A survey conducted by research firm Gartner at its 2004 Data Center Conference indicated that adoption of ITIL has grown significantly. Respondents who said they have applied ITIL in their enterprises have risen from 31 percent in 2003 to 41 percent in 2004.
The number is expected to rise further, according to Forester Research, who stated that the adoption of ITIL best practices by IT departments among billion-dollar companies will continue to increase from 13 percent in 2004 to around 40 percent in 2006, with adoption tipped to reach 80 percent by 2008.
First developed in the late 1980s by the UK government, ITIL is a set of books that documented the best practices for the IT departments within the government. The best practice guideline was soon adopted by private sectors in the UK and Europe. Only in recent years has it made its way to the US and Asia.
Drivers for ITIL
One motivator is regulatory: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But more importantly, especially among local enterprises, IT shops are turning to ITIL to reduce the cost of providing IT services, said Terry Ng, technology service manager of BMC Software.
Ng said most IT executives are forced to tighten their budget, but not being able to track the shop's IT assets, they have limited options in cost-trimming. By following ITIL's best practice, enterprises will have better visibility of its IT asset and prioritize them according to business impact, as well as providing consistent service quality.
"A stable and quality IT service is also useful for building the IT shop's creditability within the enterprise," said Ng.
As critical business services and operation increasingly rely on IT, the quality of IT services is essential to the customer's experience, said Dominic Schiavello, marketing director of Business Service Optimization (BSO) of CA Asia Pacific Japan.
"As links between business operations and IT get closer," said Schiavello, "there is a direct impact to business performance and revenue from IT service quality."
Upholding quality IT services can also help enterprises to maintain their competitiveness in the market, added CA's Asia North consulting manager Raymond Yu, formerly head of IT at insurance company BUPA.
"While most insurance companies on average take three months to process claims for clinics, because of its effective IT service, BUPA takes only two weeks to complete the process," said Yu, also the vice chairman of Hong Kong chapter of IT Service Management Forum (itSMF). "This brings a distinguished advantage to BUPA in the competitive insurance market."
Local IT service company Jardine OneSolution (JOS) began studying the quality of IT services in 2000. Bessie Mok, head of JOS managed services, said since the company changed its business focus from office equipment provisioning to IT services, managing IT services has always been on the company's priority list.
"To strengthen our position in the IT service market, we hired consultants to look into our service delivery processes last year," said Mok. "They suggested ITIL and since then, we have been training staff and adopting ITIL best practices in our operation."
Making the first step
Covering a wide range of IT practice areas, ITIL could be a long continuous journey for CIOs, especially when they don't know where to start.
At JOS, the company started with hiring a consultant, which Mok said has brought an easier way for them to locate the starting point. But for many local IT executives, not knowing how to approach and where to start has been the major challenge and barrier to adopting ITIL.
Nevertheless, Gartner noted that experienced ITIL consultants are few and expensive. The firm estimated that, in 2004, there were fewer than 200 ITIL-certified and practicing consultants with more than three years' experience in ITIL implementation...globally.
The research firm suggested a selective and focused use of consultants, instead of hiring a large number of inexperienced consultants.
"ITIL consultants should be used strategically and sparingly," suggested Gartner. "And not as ITIL implementation project managers."
"For many organizations, pursuing an ITIL framework can seem like climbing Mount Everest," said Michael Marks, CA's vice president of alliances and market development. "CIOs shouldn't let the magnitude of a full-scale ITIL stop them in their tracks. Instead, they should target a limited set of readily achievable objectives."
He suggested one of these objectives could be optimizing the end-user experience, which can be achieved through focusing on the first book in ITIL: service support. HP Suen, chairman of itSMF's Hong Kong Chapter, agreed that service support is a popular starting point among local enterprises.
"The two major areas that most Hong Kong companies look at in ITIL is service support and service delivery, since these are the areas that each IT shop will have to deal with on a daily basis," he said. "These are also areas that show the most obvious changes and improvement to the business users."
This is where JOS made its first steps. Mok said that the service desk is the first point of contact with its customers, thus making improvements in this area will produce the most prominent and encouraging result. The service desk is also the major point of contact for collecting information and feedback to make continuous improvement, she added.
