I was recently in Belgium where I presented on ITIL® Version 3 to a packed house of ITSM professionals. Standing room only, in fact. I’d like to tell you that this was all my doing, but, to be truthful, ITIL V3 has been pulling in the crowds all by itself.
As in London, I was again struck by the overwhelming acceptance of ITIL Version 3. And just a mere week after the launch.
I posted to this blog previously that I thought the acceptance was due to IT professionals already being asked by their organizations to talk of IT services in business terms. I’d like to refine that thought a bit. I think the acceptance is, in part, due to the fact that some IT organizations are “already doing it.” That is, they are managing IT services while ensuring that business needs—and communication to the business—are priorities.
ITIL has been widely accepted in Europe for some time. Therefore, many European implementations are quite mature and the discussions in Belgium reflected that. Many of these companies are “already doing it” through service portfolios that give IT a holistic view of the total demand on IT from many sources including the business, the infrastructure, changes, incidents, regulations and more. The service portfolio allows IT to control that which was previously uncontrollable.
Some forward-thinking companies are also doing “it” through service catalogs. In V3, the service catalog was added as a base process and it serves as the vehicle through which services are communicated to the business.
A smaller number of companies have even leveraged the service portfolio in conjunction with the service catalog, as advocated in ITIL V3. While the service portfolio manages all services, only those services that are offered to, and consumed by, customers constitute the service catalog. The advantage of this approach is that business users are insulated from IT considerations and can utilize meaningful metrics to choose among services offered through the service catalog.
For example, a business user choosing an email service through the service catalog may be presented with multiple options, each associated with a cost, a storage limitation and a guaranteed availability (i.e. 24x7 vs. Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. – 6 p.m.). Meanwhile, the service portfolio tracks all email services offered, including data irrelevant to the end user, such as network dependencies.
The fact that some organizations are “already doing it” affirms that the new ITIL V3 guidance supports, and advances, current industry best practice—and proves that Version 3 is grounded in reality.
Are you “already doing it?”
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