I ran into a former colleague at the itSMF Australian conference and he shared with me the challenges that his "ITIL" program was having. There were complaints that it was taking too long to promote change to production, that there was too much paperwork (electronic of course) and the fact that "problems" were associated with servers rather than business services were causing major concerns.

Recently he had discovered that the implementation of virtualization had led to developers having access to production systems and they were avoiding operations totally. The first that Operations knew was when there was a major failure and the problem team identified all the components involved.

 ITIL was designed to put effective process in place, and the interesting challenge is that some practitioners are focused on the process and not the objective - that the business service being efficient, effective and delivering customer delight.

At the itSMF event I spoke on "Efficient, effective and 'just enough' Service Management to deliver business value!"  This speech has been given globally and is designed with the purpose of ensuring that the Service Management program of work is not "process for process sake."  Rather implementation of Service Management is about reducing the cost, decreasing the time and increasing the satisfaction of the business in delivering IT enabled business services. To do so, the ITSM program of work must be:

• An ordered and finite project with a defined beginning and end
• Returning more resources than it consumes to fuel the execution
• Sustainable with the processes staying in place after the completion of the program of work!
• Deliver factual reporting and attestation to support and drives data driven decisions!

But what about those great metrics that you are currently reporting, server performance, storage capacity and so, those "IT" metrics that are not about business value, throw them away! It's time to deliver metrics to the business that drive value and are about the business and in business terms!

Often I use the example of driving my car. It delivers many metrics, but what is important is that I get to my destination at the appropriate time, driving the most effective route and the cost are within the realm of expectation. Metrics, such as my tire pressure, oil temperature and so on, are important to ensuring the car is operating effectively and if one of them is going to impact my journey, then it will inform me if I should turn the engine off and call a taxi.

In short, ITIL, ITSM, MOF are good tools, but when you are more focused on the framework than the business, you are lost and its time to get out the compass and reset!