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The IT Infrastructure Library Can Serve Small Companies: Here's How

ITIL isn't just for large organizations anymore. Smaller companies can implement the IT Infrastructure Library set of best practices and processes and get value from their information systems. IT leaders share their adoption experiences.

By Malcolm Wheatley

May 30, 2008 — CIO — This story was updated from a previous version to include additional reporting. Read the earlier version here.

When Michael Armstrong, CIO of the City of Corpus Christi, Texas, wanted to improve the productivity of his IT team, ITIL was high on the agenda.

"We needed to get to a point where we could do more planned work, which meant fighting fewer fires," he says. "And to me, that meant getting a better handle on the changes that were taking place."

Armstrong had read that 80 percent of system failures are due to change, and 80 percent of the "time-to-fix" lay in establishing just what changes had taken place. Corpus Christi, he suspected, was no different. Enter ITIL, which Armstrong knew addressed not only change management but a host of other factors that affected service management and the productivity of the city's IT staff.

Originally developed in the U.K. in the mid-1980s, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, is a set of best practice concepts and techniques for addressing the effective management of IT infrastructure, service delivery and support. Endorsed by the U.K. government for public sector IT projects, ITIL soon gained traction within the corporate sector. Published by the Office of Government Commerce, ITIL initial best practice guidelines have been widely adopted around the world, although exact numbers are unclear. (All one has to do is purchase a set of ITIL books, and adopt whatever ITIL practices one wishes.)

But along the way, ITIL has undeniably picked up a reputation for being more appropriate for big business rather than small- and medium-sized IT shops. And this, in turn, has hindered its adoption by smaller IT organizations such as Corpus Christi's. Armstrong saw past that big-business stereotype and envisaged ITIL easing the lot of the city's five telephone technicians, nine field technicians, 30 analysts and 1,600 end-users.

"ITIL hasn't really talked to smaller businesses," says Barclay Rae, former professional services director of Europe's Help Desk Institute (now known as the Service Desk Institute). "The language to date has been very much framed in the context of large organizations with mainframes and internal customers."

But although ITIL's big business credentials can't be denied, there's growing evidence that it can indeed benefit the smaller IT shop, too. In fact, the smaller IT shop can turn its size into an ITIL asset, says Rae. "Smaller companies can implement ITIL—and implement it quickly," he says. "There are fewer people to disagree about it, and it's easier to get the key people around the same table. I've implemented ITIL in an IT department of just six people: They initially complained that they didn't have the time—but by picking just the key ITIL processes, it didn't take up much time at all."

 

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