Published: January 08 2009, 12:33 PM
by Robert Stroud

I was in the heartland of the U.S. last week, well Chicago actually, visiting with organizations that are leveraging ITIL®.  The interesting question of the week that was asked 4 times in 2 days is: "Why doesn't ITIL come with a set of sample implementable processes?"  Isn't an incident at a manufacturer solved in a similar manner at a financial company?  Armed with the question, I asked some ITIL customers this week to describe their incident resolution processes.  Guess what?  They were in fact very similar though their organizations were in totally different verticals.    

ITIL is 20 years young and, although it is a framework, I agree that some more prescription is precisely what is required.  I have expected it with the ITIL complimentary library that has taken some time to surface.  At CA, we acknowledge that you are looking for prescription and we have added content to our offerings such as Service Catalog and Service Desk Manager with the objective of getting your implementations generating rapid time to value. 

We need to go beyond simply automating ITIL processes.  Don't get me wrong, that is important.  But the consumers of our IT-enabled business services are looking to, well, consume services to do their job.  What we need to automate is services.  I believe this is the next frontier.  We need to deliver industry standard business services such as ordering devices (i.e. a Blackberry, mobile phone, laptop), and on-boarding an employee--out of the box.  If you think about it, these services don't vary much by industry.  Standardizing and automating them would be the start of IT understanding the end-to-end business service delivered that allows us to attach, measure and monitor service levels that matter to the business.  What is the value to IT?  The closer we get to the business, the more value we can add and the better the perception of IT...the more budget we get, the more value we can add...