Well, so much great ITIL stuff has happened this week that it?s difficult to decide what to write about this time on Real World ITIL. So, welcome back and I hope y’all don’t mind if I think out loud for a bit:

First, I recommend that you read Scott Braden’s great ITAM blog entry from last week in which he tells a story about how metrics are useless unless management actually uses them. I’d like to see a discussion happen on that topic in his blog. We’re likely to encounter that very issue about a year from now on the ongoing project I’ve been writing about, so I’m going to learn as much as possible from his experience. Won’t you add your ‘war stories’ to his blog, too?

After all, as a global community, we ITIL implementers are going to face a hard road ahead if we can’t get corporate management to witness the value of process improvements through objective, numerical measures. Doesn’t it seem likely that the processes that we’ve put so much effort into re-engineering would otherwise backslide into an uncontrolled mess if no one monitors their performance? What are your thoughts on this topic? Click on the Comment link, below, to join the discussion.

You may also want to check out Jack Bischoff’s thought provoking response to last week’s Real World ITIL entry on design documents. Thanks, Jack - I’ll respond soon. In the meantime, though, can anyone else out there comment on his questions about ITIL implementations in Europe and Asia? We’d love to read your thoughts on that.

Or, maybe I should write something about ITIL Service Catalogs. The topic has come up four times in four different contexts recently, so it seems to be a hot issue right now. Considering that it’s one of the easier ITIL concepts to implement and considering how beneficial a catalog can be, it’s amazing how few companies I’ve heard of that have actually created one.

Without an accurate catalog, how can IT management accurately determine what set of services their customers actually want and will pay for? Furthermore, I’ve even seen instances in which corporate departments have purchased IT services from external service providers because they didn’t know that their internal IT would provide the same services for free. Also, without a catalog, it’s hard to know if your IT department is providing services that it really shouldn’t be.

The catalog issue seems to have been more prominent at some of the larger companies I?ve visited than the smaller. This is unfortunate because the IT cost transparency issues in large shops can be pretty daunting, and a catalog can help increase transparency.

Or, perhaps I should instead return to the subject of whether ITIL can reduce cost. We had an interesting field trip to NYC this week to visit a large international company which is trying to gain some cost efficiency in their IT department. Sound like a familiar situation to you?

In essence, they wanted to know whether implementing ITIL is a good way to reduce IT infrastructure headcount by ~17% over the next two-years. Their thoughts were something akin to, “if we improve the productivity of our service delivery processes, can’t we provide better service while using fewer human resources?”

Interesting question, yes? You might want to re-read Navneet Jain’s response to our blog last week on this topic. How would you respond? To summarize, our response was that, since ITIL takes so long to implement, that implementing ITIL itself isn’t the direct answer for short-term solutions. Nonetheless, we thought that ITIL would still indirectly provide a useful thought model for analyzing and assessing less comprehensive process improvements that could lead to the desired result. We’re going to provide them with an ITIL overview to help jumpstart their thinking in this regard.

Anyway, maybe by the time that blog-time comes around again next week, I’ll have decided what to write about. Thanks for reading along and have a great week until then!

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

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