ITIL exposed

When someone in your organisation mentions your Information Technology (IT) department, is there a chorus of grunts and cynical laughter? Is your IT department failing to meet its customers’ expectations? As an IT manager, would you even know? More likely than not, these people are right to laugh at you! You remember who your customers are don't you? Remember, the people that you are serving? No? Is your IT infrastructure supporting the business, or is it the other way round? Are you running out of people to blame for the disaster that you continue to refer to as “IT Management”?

So what are your options? Maybe you could fire a few people and make it look like you’re still in control. Maybe you could hire a few more people to help flog the dead horse. Or perhaps you could issue a few more lengthy procedures to bury people in red tape and buy yourself some more time before you retire.

But wait, there’s something else, there’s still time to build your nest egg. You’ve heard it in the upper reaches of the grapevine, every “Leader” in the IT industry is talking about it. Now pay attention here. NO, it’s not about listening to valuable feedback from your internal staff. NO, you’re not going to utilise the wealth of experience and expertise of your own staff. Be reasonable! You’re going to look outside your organisation, for a set of documentation that provides a general guide for things that you may or may not want to implement, that may or may not benefit your IT service. To achieve this, you are going to pay an external consultant lots of money to develop a high level plan that will be implemented only after your budget has run dry and your company is ready to go belly up. Brilliant!

Sound ridiculous? Welcome to ITIL, one of the many buzz words in the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) arena at the moment. Actually, I guess it’s more of a buzz acronym, and when it comes to IT departments, learning and using a wider set of acronyms is of course fundamental in providing better customer service. Right?

So assuming that as an IT manager you’re on top of things, you have a well developed SCM that is assisting your SLM, enabling you to ensure your customers SLR’s are being formulated into appropriate SLAs once your OLAs, UCs and CI’s have been organised. Ah yes, ITIL speak clears everything up.

For those of you that are not “enlightened”, ITIL stands for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It’s basically a collection of “adopted” good practises that have been published so that it can be sold off to gullible IT Service Managers. As I hinted above, many ITIL presenters are advocating that the “language” is the first thing you need to develop. It’s not enough that you examine known concepts in plain English (I’ll reveal why a little bit later), you need to learn the “real” meaning of the English language. Consider the word “event”. Typically this could be described as “something that happens”. Whoa there, meaningful language can be a dangerous place to venture. A standard definition is naturally way too simplistic. ITIL redefines event as “a change of state which has significance to a CI.” Sounds great doesn’t it? Hmm, so what is a CI I hear you ask? A Configuration Item, as if you didn’t know! Meaning? “An asset, service component or item which is under the control of SACM”. OH! That clears that right up, NOT. So what is SACM? “Service Asset & Configuration Management”. Well that’s just great, now I understand the meaning of an “event”! We could go on forever, but we won’t. So where were we… oh yeah… an “event” in ITIL terms, is just something that happens to a entity or object in the IT group. So why couldn’t they just keep it simple?

Well, the answer is pretty obvious. You start a business that specialises in delivering course material that also involves a certification process. Now the concepts on their own, are quite logical and straight forward. In fact, the concepts are so obvious, that even your average Joe off the street is going to be able to walk into and pass your certification exam, without BUYING any course materials, documentation, or even sitting a course. Now that would make no business sense. So, if we redefine a few English words, add a few new acronyms, throw in some jargon and bam, you’ve got yourself a money spinner.

But it’s not quite that simple. When you “borrow” best, or good practises from organisations around the world, there is a little word called “plagiarism” which also needs to be addressed. This mandates that ITIL needs to be seen to stand alone to some extent. So in order to make the material more marketable, it needed to redefine the language and definitions used in many of the practises to which it refers. What you have left is a rehash of known concepts in a language which is needlessly ambiguous.

There’s one more issue facing the creators of ITIL. Let us not forget the need to maintain sales targets, which often means a focus on not only new, but also repeat customers. It’s the classic Microsoft strategy. You produce a package which is released to the market with much fanfare, but with many flaws in the product. These flaws are “discovered” by your customers. You fix these issues, then offer a “new version”, just as existing sales begin to wane. ITIL is now in it’s 3rd version.

ITIL is a shining beacon for desperate managers who are looking for any means to advocate that their department’s failure to date has merely been a failure to observe a number of good service practises, just because they weren’t formalised or published in a procedural document some where. The sheer ignorance of their view is highlighted by the fact that it is rarely a lack of understanding of good practise that drives this failure, rather it’s quite simply an unwillingness to adopt the good practise. Never mind the fact that good leadership has been absent during the debacle that resulted in failure. Let’s also totally ignore the fact that experienced support staff already have a solid understanding of service strategy, but are bound by the misguided direction, or lack of any direction, from the very leaders that are advocating improvement.

So doesn’t it seem a little bit dubious, to be complicating descriptive words and pushing generic processes in order to get a bunch of IT staff to grasp what are essentially simple service concepts. More importantly, does the IT world really need a methodology that serves to add even more complex processes, jargon and acronyms to a field that is supposed to be interested in becoming more aligned with the businesses they support. Since when do different groups in an organisation perform better when they speak totally different languages to the business units they are serving? If your answer is NEVER, then maybe there is still some hope.

Still not convinced about ITIL’s lack of value? How about we consider their 7 R’s of change management as an example. Raised, Reason, Return, Risks, Resources, Responsible, Relationship. Can you honestly look at these words and say “Yes, that’s where we’re going wrong with our existing change management processes”. I won’t bother going into an explanation of the words, but you have to question this type of representation. Choosing terms, just to maintain a flow of “R’s” might initially seem like a neat little play on words, but any entry level teacher is going to tell you that the words must have an obvious contextual relationship. I still remember the 4 P’s of marketing from my high school days, not because they were bored into my brain, but because they were meaningful terms in the subject matter that was being presented (by the way, they were Product Price, Place & Promotion). You didn’t need an explanation of the 4 P’s because they were quite simply that obvious. The same often can’t be said of ITIL terminology. Of course ITIL couldn’t resist having a go at their own version of the 4 P’s, People, Process, Products, Partners. How clever.

Now before any ITIL lovers jump up and down in a tear-filled tantrum, let me throw you a bone. No one is saying that ITIL fails to present policies that could benefit an IT department or business. An IT group that implements sound strategy, design, transition and operation policies will obviously be in a better position to make a positive contribution to the organisation it serves. That ITIL would have the cheek to claim these ideas as their own, then charge exorbitant rates for it is entrepreneurial to say the most. That a leader would voluntarily pay an external consultant to present freely available information that is probably already known and understood by their own staff is just a sad reflection on the lack of trust and perceived value of their own team.

So before you make a desperate grab for the latest buzz word, take an inward look at yourself and your IT department. Ask yourself if the answers to your problems aren’t already staring you in the face, or falling upon your deaf ears.