ITIL Introduction

Linpei Zhang

April, 2006

What’s ITIL?

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework of best practices approaches intended to facilitate the delivery of high quality information technology services.

- Wikipedia

Okay, what exactly is ITIL?

• A series of publications

• Best Practices for IT Service Management– Processes– Guidelines– Checklists

• Worldwide Industry standard

• Management Philosophy

Brief History of ITIL• The Central Computer and

Telecommunications Agency of United Kingdom first published elements of ITIL in 1989.

• The intention is to improve the management of IT services in UK Central Government

• Contributed to by expert IT practitioners around the world.

• The UK Office of Government Commerce was established in 2000 and incorporates the CCTA.

• The OGC now owns ITIL and is responsible for its maintenance and further development

ITIL Publications

Putting them into context

ITIL is the industry standard

• Widely accepted in Europe, Asia and Australia– 170,000 ITIL certified professionals worldwide– Over 10,000 companies adopted ITIL

worldwide• Started to gain momentum in United States

– Over 2000 people attended itSMF USA Conference in Chicago, 2005, the ITIL “trade show”, representing over 700 companies

– More than 1000 IT Professionals got ITIL certifications every month since 2005

Who’s Using ITIL

• Corporate– Procter & Gamble– Capital One– Boeing– British Petroleum– DHL– Microsoft– IBM– HP

• Government– UK Government

Communications Headquarters

– IRS– US Army– Virginia– Oklahoma City

ITIL Tools

• Over 100 Vendors

• Well know tools supporting ITIL– HP Openview Service Desk– Remedy Strategic Service Suite– CA Unicenter Service Desk– Peregrine Service Center

Frameworks Based on ITIL

• HP ITSM Reference Model– “a model that combines ITIL and industry-standard best

practices with years of HP knowledge and experience.”

• Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)– “Applying the principles of ITIL to the Microsoft

technology platform, MOF provides a foundation to help IT organizations meet the challenges”

Other useful frameworks focus on IT efficiency

• COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies)

• CMM (Capability Maturity Model)

• Six Sigma

• Balanced Scorecard

International Industry Standards

• BS15000– Published by BSI (British Standards Institution)

in 2000 as national standard for UK• ISO20000

– Published by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) on 12/15/2005

– The first International standard for IT Service Management. It’s based on and has superseded BS15000.

• Both standards are based heavily upon ITIL

ITIL Philosophy

• Service

• Quality

• Process

• Measurement

• Cost

• Proactive

ITIL Philosophy One - Service

• IT Service Management (ITSM) means managing IT as a service business.

• Deploy and manage resources to a discrete set of defined services

• Thinking ourselves as Service Providers

What kinds of services are we providing?

• Application Services– EasyPay– EasyPayNet– TeleNet– DAS– AOS– FLT– EEE– …

• Construction Services

• Support Services– Network Support Service– Application Maintenance

Service– Database Maintenance Service– Infrastructure Maintenance

Service• Management Services

– Statistics and report– Communication and Training– Consulting

Behave like Service Providers

• Align IT services to the customer and business needs. Find out what the customer needs and make those services available

• Partner with the customer to create new ways of doing business. Create new competitive advantages.

• Increase the quality of the existing services by organizing around services and working to make those service efficient

Realize the promise “We care about our Customer!”

• Documenting, negotiating and agreeing Customer and business quality targets and responsibilities in Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• Regular assessment of Customer opinions in Customer Feedback and Customer Satisfaction Surveys

• IT personnel regularly taking the ‘Customer journey’ and sampling the ‘Customer experience’

• IT personnel taking the Customer and Business perspective and always trying to keep Customer interactions as simple and enjoyable as possible

Expected Results• Alignment – Better match IT capability and

costs to business needs• Efficiency – Extend existing resources• Reliability – Ensure consistent performance• Agility – Response to business and

technology-driven changes

ITIL Philosophy Two - Quality

• Quality is the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements” as in ISO 9000

• Service Quality is “about ensuring customers get what they want” as in Managing Service Quality

• Quality is a interactive term. It’s all about satisfying and exceeding Customer Expectations.

What does that mean?

• High quality of the product cannot be achieved without understanding what customer wants (requirements)

• Quality cannot be measured without asking the customer’s opinions

• High quality service cannot be delivered without thinking in customer’s perspective

How Customer Evaluate Service Quality?

• Did the service satisfy my expectation?

• Can I get the same service next time?

• Is the service provided by a reasonable cost?

A High Quality (Pleasant) Dining Service

• Parking• Reception desk• Waiter/Waitress• Take order• Food delivery• Food• Feedback• Billing• Farewell

The quality of the dinning service is based on the quality of ALL the services above!

Question: How to improve the quality of our IT Services? How can you contribute?

