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Making ITIL work

01 October 2005

Preliminary results from a new Gartner survey indicate Australia leads the way in the Asia-Pacific region for adoption of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) approach to IT service management.

According to Gartner, 44 percent of organisations with more than 500 employees have adopted ITIL in Australia, compared with 22 percent in Singapore and just six percent in Hong Kong.

CITEC adopted the ITIL framework in 2002, making it one of the first ICT outsourcers in Australia to formally adopt this ICT service management framework.

Service Quality and Strategies Unit Manager for CITEC, Peter Marshall said the organisation already had well established systems and practices for IT service delivery.

"We were an early adopter of the AS/NZS ISO 9001 series of standards for quality management systems, so we saw our alignment with the ITIL framework as a way of further sharpening our focus on ICT service management," Peter said.

He said there was a range of organisational drivers behind the push to adopt ITIL.

"We wanted to produce seamless, practical business solutions for our clients but it was difficult to get a whole-of-service view, for a number of reasons.

"Roles, responsibilities and accountabilities were vague in some areas, and our organisational and business management processes didn't support the provision of an integrated service capability as well as they could have.

"Another driving factor for adopting ITIL was that our clients were reporting varying service experiences.

"Clients also had limited opportunities to provide input to our service delivery processes, and we felt there was room to further strengthen our customer focus and relationships."

CITEC's approach to better practice

Peter says one of the best decisions CITEC made when aligning with ITIL was to develop a core capability and understanding of the ITIL framework before introducing the change.

"We approached ITIL as a major change initiative, and staff needed to see that management felt strongly enough about ITIL to dedicate sufficient resources for its effective implementation," he said.

"Our first step was to identify and train a core group of champions. Initially, 16 employees received the Manager's Certificate in IT Service Management or Master's level training and an additional 130 staff have since obtained the Foundation Certificate level.

"The Masters level group was responsible for performing initial process maturity assessments and developing a phased project for the alignment with ITIL around defined process clusters."

The first cluster of ITIL processes to be addressed included incident, problem and change management.

"From a client perspective these were the areas that had the highest impact, so that is why we started with this cluster," Peter said.

The implementation program involved establishing Process Improvement Teams, known as PIT crews, which each had three Masters level staff. Workshop materials supported the PIT crews to cascade the learning and the change.

Subsequent clusters have addressed service level management, financial management, configuration management and IT service continuity management processes. Additional work to mature CITEC's availability and capacity management processes is planned as the maturity of the initial processes improves.

Over this initial alignment period, CITEC has also successfully leveraged this effort and approach to achieve a third party certification to AS/NZS 7799.2:2003 for its information security management system and practices.

Results

Ongoing assessments of the maturity of CITEC's service management reveal continual improvements since ITIL was introduced. Major (service) incidents have fallen by 20 per cent every six months for the past 18 months.

"Whilst achieving and maintaining best practice in ICT service management is a journey of continual improvement, our core processes now have a clearly established level of maturity," Peter said.

"One of the major challenges throughout this initiative has been to try and manage the process maturation at a rate that enables integration with, and support of, related processes.

"Having processes with very different levels of maturity creates diseconomies of scale, which can in turn affect the motivation of the people striving for improvement.

"I believe it is vitally important to reinforce the synergistic nature of a holistic integrated approach to ICT service management at every opportunity," Peter said.

Peter also provides these pointers for organisations considering adopting ITIL:

Be flexible - one size does not fit all;
Adapt what you learn;
Pragmatically apply what is appropriate for your organisation and its goals;
Match the rate of change with the capability to engage and embed it; and;
Build time into your service improvement plans to reflect on your achievements and generate energy for the next improvement cycle.

"Most importantly," he says "a deliberate effort is needed to sustain improvements and continue to build new capability."

Organisational evolution

Peter says the adoption of an ITIL framework has strengthened one of CITEC's three organisational pillars.

"Our integrated service management capability is built on three core components - people, best practice process frameworks and enabling technology," he said.

"By adopting the ITIL framework, we were able to use an independent framework and approach to move our core IT service management processes to a new level of maturity.

"More recently, CITEC has focused on refreshing its technology through the introduction of a new IT service management toolset, which enables integrated service monitoring and allows our staff and clients to view service performance in real-time.

"This technology refresh positions us well for a further leap in process maturity. The benefits are incremental but when viewed over a long period, we can see significant changes to our service delivery capability, benefiting both our clients and staff."

This article is based on a paper presented by Peter Marshall at the 8th National IT Service Management Conference in Brisbane on 23 August 2005. For more information about how ITIL can help to improve your IT service delivery, please contact Peter on +61 7 3006 6131.