Happy Monday, everyone, and welcome back to another week doing ITIL in the real world. If you’re new to this blog, I write once (approximately) weekly (usually on or near Friday) about the joys & sorrows of implementing ITIL ‘out there’ in corporate America. Thanks for reading!

Something funny happened on the way to ITIL nirvana this week!

Before we hear about that, though, Real World ITIL would like to say “thanks” to Adam Beck, Jack Bischof and John [Visitor] for their thoughtful responses to last week’s post on Asset Management vs. Configuration Management. Guys: please check the thread for my response to your comments. It’s great that we’re having an intelligent and informed discussion.

I’m a bit late with the blog entry this week because we had to focus on a major deliverable for the ITAM implementation project that we’ve been blogging about. Our draft design document, which the team finished this week, comprised nearly 200 pages of fairly detailed process and technology specifications. It was accompanied by a 3′ x 4′ wall chart of the ITAM IMAC process and a project plan covering the next 10 months’ worth of work. It was a major piece of work and a true team effort - way to go, folks!

The team is now reviewing its work prior to releasing it to any other consituents. As you can imagine, the document will be a key tool in gaining sign-off from all the many departments that are going to be affected by the proposed changes to workflow and supporting tools. We’ll see what happens!

Anyway, sometime during this very busy week, while everyone was focused on finalizing the design, a photocopy of an old Meta Group opinion paper ‘magically’ appeared on the chair of an influential manager while he was away from his desk. This particular manager is one of the leaders of this company’s early ITIL implementation efforts. The May 2002 article, by Wissam Raffoul, was entitled, “ITIL Does Not Reduce Cost”. No one knows who put it on the manager’s chair.

The abstract of the article confidently states, “IT organizations implementing ITIL to reduce cost should not expect considerable savings because the prime potential of ITIL is to improve service quality and elevate performance consistency of the IT organization”. (Source: #31434 © 2002 Meta Group, Inc.).

You’ll have to purchase the article to learn the details, but suffice to say that there is nothing surprising in it (statistically speaking) other than a bunch of predictions that seem questionable from the real world perspective of June 2005.

If you feel differently after reading it, though, I’d like to hear from you - just click the Comment link below.

But the funny thing is that someone living in this company’s everyday IT world should react strongly enough to the title as to leave it on the manager’s chair without raising the question in a setting where it can be discussed. Certainly, there is scant enough analytical information in the opinion paper to adequately support its title and the author’s points are easily refuted. In fact, most of the rest of the paper has nothing whatever to do with cost-justifying ITIL implementations.

So who knows what really motivated some anonymous someone to spend their work time searching Meta’s database for such a thing and then going to the effort to time the delivery so as to remain anonymous?

Is it a sign of personal resistance to changing the cultural status quo? Is it rather a covert caution to management against taking the advice of consultants who preach ITIL? Is someone only trying to present all sides of an argument, perhaps? Or is it really just the opinion of someone who isn’t fully informed about what ITIL can do?

Let’s for a moment recall some basic real world facts:

Anyone who works in the for-profit world knows that any significant project requires a business justification expressed in for-profit terms. ITIL can be implemented in a cost-effective way. It can also unquestionably be implemented in a way that wastes corporate resources. Is this really surprising? After all, the challenge of defining ROIC is one of the major reasons why many organizations have a difficult time determining where to start with ITIL in the first place.

But perhaps the important thing to realize in this case, though, is that there is a subsurface debate happening in this company about the value of implementing ITIL. At the very least, this is a small real-world example of why ITIL project leaders must never underestimate the amount of human change leadership that will be involved in any ITIL effort - no matter how small. Resistance to change will appear in both overt and covert forms and should be dealt with on a continuous basis.

Moral of the story: if you’re leading ITIL in the real world, it’s never too early (or too often!) to begin communicating these few basic things to everyone involved at all levels whenever a ‘teachable moment’ arises:

• what ITIL is and
• what ITIL isn’t
• why ITIL is worth doing (in business terms)
• why learning more about ITIL is a Good Thing
• why people shouldn’t be afraid of it, and
• always invite them raise their questions and concerns in an open forum where we can communicate these things to them all over again

Now, let’s get going and lead our people! There’s lots more ITIL to get done this week.

Have fun out there,
Scott (moderator)

—–