PA extract:
"A lot of companies have invested heavily in Itil and are asking why their service management has not improved," says Richard Harrison of PA Consulting's global IT consulting group practice. "Often this is because it has not changed the attitudes and behaviours of the people using it." For example, he notes, many helpdesk analysts are still being measured simply on how many calls they can answer in a given time.
Full article:
Until recently, few companies gave much thought to what their IT helpdesks and service management structures were aiming to achieve - beyond getting users' problems logged and fixed as quickly as possible - and how they were doing it.
But the pressure to reduce costs, along with the need to improve service to customers and get more out of the supporting technologies, has underlined the case for something more than an ad hoc approach. Enterprises want a roadmap of best practice to help them deliver the service that the business needs. This is the aim of Itil, (IT Infrastructure Library), a series of documents and methodologies originally created by the UK government for use in the public sector.
"It brings a set of integrated, cohesive, processes to make sure you are doing everything in the right way," says Aidan Lawes, chief executive of the IT Service Management Forum. "You can run a good service management operation without it, but that would require a very long journey of discovery rather than tapping into a huge pool of knowledge."
The forum, whose members include vendors and users, has developed the UK civil servants' work into a framework for best practice in IT service management. It is used heavily in the UK and the Netherlands, says Mr Lawes, but is spreading rapidly across the rest of Europe and the US.
A survey* published in April found that user organisations broadly welcomed the initiative, despite some reservations about missing elements and agreement that the methodology does not have all the answers.
Of organisations that had adopted Itil, 82 per cent said they would recommend it to others and 70 per cent said it gave a worthwhile return for the effort and the expense.
Cadbury Schweppes, one of the world's largest drinks and confectionery companies, is among enthusiastic users of Itil. This is partly because of its ability to merge business and IT standards into a single roadmap, says John Canning, customer services manager for IT in the Emea region.
On the company's helpdesk, Itil complements software from Remedy, part of US-based BMC Software. Apart from helping agents understand the business impact of a problem, it also aids their professional development, he says. "Lots of companies treat the helpdesk as a dumping ground for new graduates and others. Itil helps them learn what service management is all about and helps them to pass on from the helpdesk into the business or IT."
As often happens with such frameworks, however, users can end up getting the wrong end of the stick. "It's not a silver bullet, and it's not a product," says Mr Lawes. "It is just some recommended guidance, distilled from much experience. You need to use it with common sense."
Also, companies that have adopted Itil successfully stress the need to pick and choose from the guidelines, rather than introduce the whole package slavishly as if it was a standard. "Those Itil books can look like an enormous piece of bureaucracy," says Mr Canning. "You have to adapt and adapt. We have taken the bits we require, and wrapped them around the processes we have, to suit ourselves."
"You can even mould it slightly to fit the business," adds Bernie Colling, technology service support manager at MTV Networks Europe, which has also gone down the Itil path to transform its service management performance.
There appears to be some confusion, too, about the relevance of Itil to companies' broader business needs. Debbie Rosario, managing consultant at Compass Management Consulting, says that, all too often, IT managers will seek to implement Itil as a "kneejerk" reaction to reduce costs but fail to recognise that the service management strategy, or any Itil implementation, must support the organisation's business strategy.
IT vendors, too, have inevitably jumped on the Itil bandwagon, developing tools that are "Itil-compliant." In a vain attempt to ensure compliance, organisations are purchasing these tools and struggling to make them fit their internal processes, says Ms Rosario. Itil, she says, should supplement what is already there, as this is a far better way of ensuring "buy-in" from both business and IT.
Some vendors, however, are developing their service management software around the Itil guidelines, rather than simply adapting existing products. An example of this is assyst, developed by Edinburgh-based Axios Systems, and used by Mr Colling and his team at MTVNE. "It's like a textbook for Itil, made into a fancy program," says Mr Colling.
Although companies such as Cadbury Schweppes and MTVNE are making good use of Itil, old attitudes seem to die hard in some places. "A lot of companies have invested heavily in Itil and are asking why their service management has not improved," says Richard Harrison of PA Consulting's global IT consulting group practice. "Often this is because it has not changed the attitudes and behaviours of the people using it." For example, he notes, many helpdesk analysts are still being measured simply on how many calls they can answer in a given time.
* The Itil experience - has it been worth it? Sponsored by Hornbill Systems in association with the Help Desk Institute.
