ITIL Thoughts

Last week I was on an ITIL Foundation course.

If you work in IT and you don’t know what ITIL is – you probably soon will. ITIL which stands for “IT Infrastructure Library” is an emerging standard for the operation of IT, it started in the UK, but is rapidly being adopted as a global standard.

I’ve worked in and around it operations for nearly 20 years now (a scary thought) and the framework that ITIL sets out makes a lot of sense. It’s not dissimilar to the one most organisations operate. What it does do is clarify a number of roles and processes in a way that will help a lot of organisations to assess the effectiveness of their operations. I suspect many organisations will look at the list of processes and know immediately which is the one they struggle with.

If ITIL manages to create a common understanding of roles and processes, or even just a common taxonomy for things like change, problem, incident, capacity then it will have achieved a lot. Speaking as a Solution Architect it will be great to be able to plug into a known set of operational processes during the implementation phase of projects.

The problem with all frameworks is that the problems are in the detail – and I don’t know enough detail to comment on that.