Companies look to reshape IT operations with ITIL

11.10.2005
Von Patrick Thibodeau

The rub on GuideStone Financial Resources" help desk could be summed up by what company employees called it: "the helpless desk." Not only was the moniker unflattering, it reflected lingering system problems that hurt employee productivity. With that in mind, the Guidestone IT department turned to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standard. A driving goal of ITIL is to reshape IT operations into a service model, with service levels and detailed processes spelled out for delivering and managing IT. Proponents say the standard can help cut IT costs and improve business alignment -- which may explain the interest in it among IT managers at the AFCOM data center conference in Chicago this week.

AFCOM is the Orange, Calif.-based user group that focuses on data center issues.

At GuideStone, tech support workers were retrained or replaced with systems analysts and employees who could probe application problems. Using workers with better skills boosted help desk payroll costs but led to increased responsiveness and a dramatic turnaround. Most IT problems are now resolved in seven minutes, said Dawn Sawyer, operations manager at Guidestone. In contrast, some problems once took longer than a day to get fixed, she said.

Sawyer began implementing ITIL processes across Guidestone"s IT organization four years ago and work is still under way. Although Sawyer said many of her peers haven"t adopted ITIL, she recommends that anyone considering it start with the help desk, given the "marketing payoff" it"s likely to have throughout a company.

ITIL was developed in the 1980s by a U.K. government agency, the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. The standard incorporates best practices across a spectrum of IT processes while detailing and documenting how to manage these processes.

Jim Marrs, data center manager at Austin Energy, said the Austin-based utility started implementing ITIL this year. He sees it as a framework for organizing service processes, "so IT is more focused as a service."

For IT staffers, that means documenting activities in more detail, as well as spelling out the steps and processes used to manage incidents and changes.

Getting IT workers to change their ways isn"t always easy, said Slater M. Butts, director of network services at Safeway Inc., in Salt Lake City, Utah. When it comes to standards, IT workers "don"t like to adhere to them... they just like to carry the banner."

Butts, however, sees value to the ITIL process, which his IT operation began gradually deploying four years ago. Having a framework "takes cost out of the process because you don"t have to re-engineer them" whenever you need to make an IT change.

Richard Davenport, a senior consultant at Fox IT, which helps companies implement ITIL, said it forces companies to think about IT as a service, set service levels, while ensuring that IT is aligned with the business. The processes can save money by setting best practices, he said.

For instance, if a service desk (which would be called a help desk in a non-ITIL shop), finds a number of small errors, ITIL processes will trigger a search for larger underlying issues through "a problem management process." The service desk looks for root causes and can become more proactive, recommending new services that add value to the business, said Davenport.

IT managers who attend AFCOM have always been interested in standards affecting areas such as cabling and data center design and layout. But there now seems to be growing interest in standards -- beyond just ITIL -- that can have a broad impact on IT and data center management.

For instance, Steve Hernandez, director of enterprise management and processing services at First Data Corp. in Omaha, is participating in the effort to push Data Center Markup Language (DCML). The DCML standard, now being developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), can be used by enterprise vendors to improve product interoperability. It allows various devices and management systems to talk to one another, improving management as well as the ability to document and configure a data center.

First Data has seven data centers, and while Hernandez said he doesn"t know how much using the standard could save him, he sees standardization as critical to improving IT efficiency and cutting costs.

"What I"m looking for as a user is for vendors to provide that [DCML standards compliance] as part of their product," said Hernandez, who hopes to see more users join the effort to convince enterprise vendors to adopt DCML.