Getting the tools right
Apart from identifying a starting point, many CIOs also find it intimidating to make the first step in applying ITIL. Many find it too conceptual "as it doesn't offer guidance on how to actually apply the best practice," said BMC's Ng.
For example, ITIL suggests that best practice for service support involves clear visibility of the users' IT assets, like the OS version, accessible applications, related security measures and applied patches. But the library does not spell out how to achieve this. This means that having the right tools and applications is important.
By applying BMC's Remedy call center management application, which is ITIL-compliant, JOS was able to conform to ITIL's service support best practices. Mok explained the application acted like a tool to guide the company's service desk in capturing data, logging incidences and tracking problems, which are all suggested within ITIL.
After applying ITIL for about a year, Mok said JOS has significantly improved its customer satisfaction. The company has also created key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure its service level. One of them is measuring the average speed of answer (ASA): the time taken to pick up a customer's call (JOS clocks in at an impressive seven seconds, said Mok).
Database configuration
In addition to a quick response, a quality reply is equally important for service support. Developing a configuration management database (CMDB), which was suggested by ITIL, plays a big part, noted Ng.
A CMDB is a database that contains all relevant information about the components of the applications used in an organization and the relationships between them. It is a map of every piece of technology a company owns: systems, routers, servers, PCs and so on. CMDB also reflects every change made to each asset and its implication to other related IT assets, as well as business services.
"The CMDB is the core of ITIL," says Christine Rose, director of global IT at Finisar, a computer hardware manufacturer that adopted ITIL in 2002. "It allows you to track your assets and gives you a running history of everything that you have done."
"But, how to build a CMDB? What should it cover?," queried Ng. "How to maintain it to ensure it's up-to-date with the ever changing business environment? These are all questions for many local CIOs."
It is not only challenging to collect and compile all the information within a CMDB, it is an upfront technical challenge to integrate the information for managing changes and tracking root problems.
This is where vendors play a major role. Recently, vendors providing IT service management software-including BMC, CA, HP and IBM-have made CMDB applications available in Hong Kong. Offering varies among vendors, but when making a purchase decision, Schiavello suggested evaluating the application's flexibility and comprehensiveness.
Getting people prepared
Despite having a significant improvement, Mok said the process of complying with ITIL is challenging. With a large number of staff, arranging them for training and developing new processes, as well as training business users to comply with the new processes, is a corporate-wide initiative.
"It is more like developing a new corporate culture," she said, "instead of an initiative to comply with best practice frameworks."
Suen from itSMF agreed that ITIL adoption involves changes to IT operation processes, changes which some IT staff may be reluctant to follow.
"Making changes sometimes means a delay [to complete a project] and longer working hours," he said. "It's important that IT managers encourage its staff to appreciate the idea of new IT processes."
Training important
Providing training is a good way to get IT staff prepared for change. "Training is definitely useful," said Suen. "It's not only easier for management to introduce change, but also useful for the individual's career development."
He added that the ITIL training business is booming in Hong Kong. Providers ranging from IT vendors to other technology training institutions are offering foundation and management level courses as well as online assessments for certification.
Suen, who is also manager of IT operations at HKJC, said training has significantly enhanced communication and speeded up operations within the IT shop.
"By having the same definition on certain incidences [using] a dedicated procedure," he said, "communication is much easier and more effective. We no longer need to discuss what processes are involved."
Nevertheless, some companies use financial incentive programs to foster the change. In the US, Nationwide Insurance incorporated adherence-to-process objectives into its compensation and bonus plans for employees.
"You don't want to have to browbeat people into compliance, but building process compliance into personal performance objectives does improve the focus," said Doug LeMaster, director of IT program management at Nationwide. "As an organization moving from systems management to service management, we've changed our focus from service availability to understanding customer impact."
As more enterprises turn to ITIL, Gartner reminded IT executives: "using standard ITIL semantics does not necessarily translate to actual implementation acceptance or service quality improvement."
Even certification does not presume actual implementation. Based on client inquiries taken by Gartner analysts, many ITIL initiatives begin within the architecture and standards group and were not effectively exported to the IT domains that own the processes: the domains responsible for using and measuring the success of an ITIL methodology implementation.
"If the process owner who will be using the process on a day-to-day basis does not buy into the ITIL process re-engineering," concluded Gartner, "the ITIL project may never come to fruition in production operations."
--IDG staff contributed to this article