Pink Elephant’s Troy DuMoulin Discusses ITIL v.3 and Beyond: Part Two
Posted March 26th, 2008 by Dennis PowellThis is part two of two of an interview with Troy DuMoulin, a blogger and the Director of Product Strategy at Pink Elephant. Troy has been gracious enough to share his insights on ITIL v.3 as well as thoughts on implementation, best practices and overall strategy for ITIL adoption.
The first part of the interview can be read here.
You can also listen to his audio responses below, or download using the link after each question.
StackSafe: What ITIL v3 improvements will have the most positive impact on those that adhere to it?
Troy DuMoulin: ITIL version 3 was actually well timed in its release. Most organizations that have begun to adopt ITIL have started in the operational processes. They have gotten better at the service desk, the incident process, the change process, and are starting to tackle the configuration management issue.
That’s where you’re trying to understand how a given component enables or disables a business process outcome. To do that, you have to understand the nature of service and how services are consumed by the business to automate processes.
ITIL version 3 provides an elevation of the service concept, to more than just a principle. The idea that it all begins and ends with a service. This higher profile of the higher service and delivery provides the extra impetus to go to the next level. That’s why it’s such a hot topic today.
Any organization trying to adopt ITIL or implement the service management principles either looks at a service catalog to see what services are being provided, or the CMDB which asks how to model and manage what may or may not be defined. This is moving beyond the operational processes of support, towards business and IT alignment.
Consider this: “If the total goal of IT is to support business outcome, then a basic accountability for IT is to understand how any technology component enables or disables that business outcome through service consumption.” So, if you have no clue how any given component works for your business process, how can you claim to be aligned or integrated with that business? You can’t.
StackSafe: Your blog offers a lot of guidance about managing IT people through the standards and best practices adoption process. Why?
Troy DuMoulin: It’s simply because the biggest challenges are the resources and number of people you have. What is their role in a business context? The majority of the people we work with, our customers, it’s a big stretch for them to culturally to understand that they are moving beyond this technology optimization principle to a service organization principle. That goes up the entire ranks from operational staff to executives.
The knowledge is there, we have more knowledge about what best practices are than the average industry. We have documentation and tools that are beyond the ability for most organizations to use in relation to service management.
It’s not a tool issue, not a knowledge issue, but a culture and resource issue. What business is IT in technology or service? Is it managing boxes, or planning to be a service provider? The vast majority of the issues that derail an ITSM project has nothing to do with knowledge or tools. It is firmly centered in the organizational change required to move from technology to service.
StackSafe: A lot of presentations at the Pink Elephant ITSM Event in February stressed how important Senior Executive “buy-in” is to the adoption process. Are Senior Executives on board?
Troy DuMoulin: It depends where the Senior Executive is coming from.
There are two elements to the question:
If the executive comes from a business context, then they understand the business and IT dependency aspect, and they’re trying to ratify this huge gap between the two. If the executive has come up through the domain ranks and is in essence a “super-techie”, then the idea of service management is foreign to them and a hard sell to the role of IT.
No matter what, you have to have top executive buy-in. It takes real money, real funding, and real effort to change a culture. Even if you change it at a tactical level and the executive is not in line with the cultural evolution, it won’t work. The leadership of an organization is one of the primary drivers of an organization’s culture. Whatever the executives are seen doing and saying, that’s what the rest of the organization below will do.
StackSafe: You are a contributing author to ITIL’s Planning to Implement IT Service Management book. So what’s your preference, writing or speaking, and why?.
Troy DuMoulin: Interesting, I’ve never been asked this before. I prefer to speak; I’m a teacher by passion. However, I find that speaking is often augmented when you have written documentation and proof. So my preference is to speak, my tools to achieve that end are to write and document. It’s not just about documenting my thoughts and processes, a lot of times what I’m talking about is already out there, I’m just pulling it together to an IT context to show how it applies here as well.
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Filed Under: ITIL, Interviews, Interviews-Analysts
March 28th, 2008 at 3:42 pm