Using ITIL effectively

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2011-10-17 22:21
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[Updated 18/10/2011] Yesterday I blogged about a request from a reader for advice on service catalogue. It must be a week for it because another reader asked about using ITIL (or ITSM in general) effectively.

So here is first cut of "ITSM in a nutshell":

  • Start with business outcomes required or desired of IT
  • Work out the IT deliverables to achieve those outcomes (COBIT has some good mappings for this)
  • Select areas for improvement in order to achieve those deliverables:
    • "incident management" is much too big and vague. Improve what? Incident tracking? Incident handling? Comms to users? Known error and workaround search? etc
    • Don't chunk it by process: bit of incident and a little problem and a pinch of CRM... ITIL "processes" are a useful conceptual way of grouping ideas. They have nothing to do with the order or structure in which we should look at improvements in reality
  • [Added:] Any improvement is about changing people, i.e. culture: attitudes and behaviour. Changing the technology or the processes on their own does nothing.

This is the essence of my Tipu method.

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