Continuously Improve Service Quality

How do we keep themomentum going

How do we keep themomentum going

Where are we now?Where are we now? Current process & procedures

Current challenges & problems

Current process & procedures

Current challenges & problems

Where do we wantto be?

Where do we wantto be?

What are the priorities?

How do we bridge the gap?

What are the priorities?

How do we bridge the gap?

How do we get wherewe want to be?

How do we get wherewe want to be?

Informed planning

Experienced execution

Informed planning

Experienced execution

Are we improving?Did we get to where we

wanted to be?

Are we improving?Did we get to where we

wanted to be?Strict control

Status communication

Strict control

Status communication

How to get there - Quality Improvement Model

Deming Circle (PDCA)• Plan: Plan ahead for change.

Analyze and predict the results.

• Do: Execute the plan, taking small steps in controlled circumstances.

• Check: Study the results• Act: Take action to

standardize or improve the process

ITIL Philosophy Three - Process

“A process is a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action. ... Taking a process approach implies adopting the customer’s point of view. Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.”

- Thomas Davenport, “Process Innovation”

Characteristics of Processes

• Definability: It must have clearly defined input and output

• Order: It must consists of activities that are ordered by time and space

• Customer: There must be a recipient of the process’ outcome

• Value-adding: The transformation taking place within the process must add value to the recipient

Result vs. Process

• Result Oriented Management– Results can map to Activities– Results are measurable and worth measuring– Only applicable for low risk task

• Process Oriented Management– Define a process to achieve the result– Break down the overall result into smaller

intermediate results– More control and lower risk

Why we need Process to provide high quality service?

• Service– Intangible: Customer Experience– Interactive: One-time, Cannot be stored

• Process can help– Consistent performance– Reduce risk– Repeatable: Customer experience can be

repeated next time

But, what does process mean to me?

Give

• Understand the whole picture

• Know what to do in any circumstances

• Clearly defined Roles/Responsibilities

• Measurable performance

• Save time and efforts

Take

• May change way we used to carry out our tasks

• Take away some flexibilities

ITIL Philosophy Four - Measurement

If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it

If you cannot measure it, you probably don’t care about it

If you cannot influence it, you don’t need to measure it

What do we mean “Measure” here?

• Check in PDCA • Evaluate if we are in the right direction?

Are we in the right

direction?

Start Point

Goal

Why “Best Effort” is not good enough?

• “Best Effort”, “Some Progress”, “Improved Performance”… are not measurable.

• “Performance is improved 10%”, “Time to Market decreased from 100 days to 50 days”, “Customer Satisfaction Rate improves 23 percents”. Those are good measurements.

• All the measurements must be quantitative!

What to measure?

• Goal (Where do we want to go? What are we want to achieve?)

• CSF – Critical Success Factors: Determinate factors to achieve the goal

• KPI - Key Performance Indicators: Compare the CSF with standards, Quantities measurements

Example: Measure Availability

KPI for Availability

• MTTR (Mean Time to Repair): Average Down Time including Detect Time and Resolve Time.

• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures): Average Normal Operation Time

• MTBSI (Mean Time Between System Incidents): Average time between two incidents

• Availability Ratio: MTBF/MTBSI*100%

Not too little, not too much

• Measurement has costs– Tools– Time– Report– Analysis

• Too many measurements only ends up with No measurement

• Only measure the KEY performance indicators

ITIL Philosophy Five - Cost

Everything comes with a cost– Equipment Cost– Software Cost– Organization Cost– Accommodation Cost– Transfer Cost– Cost Accounting

How Cost are related to us?• Budget• Salary/Bonus• Reimbursement• Training Cost• Tools• Hiring• It’s everywhere in our working life! (Personal

life too)

Cost Awareness – Thinking as the Management

• Budget– Can we make the ends meet?

• New Project– ROI (Return Of Investment) = Profit /

Investiment

• New Software/Hardware/Tool– TOS (Total Ownership Cost): Cost in its

lifetime

Hidden costs

• Management cost– Statistics and Report– Communication and Training

• Support cost– Installation/Upgrade– Incident Support– Performance Tuning

Efficient IT Service

• Quality– Capacity– Availability– Performance– Support– Disaster Recovery

• Cost– Investment– Spending

• Customer Requirement– Can quality and cost satisfy the business needs?

ITIL Philosophy Six - Proactive

• Common feelings about work– I am too busy– Work is chasing me. I am stressed out– I don’t have time to do the meaningful

things. – Those issues are so bugging. They kept

coming back!

Breaking things down

• Reactive activities– Handle customer complains– Handle production outage– Last minute purchase– Deal with disasters

• Preventative activities– Create contingency plan– Setup knowledge database– Setup Production Monitors– Capacity Planning– Create Disaster Recovery Plan

First thing first

• The more you work on Preventative Activities, the less you need to work on Reactive Activities

• Take the control back! – Preventative activities are under your

control while Reactive Activities control you.

