumbed to political infighting over whether such a function should be controlled by the government or industry. However, ITIL provides a structure for planning IT strategy for enterprises, both public and private. It's many of the traditional system management issues dressed up in a stylish business suit.

More concretely, ITIL attempts to provide a structure that helps IT managers think more strategically about how their piece of the enterprise pie serves the greater whole. Although many parts of ITIL aren't attuned to small businesses, there are a number of issues it touches on that should sound familiar to everyone, such as application sizing, asset management, availability management, IT budgeting, capacity planning, help desk, incident management, security management, and service-level agreements. The British Standards Institute formulated BSI15000, and the International Organization for Standardization created ISO20000, two IT service-management standards based on ITIL.

Although originally launched in the late 90s, ITIL V3, the latest iteration of the framework, was published just last May and updated ITIL to be more Internet-centric and to focus more on integrating IT with business rather than simply supporting it.

ITIL isn't a silver bullet, of course. It's a huge amount of information and can seem overwhelming in its entirety. But I think it has some value for System i people. For one thing, it's always good to take time to look at the IT picture for your organization in a strategic way, regardless of your work role, because a good idea can come from anywhere. If you should happen to be thinking about changing companies, thinking strategically about IT challenges is something that an IT person can carry quite usefully from job to job.

Another advantage is that because it's a framework and somewhat modular, companies can follow the parts of it that make sense for them and ignore the parts that may be impractical to implement because of company size or financial limits. In fact, some experts recommend that approach to getting started with ITIL: pick one part of it you're already doing and see if its recommendations for that area contain some information that's useful to you in a practical way. This should be particularly true for companies concerned with service-level agreements, offering software as a service, and moving to a web-services model.

Finally, in my opinion anyway, one of the strengths of the System i is that because it performs certain tasks so well, such as running applications supported by databases, platform users might benefit especially from the more organized approach to those specialized areas that ITIL can offer.

Although a quick search of the web didn't turn up too many System i software vendors who are touting their products as specifically supporting the ITIL concept, there are a few. Perhaps not surprisingly, France-based ARCAD Software's ARCAD-Skipper, ARCAD-Observer, and ARCAD-Customer solutions are tailored to ITIL support. Aldon's Application Lifecycle Management suite uses ITIL practices as a basis for its design. MKS offers MKS Integrity for ITIL, a version of its change and configuration management solution that supports ITIL. Tango/04 Computing Group's website notes how its VISUAL Message Center product helped customer Capgemini, an outsourcing company, meet an ITIL implementation goal.

I'm sure there must be numerous other vendors whose products might help companies meet ITIL requirements, whether or not that capability is currently part of their online marketing materials. I invite those companies to alert us to this in response posts.

If you're interested in more information on ITIL, there are some resources. The U.K. Office of Government Commerce offers primary documentation. ITIL Central is a vendor-neutral information source. The IT Service Management Forum is U.S.-based, and the IT Service Management Forum International is an international, organization for IT professionals interested in ITIL.

Posted by at October 16, 2007 10:22 AM