ITILigent Service Management

I spend a lot of time helping clients transform their IT organizations into ones that are ready for the future. We may talk about consumerization and cloud and how they are affecting IT. But what’s really happening is the democratization of IT. That is, IT doesn’t have the monopoly anymore. Businesses can go anywhere to buy IT services.

This leads to an urgent problem for traditional IT. Information services are absolutely necessary. But who will deliver them? Think of this as analogous to the restaurant business. The need for food will never go away – it’s integral to survival. But if you as a restaurant will not provide the right food, your customers will go elsewhere. In the same way, there’s no company in the world that can survive without information services. But the worst-case scenario is that you close your IT shop because the business is buying information services somewhere else.

I’ve worked for years helping CIOs and organizations transform their organizations. And in my experience leadership is the #1 thing that’s important if you want to achieve any form of change. This includes (large) ITIL implementations. If you don’t demonstrate leadership, people won’t actually change.

Communication isn’t taken care of, even when you take care of it. Nowadays, many organizations have this culture expecting that “when I have sent the email or the newsletter through a mail-blast” everybody is informed. But many employees do not read email to much…or read them (too) late; simply because they get to many emails and most of them are deemed not relevant, just FYI. Thus they form this habit of “seldom reading emails”, definitely when it comes from the same (level of the) sender. Or they scan through it and for certain miss information or mis-interpretate it. Even when they read it, it isn’t sure they have internalized it!

In my honest opinion, improving service delivery and implementation of new / changed services is many times about changing competencies. No matter what the change is about, it always changes competencies whether this is on an organizational level, a team level, an individual level or all of the above. Hence, a improving services levels or successfully implementing a new service in production is only successful when new competencies have been internalized by those who have to deliver these services.

The 2011 edition of ITIL was published today. As the author of ITIL Service Transition, 2011 edition this means that a very major commitment has come to an end, and I will now have considerably more time to spend with my family.

This edition is not a major update to the concepts behind ITIL, but a refresh of the content based on a belief in continual service improvement, informed by feedback posted to the ITIL Changelog.

Some of the changes to ITIL Service Transition include: