Welcome back! It’s that time of week again, when we blog about the everyday experiences of everyday IT folks who are working to implement ITIL principles in their particular chunk of corporate America. As usual, I’ll start off this week with some administrative remarks and then we’ll see how our continuing story unfolds from there.

First, please note that this blog (along with all of the others on this website) is now available for distribution through your RSS newsreader. I’m not sure if RSS will also send along any of the comments on top-level articles (in addition to the articles themselves, that is) but I’ll let y’all know what I find out. RSS subscription instructions appear in the right-hand column of this page.

Next, I’ve been receiving a lot of great feedback from several readers recently (both online and offline), which we really appreciate. The following thoughts are partially in response to some of that feedback. So, thanks to all of you for reading our humble story and keep those comments coming!

In particular, check out Dr. ITIL’s response to our article from last week. Dr. ITIL cites an excellent beginner’s guide to ITIL that may interest some of our readers - Thanks, Dr. ITIL! (also check out their daily blog at http://www.dritil.blogspot.com )

If you’re just joining us, this blog intends to portray a slice of what life is like when you’re actually doing ITIL in the real world so you have some idea what to expect when your organization decides to do any of this stuff. I’ve noticed through experience that ITIL projects tend to hit IT workers at a pretty personal level in their professional lives, so that’s where our story’s focus will be: relating actual events in the lives of ordinary IT folks who are on the path to ITIL nirvana.

Because of this focus, I won’t be addressing much in the way of analytical or research-based pieces about ITIL philosophy or strategy except as those topics relate directly to the ongoing everyday experiences of the project teams I work with at several different companies. Considering that this is written on my ’spare time’ each week, there isn’t enough time available to write pieces like that, anyway, though I would enjoy doing so.

Nonetheless, I invite any reader who can add analytical perspective to do so by clicking on the Comment link, below. That way, we can build together a broader base of experience for our readers to draw upon.

So what do I mean when I say that ITIL can hit IT workers at a personal level in their professional lives? Consider this example that we recently encountered:

One of the companies we’re helping is beginning their enterprise CMDB implementation by consolidating 39 different ‘lists’ (or databases) of hardware assets down into a single list to be maintained through a software tool. In order to characterize the current state of data formats and workflows associated with each list, we had to interview each list’s owner.

Among the list of interviewees was the leader of a network hardware management group. When we told him about our project, his response was something like, “I’ll tell you everything you want to know about our process. I’ll provide you with all of my hardware data, too. I’ll even help you implement the infrastructure that you’ll need to run your software tool. But I’m not going to use your enterprise solution - I like my team’s departmental solution just fine.”

What was this guy thinking? Is he wrong to refuse the enterprise solution? He should remember that full cooperation is his employer rightful expectation - shouldn’t he just support the new corporate direction? After all, if the team he leads doesn’t use the enterprise solution, the official ‘book-of-record’ for hardware assets that the company is trying to build will never be truly accurate. This is not a good way for a CMDB implementation to start off. If you were in management, how would you respond?

Well, management might draw the conclusion that this IT worker is not acting in the company’s best interests. They might label this person as ‘not a team player who is out-of-sync with the company’s stated ITIL direction’. They could put a lot of energy into coercive measures of different sorts. But would management really be addressing the issue at hand?

On a personal level, the network team leader has a daily problem: how to keep IT production going through effective network management. From his perspective, if he doesn’t do his job well he’ll get in trouble with his employer. That’s a clear personal motivation.

So, in order to avoid getting in trouble, he and his team developed a departmental solution that works just fine for them. The success of his departmental solution depends in part on having complete control over his own hardware asset data. This means that he is unwilling to give up control (even partially) to some enterprise-level ITIL Configuration Management team, of which he will only be a peripheral part. Naturally, therefore, he’s got strong negative feelings about how a CMDB project will impact him.

Improving network processes through effective hardware asset management is clearly important to both parties involved. From the network team leader’s perspective, he is acting both in his personal best interest and ALSO the company’s interest (even if it doesn’t seem so from management’s perspective) by refusing to cooperate. It’s just that management and the team leader have differing views on the matter, which are rooted in differing sets of priorities.

The lesson for me was that, when implementing ITIL, we shouldn’t forget the obvious: in this multi-billion dollar organization we’re discussing, IT has been ‘getting done’ every day of every week of every year for the past 40+ years. This company (including the recalcitrant network guy) certainly knows how to ‘do IT’, doesn’t it? After all, they’ve been getting the job done for all these years before ITIL even existed.

In the end, IT process improvements are usually about people. All of us in IT have a job to get done everyday. If we’re ‘doing ITIL’, then that just means that we collectively have to learn new ways of connecting with our coworkers compared to whatever we’ve been doing in the past.

Therefore, no matter which core process we may happen to be implementing, ITIL transformations will always have impacts and side-effects at both the corporate and personal levels. Real World ITIL will continue to tell the story from that perspective as it happens. Thanks again for reading & see you here next week!

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

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