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
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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
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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
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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
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Parking
Reception desk
Waiter/Waitress
Take order
Food delivery
Food
Feedback
Billing
Farewell
Question:
How to improve the
quality of our IT
Services? How can
you contribute?
The quality of the dinning service is based on the
quality of ALL the services above!
Continuously Improve Service Quality
Where are we now?
Current process & procedures
Current challenges & problems
Where do we want
to be?
What are the priorities?
How do we bridge the gap?
How do we get where
we want to be?
Informed planning
Experienced execution
Are we improving?
Did we get to where we
wanted to be?
Strict control
Status communication
How do we keep the
momentum going
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?
Goal
Are we in the
right
direction?
Start Point
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
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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?
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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
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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?
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Goals/Benefits
Processes
Guidelines
Check lists
Critical Success Factors
Key Performance Indicators
Implementation tips
Service Lifecycle
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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!