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    • #3216530

      Yet the acronym is never defined.

      by stress junkie ·

      In reply to Interesting discussion of “ITIL verified”

      It gets a bit tiring to read two discussions about the applicability of something without ever having that thing defined. What does ITIL mean? Specifically, what word does each letter represent?

      The impression that I got reading the two references was that this is a resurgence of meaningless imperatives. I was reminded of the early 1990s when we were introduced to the quality oriented imperatives in Six Sigma and ISO 9000, or even better, ISO 9001. (Oh yeah. 9001 is definitely better than 9000!!!)

      I am inclined to think that this ITIL and numerous other acronyms only represent a bunch of topics for management books. I don’t see how any of this applies to my work. Please enlighten me.

      • #3224171

        if you are in ops you NEED to be across ITIL

        by twohills ·

        In reply to Yet the acronym is never defined.

        ITIL is the IT Infrastructure Library, and just like XP, OS390, UNIX and a herd of other acronyms most people either don’t know that or have forgotten, because like most acronyms it doesn’t matter: it is just ITIL.

        How it applies to your work depends very much on what your work is. We can broadly divide IT (IT = computing in business, not people mmucking around with computers) into two halves: development/solutions/applications and production/delivery/operations – call them what you will. If you work in that second half then ITIL has everything to do with you. It is the de facto standard for how to run an IT operation. It has been adopted by many large organisations. it is appearing in medium and smaller ones now. It is already appearing in job advertisments. It already forms the standard language for IT people to discuss operations: new staff, external cosnultants and auditors can understand how you do things by understanding how you vary from the ITIL model. It has formed the basis for a large chunk of the new ISO20000 standard. Either ITIl or ISO20000 will be a mandatory requirement for many IT outsource and other service contracts in coming years, and a mandatory qualification for employment in IT operations. All Service Desk tools are already expected to be ITIL compliant (whatever that means, hence this thread).

        ITIL is a grass-roots movement: most management above CIO still haven’t heard of it.

        ITIL differs from TQM, Six Sigma and ISO 9000 in several ways: it tells you how to do stuff not what level to achieve, it is specific to IT process, and it is generally useful.

        So if you are in ops you NEED to be across this thing.

        The best introductory discussion of ITIL is on Wikipedia.

      • #3289118

        Not defined?

        by chrisevans ·

        In reply to Yet the acronym is never defined.

        ITIL or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library has been around for many years and is currently in its third revision.

        It is a set of core disciplines which have been adopted as IT industry best practice across the UK and most of the globe. Its interaction with BS15000 and ISO20000 (fast tracked through completion due to its importance to the field) means that it is THE defacto standard for IT Service provision globally.

        Whether it applies to you or not largely depends on the size of your organisation and the work you do ..

        Whether it applies to your industry or not? Go to http://www.jobserve.com and do a search on ITIL and you will get the idea 😉

        It is well worth a read as everyone in our line of work can take something from 😉

        • #3289097

          the counter arguments for some balance

          by twohills ·

          In reply to Not defined?

          Yes and after you read up on it: before you get too enthused and evangelical, check out the counter arguments for some balance:
          http://www.itskeptic.org
          http://www.itsm.mobi/index.html
          http://www.erp4it.com

        • #3289039

          I can’t keep up with all of the acronyms. :)

          by stress junkie ·

          In reply to Not defined?

          I meant that the acronym ITIL was not defined in the article. I did not mean that it was not defined somewhere.

          Too many acronyms spoil the lesson. There are so many acronyms these days that I don’t know what most of them mean, and I used to work on military contracts. Talk about an abundance of acronyms!!! I like to use the writing style where the first use of an acronym includes its fully qualified term. For example: American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). Then you can use the acronym without qualification for the remainder of the document.

        • #3288942

          some acronyms gain suffucient currency

          by twohills ·

          In reply to I can’t keep up with all of the acronyms. :)

          yes I knew what you meant 🙂 I contend that some acronyms gain suffucient currency that their full meaning becomes irerelevant and forgotten: UNIX, IBM, XP, SQL and for some of us oldies MVS, CICS, TSO …

          Those of us immersed in the ITIL world forget that maybe it still hasn’t achieved that status in the general IT community yet. Sorry.

    • #3224155

      Framework

      by vawns ·

      In reply to Interesting discussion of “ITIL verified”

      The thing I like to remind most vendors when they claim to be ITIL compliant is that ITIL is a framework; it’s a series of best practices for service management – it’s not perscriptive. Each organisation is different and needs to adapt the ITIL principles to work for the individual organisation. The same goes for tools – the tool needs to support the process and the organisation – not the other way round.

    • #3224154

      Framework

      by vawns ·

      In reply to Interesting discussion of “ITIL verified”

      The thing I like to remind most vendors when they claim to be ITIL compliant is that ITIL is a framework; it’s a series of best practices for service management – it’s not perscriptive. Each organisation is different and needs to adapt the ITIL principles to work for the individual organisation. The same goes for tools – the tool needs to support the process and the organisation – not the other way round.

      • #3223956

        Adapting ITIL: don’t (if you can avoid it)

        by twohills ·

        In reply to Framework

        Every organisation needs to adapt ITIL, and “adopt and adapt” is indeed one of the fundamentals put forward in the books.

        On the other hand:
        1) don’t adapt if you can at all help it. One of the biggest ongoing benefits of ITIL is standardisation, so that auditors, contractors and new employees understand terminiology and processes with a min imum of training or explanation. For this reason, all variations from the model ought to be separately documente das such, so e.g. an auditor can just read the variance manual and know that everything else is vanilla. My pet hate: if a process is not ITIL standard, don’t use the ITIL term for it, and if it is standard don’t call it something else.

        2) I’m told ISO20000 is completely prescriptive and allows for little adaptation, so fiddling with ITIL too much will make ISO20000 compliance harder.

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