EasyStreet does. What is it? ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Still not clear? 
ITIL is the result of the British Government’s extensive industry survey to determine IT best practices. In fact, it is a collection of schema, definitions, and functional and organizational relationships that are common to all high maturity IT shops. Implementation, is as they say, an exercise for the users (and the consultants!).
Most organizatons that embark on ITIL are large, publicly traded enterprises. They are driven to ITIL for increased services availability, and often these days for government regulatory compliance (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.).
EasyStreet is privately held, and our service availability is 99+% already. Fortunately, as ITIL’s popularity spreads, the key software packages needed to implement it are becoming more affordable. Our motivations include:
- Building in better organizational scalability as we grow, while maintaining high service availability
- Improved measurability of our performance against SLAs (and the internal Operational Level Agreements, OLAs) for system availability and service desk/trouble ticket responses
- Create new and improved services using the “service management” approach to better integrate our services with our customers operations
We began our ITIL journey with some classes sponsored by the SAO’s Oregon Training Network, offered by Pink Elephant. Virtually all EasyStreet employees attended a 2-day overview class, and three employees have earned the Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management. We immediately put training into practice by establishing a change control process for some key customer services, and as a sign of its value, the process was spontaneously embraced by the technical staff for all changes, virtually eliminating the famous last words: “This change shouldn’t affect anything…oops, what happened?”
We are now well along in our next phase: a new service desk automation system. We selected Footprints by Unipress. It’s got a great feature set, is web based, and is ITIL compliant; which means it helps implement ITIL concepts and integrates more easily with other ITIL compliant packages (we hope).
We’ve still got years to go before we become a high maturity ITIL shop, but we’re on our way and the positive experiences so far are helping with the inevitable cultural changes.
Sound interesting? There’s a international organization dedicated to ITIL implementation known as ITSMF, the IT Service Management Forum. A local Portland chapter is just starting up. Here’s the invite to the upcoming meeting, courtesy of Leslie Rohrs of the BPM Group. She hosts an IT breakfast group (attendance at the breakfast is by invitation only from Leslie). Leslie’s recent breakfast featured a consultant from CA educating us about ITIL implementation issues.