Welcome back to another episode of Real World ITIL. This week’s story requires audience participation - so read on and we hope you’ll play along.

Speaking of audience participation, let’s take a moment to express appreciation to John Worthington for his insightful response to last week’s article on ‘What Happens When ITIL is Deemed too Risky?’. His comments are well worth considering if you’re beginning any IT project. Check out that entry for my response, John.

Now on to this week’s story:

It’s Columbus Day in the U.S. today - a day to remember Christopher Columbus’s westward voyage across the Atlantic to discover the ‘new world’ (which, of course, to the folks who were already living on the island of Hispaniola when CC arrived was the same old world they always had known). I had the good fortune to visit Hispaniola recently and it’s a very interesting place.

This is one of those odd Federal holidays on which day most federal, state and local government offices (and some schools) close but not much else does. Some companies seem to celebrate it by offering employees the opportunity to take a ‘floating holiday’ but this is the first Columbus Day I’ve ever officially had off in my whole career. That’s okay, though - leaves more time for blogging about ITIL, no?

Speaking of that, our adventures in ITIL last week took us eastward across the Atlantic from New York City to the original home of ITIL itself - the jolly old United Kingdom. The mission was to present ITIL concepts to a group of veteran IT leaders in support of an organizational transformation effort their company is working on. It was a great experience being with them.

While there, I had thought it might be appropriate to make some sort of ritual obeisance on the sidewalk in front of the Office of Government Commerce, celebrated as ITIL’s birthplace. (Or, short of performing a ritual, at least have my picture taken in front of the office’s sign.) Alas, OGC’s office seems to be in Norwich (England) which is some distance from where I was in London and time didn’t permit a field trip. Anyway, I’m sure the local police appreciated not having to chase away yet another devoted fan of ITIL :-).

As part of the seminar, however, an interesting question arose: What are the dozen or so key questions we have to answer now that will ultimately define our future state in ITIL? Put differently, what are the Ten Golden Rules that our teams should build to?

This is another one of those questions that’s simple to understand but complex to answer. In its simplest sense the ITIL framework is the definition of our desired future state, after all. Either our overall service delivery processes (or the subset of ITIL we’ve chosen) are well defined, holistic and integrated or they’re not, right? So what’s to decide?

Well, those of us who have implemented ITIL know that once we get past the obvious questions about ITIL, the real world gets a bit more complex. Here is a sample of some of the questions we bandied about this week:

• Should there be only one entry point into IT for incidents and other requests or multiple points-of-entry depending on type of request?
• What process should be implemented to govern requests for IT services that are neither incidents nor ordinary service requests (e.g., a request for a new major project). Also, how much latitude do our IT managers really have to deny a request for a service that is not defined in our Service Catalog?
• Should root cause resolution be pursued for all problems or only the ones that had the highest negative impact?
• Should dedicated teams be organized around Problem Management, Service Level Management, Change Management, etc. or should there instead be ‘virtual’ teams defined from the existing hierarchy?
• If we’re a global corporation, should there be only one Definitive Software Library at a single location to hold all master media, licenses, etc. or should it be distributed?
• Given that a completing an actual physical inventory of IT assets is unfeasible and that automated tools can only discover a portion of our assets, how much inaccuracy can we stand in our CMDB and still have it be of value?
• How do we define ‘overprovisioning’ and ‘underprovisioning’ with respect to Capacity Management? Should we for instance establish a policy such as ‘we will manage infrastructure capacity to within +/- 10% of actual client demand for service?’
• What are the three most essential governance metrics that our processes should generate for management purposes?
• How much influence should the Financial Management team have over the control of other service delivery processes? How much effort should we put into developing a cost transparency model for our processes?

Now it’s time for the audience participation part:

What decisions would be most essential for your IT executives to answer at the beginning of your ITIL effort? Try to focus on which few questions would be most influential in determining how your ITIL-powered organization will function in the future. Please share your suggestions by clicking on the Comment link below.

In developing your questions, assume that the reasons for implementing ITIL are already well defined and that management supports the effort fully. Also assume that all of the basic questions have been answered, such as which ITIL processes will be implemented and in what order.

So, which 10 or 12 key architectural decisions, if made now, will most influence your infrastructure organization’s future state? We hope to hear a question or two from many of our readers. We look forward to your responses.

Until then, in the spirit of Al Almirante Cristóvão Colombo, may your voyage of discovery in ITIL soon lead to a new world of improved processes!

Thanks for reading & see you back here next week.

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

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