Away with ITIL

Posted by Roel Gloudemans on 4 February 2008 | 3 Comments

Tags: ITIL, System Management, Support Organization

ITIL has become the de facto standard for system management in most large organizations and many small ones. ITIL has revolutionized system management . One of the strongest points of ITIL is the dictionary that comes with it. Now we can all understand each-other when talking about system and service management.

But has the quality of IT services really improved because of ITIL? I think not as much as it could have. In ITIL implementations, organization structures became a mirror of the ITIL processes. Organizations which previously had one monolithic systems management department, now have several departments or groups. One responsible for first line support, one for second line, one for service management etc. ITIL has inadvertently created new boundaries within the organizations implementing it. This is not a problem by definition, but all to often boundaries lead to "kingdoms".

Knowledge and experience becomes locked up between these boundaries and employees become fed up with their jobs (if you are a real technician, delivering first line support can be a true horror).

The solution? Quite simple; use ITIL as a representation to the outside world, but remove the boundaries internally. Create two groups, one the business side of systems/service management and one for the technical side and fine a balance of experienced staff and rookies within these groups. For large organizations create teams for each application/service domain within the groups. Make each team responsible for meeting the service levels for the services running in their domain. If possible, do not appoint a team lead, but let the teams find out for themselves and move members between teams on a regular (yearly?) basis, to promote standardization.

Each team must contain all the skills needed to manage the application/service domain, not only first to third level, but also from hardware to application, from tactical to strategical etc. In these multi-skilled teams of diverse experience, the learning curve for the inexperienced will be very steep, while the experienced may find a new challenge in coaching the inexperienced and enjoy the increased freedom. Competition between the teams (based on service levels met) must be encouraged. The only boundary condition; the outside interface is ITIL and it must be the same for all teams. (Knowledge about ITIL within the teams is essential)

I think, this will really improve the quality of services delivered. For instance the number of escalations, technical or management will go down drastically. If the teams do a proper job, the person to escalate to is already involved! At the same time, customers and team members will be more content and thus less likely to switch vendor or employer.