The Beatles started it all in the ’60s. Since then, it seems, there has been one British invasion after another. The latest one, however, has a lot of relevance to federal agencies. Invading agency IT shops across the nation is the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, a best-practices framework that is now being adopted broadly in big government.
“We are implementing ITIL’s Incident Management processes across all of IT in the help desk and in troubleshooting,” said Jeanette Cook, service level manager at Idaho National Laboratory based in Idaho Falls, an engineering lab supporting the Energy Department in nuclear and energy research, science, and national defense. “It is helping us to restore services faster.”
“ITIL has become the de facto standard for enterprise service delivery processes,” said Thomas Mendel, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. According to Forrester Research, 40 percent of billion-dollar corporations have now adopted ITIL, and that figure will rise to 80 percent within two years.
According to IT consulting firm Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn., an organization can achieve up to a 48 percent reduction in total cost of ownership of IT equipment by fully implementing ITIL. Anecdotal evidence backs up those numbers, according to Gartner.
Policies and standards back ITIL
Further, this system of best practices has been getting support from standards bodies and government policies. The first International Standard (ISO 20000) covering how organizations are to manage IT services is built around ITIL. In addition, the President’s Management Agenda specifically emphasizes the adoption of best practices.
The Office of Management and Budget has published multiple circulars that relate to the adoption of ISO 20000, such as A-123, A-119 and A-76, noted David L. Farris, IT service manager for the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, based in Raleigh, N.C.
“OMB Circular A-119 directs the use of voluntary consensus standards, which ISO 20000/ITIL is and will continue to be,” he said.
It has been nearly two decades since the United Kingdom’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (now called the Office of Government Commerce or OGC) introduced ITIL.
In essence, ITIL is a widely accepted approach to IT service management. But rather than being a standard, ITIL offers a framework of best practices and guidelines. Organizations don’t become “ITIL Certified.” What ITIL provides, though, is a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provisioning.
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