While U.S. federal agencies scurry to get their enterprise architectures in line, their British counterparts have been deploying another framework altogether for managing IT—the IT Infrastructure Library. ITIL is a set of best-practice recommendations and common IT definitions covering incident, problem, configuration, change management and other IT functions.
ITIL may be catching on stateside as well. Earlier this month, IT professionals packed the rooms of a modest ITIL conference in Washington. One of the best-attended talks was by Malcolm Fry, a Colchester, England-based consultant, and an adviser for BMC Software Inc. of Houston, who is considered the creator of ITIL. GCN caught up with Fry afterward.
GCN: How did you start ITIL?
Fry: I was working at a business that did consulting, and I was frustrated about service management. It seemed to me that these were things we should be doing, but no one was. And so I wrote some books. They’re obviously out of print now—since they were published in the Middle Ages—on service desks, problem management, change management, that sort of thing. And one day, the folks who were writing the first ITIL book contacted me and asked to use my books as a reference point. Since then I have been involved on and off with ITIL throughout the last 20 years.
GCN: Why was there a need for ITIL at the time?
Fry: The British government was the driving factor. The government had many computer centers, and each one was audited. Auditors were finding it very difficult to go from one center to another, as they had to relearn everything. Each computer center was doing the same things, but in a different way. [Officials] wanted to agree on a common set of processes with a common terminology. It had to be flexible enough to work in different environments, but at the same time be rigid enough so that you wouldn’t want to change it too much.
GCN: In your talk, you mentioned how ITIL could be used in change management, where an application could be upgraded without affecting its users. How would that work?
Fry: Say you wanted to upgrade some software, and I was a person who was assigned the request for the change. The first thing I would do is to go to the configuration management database, the CMDB, and see who else is using the server where the software [to be upgraded] resides, and what other services are on that server. I want to get the potential impact. I can tell which of the workstations have version 6 of the software, and which have version 7.
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