Why ITIL can be applied at any level

Many IT organisations are familiar with ITIL. Opinions are divided; some experience it as a bureaucratic monster while others are enthusiastic about it and like to apply it. Depending on the ambition level of the organisation, different processes can be implemented. I believe, therefore, that it is suitable for any organisation. You can make it as crazy as you want.

What is ITIL?

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and is a reference framework for setting up and controlling processes within an IT service organisation. Contrary to popular belief, ITIL is not a methodology, model or standard. Perhaps that is precisely the reason why many organisations have difficulty with a good implementation. I deliberately write 'good' because the word 'full' would be out of place (a full implementation is not always necessary). This best practice offers a range of solutions that can partly be implemented at one's own discretion.

The time that ITIL was limited to service support is now far behind us. What is most important is the balance between IT and the business. How do you respond to new changes without putting too much pressure on the operation? In this and the coming blogs, I will mainly discuss the management processes, also known as Service Operation.

Incident management = sexy

The interesting thing about a best practice solution is that, as an organisation, you can decide which parts are relevant. In practice, this often means that the most visible management process of many IT service organisations, namely 'incident management', is reasonably well implemented. With the help of a good incident management process, priorities can be set when it comes to dealing with failures. Formal escalation paths are created and the agreements agreed upon in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) are usually well observed. It is a sexy process.

A streamlined incident management process inspires confidence and helps determine the quality of the entire service. Many IT organisations harmonise this process. Thanks to ITIL, we all speak the same language when it comes to providing service and resolving failures. However, organisations that only do incident management extinguish the fire without looking at the cause.

After all, the primary goal of incident management is to recover quickly. The underlying cause and preventive actions to avoid recurrence are less relevant to this process. Responsibilities and expertise are separated. The employee who dealt with a malfunction may also be the employee who later, albeit wearing a different hat, investigates the underlying cause of the malfunction. In this specific case, we speak of 'problem management'.

Few organisations have fully implemented problem management. This also requires more from the IT organisation. A good problem manager is in fact happy with many problems. New failures are compared with incidents from the past, manually or with the help of a monitoring system, for example. We will discuss problem management in detail in a subsequent blog.

In some organisations, it is necessary to apply all processes extensively, but not everywhere. It just depends on the agreements that the business has made with IT. More extensive and detailed processes simply carry a higher price tag. For example, processes need to be continuously updated and new systems will need to be set up. In addition, an almost complete implementation of ITIL can be considered bureaucratic. The important question, however, is which benefits outweigh the costs. This question is insufficiently answered in many ITIL implementations. An experienced consultant is no superfluous luxury.

ITIL at Nomios

Nomios offers mature ITIL processes, including event management, incident management, problem management, change management, configuration management, capacity management and release and deployment management. This enables us, through our Service Level Management service, to provide a wide range of service management services on an operational and tactical level.

The relevant Service Level Manager reviews the entire performance with you on a monthly basis. The Service Level Manager represents your interests and acts as your customer advocate. Continuous learning from each other is central to this. ITIL uses the CSI terminology for this, which stands for Continual Service Improvement. By actively deploying CSI, you and Nomios work together towards a greater maturity of your management and service organisation.

Would you like to know how we at Nomios deal with ITIL for our customers? Then contact us and we will be pleased to discuss it with you.