ITIL Uncovered: Q&A with EMA’s Julie Craig

In light of the fact that StackSafe is heading to the Pink Elephant conference next week, IT’s About Uptime spoke with Julie Craig, a Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) who focuses on ITIL, data center automation and downtime. Julie shared her insights into the intricacies of implementing ITIL and the benefits of establishing service management processes and business alignment.

Joe Pendry (JP): How long have you been with EMA? What is your area of coverage? What is your background prior to EMA?

Julie Craig (JC): I’ve been with EMA for 2 1/2 years. I cover Application Management, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Software as a Service (SaaS). My coverage tends to be influenced by ITIL, because I was ITIL Foundation certified when I worked as a Manager in Accenture’s Global Architecture and Core Technologies, immediately prior to joining EMA. Prior to Accenture, I worked as a Software Engineer in commercial software companies for over 10 years, then as a Senior IT Infrastructure Engineer for JD Edwards, prior to its acquisition by PeopleSoft/Oracle. My role within IT was to write, select, and implement enterprise management products, and I have worked in the enterprise management space for over ten years now.

JP: ITIL seems to be catching hold in the United States, but it has been around for some time. Why is it interesting to organizations now?

JC: Primarily because they are under the gun to improve efficiency, maximize service levels, and become a business enabler. This is a tall order and one that makes it necessary to optimize existing resources while evolving into a closer alignment with the business. ITIL’s best practice focus facilitates these core capabilities, and in doing so helps move companies along in terms of organizational maturity.

JP: What kind of adoptions rates are you seeing now and/or expecting in the future?

JC: EMA’s most recent data, published in a Research Report entitled “Data Center Automation: Delivering Fast, Efficient, and Reliable IT Services” (published October 2007), found that over 50% of all surveyed organizations - in many different sizes, locations, and industries - are pursuing ITIL. This is around twice as many as the next most popular best practice (in this report, ISO, but closely followed by Six Sigma and CoBIT). This adoption rate has been reasonably steady for several years, according to earlier EMA research, which has showed consistent ITIL adoption rates of around 50-60% for several years.

JP: From your perspective, what are the benefits that ITIL provides an organization?

JC: Process and resource optimization are two areas of benefit that are most often mentioned. However, I believe that ITIL’s emphasis on business alignment is equally, or even more, important. Companies tend to gravitate towards best practice when they are under pressure to improve the quality of their services and, in doing so, to generate higher levels of customer satisfaction. ITIL’s focus on breaking down silos across the business and on improving communication between IT and the business is particularly beneficial as IT services become ever more closely aligned with revenue generation and business differentiation.

JP: What aspects of ITIL deal with organizational downtime?

JC: At the end of the day, optimizing services, including minimizing downtime and maximizing performance, is a theme that resonates across ITIL. Service Support, which deals with the Service Desk, as well as Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, and Release Management, is obviously directly aimed at minimizing, if not eliminating, downtime. However, the ITIL Service Delivery best practice process areas assume that Service Support in place, and are closely aligned with moving from a reactive to a more proactive approach to downtime.

JP: We’ve done some research about the importance of testing with regard to uptime and availability. Where does change testing fit into the ITIL framework?

JC: ITIL is not a prescriptive methodology– in other words it does not give specific instructions as to how its best practice recommendations are to be implemented. However, work done by the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF) and other industry bodies to build out ITIL processes have made it clear that testing is an integral component of both Change Management and Release Management. I actually discussed this at some length in a recent paper entitled, “StackSafe™ Test Center: Evolving ITIL in the Enterprise with a New Approach to Pre-deployment Testing“. This paper is available online at www.emausa.com and at www.stacksafe.com.

JP: Any advice for organizations considering ITIL for change management and release management?

JC: First of all, ITIL implementation is not necessary simple. Enterprises should carefully plan any such project, and set about to achieve realistic goals in a realistic timeframe. However, the CMDB should be considered to be a critical part of a complete ITIL implementation, as it provides a foundation for every other ITIL process, including Change and Release Management. Once the CMDB is in place, it provides a framework for understanding technology relationships. This helps predict the up- and down-stream impacts of a given change and/or release. While the CMDB can help identify potential trouble spots, thorough testing is IT’s insurance policy that the change won’t adversely impact the business. So my advice would be to make sure that a CMDB and robust testing procedures are in place. These two go hand in hand, and as the processes around configuration and change become more disciplined, companies begin to see a decrease in change-related outages.

JP: Are there any sources of information that you would recommend for people who want to learn more about ITIL, change management and release management?

JC: There are multiple sources. My advice would be for targeted personnel within IT to become familiar with ITIL, potentially investing in an ITIL class and a Foundation certification. They can help educate others within the organization, since ITIL provides a “common language” that enables cross-functional groups to interact more effectively. In addition, The Internet is a great source of information, as are the ITIL books themselves.

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Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, ITIL, Interviews, Interviews-Analysts, Testing