Some Proactive Activities Suggested by ITIL

• Problem Management: Study the trend of the incidents. Dig out and fix the fundamental problem.

• Configuration Management: Keep track of important things and their relationships

• Capacity Management: Project the workload. Plan the capacity ahead of time

• And a lot more….

What’s actually in ITIL?

• Goals/Benefits• Processes• Guidelines• Check lists• Critical Success Factors• Key Performance Indicators• Implementation tips

Service Lifecycle

• Design: Requirements

• Define: Service Level Agreement

• Delivery: Construct, Test, Release

• Support: Incident, Problem, Change

• Measure: Service Level Report

• Improve: Service Improvement Plan

Core ITIL Processes

Service Delivery

• Face the Customer. Satisfy Customer requirements

• Business driven• Strategic level processes• Forward-looking, planning, proactive

activities• Do the right things

Service Delivery Processes

• Service Level Management: Define a service catalog; Identify, negotiate, monitor and review service level agreements (SLAs)

• Financial Management: Review budgeting, charging and IT accounting; analysis of running costs and charging policies

• Availability Management: Review of reliability, availability, resilience, maintainability and serviceability; plan, monitor and report availability

Service Delivery Processes – Cont.

• Capacity Management: Review of application sizing, workload, performance, demand and resource management; Modeling; Define the Capacity Management Database and the Capacity Plan

• IT Service Continuity Management: Review the Business Continuity, risk analysis and risk management; define assets, threats, vulnerabilities; develop, test and maintain the IT Service Continuity Plan and IT recovery options

Put Into Context

Service Support

• Face the User. Response to user requests

• Event driven

• Operational level processes

• Reactive/Responsive activities

• Do things right

Service Support Processes

• Service Desk: Single point of contact between users and IT Service Management. Handle incidents and requests; Customer surveys

• Incident Management: Restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible when an incident happens; Minimize business impact and ensure the best possible of service quality;

• Problem Management: Resolve the root cause of incidents; Prevent recurrence of incidents related to errors within the IT infrastructure

Service Support Processes – Cont.

• Configuration Management: Track all the individual configuration items (CI) in a system including software, hardware, network and documents. Track their versions, status and relationships

• Change Management: Ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient handling of all Changes. Minimize the impact of change related incidents

• Release Management: Distribute software and hardware, including license controls across the entire IT infrastructure

Put into context

Benefits of ITIL to IT Department

How can ITIL help us?

• Big picture view

• Common language

• Clear definition of roles, goals, responsibilities and interfaces

• Measurable performance

• Guidelines/Checklist

Development

• Currently Involved Processes– All the processes in

Service Delivery and Service Support

• Benefits– Effective and efficient

delivery– Better understanding of our

responsibilities– Learn from best practices– Proactively task planning– Fair performance evaluation

based on all tasks– Better project planning– More efficient communication

with other teams

QA/RATE

• Currently Involved Processes– Change Management– Release Management– Capacity Management

• Benefits– Better understanding of

ALL the aspects of Quality

– Extend roles and responsibilities with more proactive participations in other Quality related processes

Release Management

• Currently Involved Processes– Change Management– Release Management

• Benefits– Better understanding of all

the aspects of Change and Release

– Leverage Best Practices to establish a more efficient release process

– Extend responsibilities in full cycle of Change Management and Release Management

Infrastructure

• Currently Involved Processes– Capacity Management– Availability Management– IT Service Continuity

Management– Configuration Management– Incident Management– Problem Management– Change Management– Release Management

• Benefits– Better understanding of

the big picture– Clearer understanding of

the tasks– More efficient interfaces

with other team– Leverage best practices

to provide better services

Support

• Currently Involved Processes– Incident Management– Problem Management– Configuration

Management

• Benefits– Establish an more efficient

incident management process based on the best practices

– Better understand the value of work

– Measurable performance– More efficient

communications with other teams

Implement ITIL

• Full of Challenges– A complete culture and organizational change:

change how people work and how work are organized

– Wide impact: internal and external – Extensive and complicate materials– Without current benchmarks, it’s hard to measure

ROI– Time consuming and resource intensive

Face the challenge

• Management commitment• Pick a ITIL Project owner• Focus on people: training and early involvement in

redefining the processes• Take baby steps. One process, then another• Don’t reinvent the wheel: build upon existing

processes• Produce quick-wins• Bring in experts• Tools: Cannot solely count on it, cannot live without

Critical Success Factors

Interesting! Now what?

• Read more about ITIL– Publication– Articles– Success Stories

• Get certified in ITIL• Apply the best practices to improve your

everyday work• Support department adoption of ITIL!