ITIL and ITSM are a story of great deception. Is there any benefit? How much does it cost and who exactly DOES NOT “implement ITIL”?
Almost every day, we at Okdesk come across a question from potential customers, “Does your Help Desk match ITIL?”. The time has come to reveal the story of the great deception associated with these 4 letters.
ITSM is a well-known and proven approach to organizing IT management processes over the years. ITIL is the source of ITSM best practices. A huge number of articles on Habr on the topic ITIL / ITSM only confirms the wide interest in the topic.
Last year, the next version of the ITIL library was released. The “concept” has perhaps become even wider than the IT industry itself. And the next version of the library only confirms the relevance of the changes it generated in approaches to IT management, taking into account the development of technologies, new challenges, etc.
But is ITIL and ITSM so useful? What and whom did he “deceive”? Does it make sense to follow his recommendations, especially for medium and small businesses, and when? Is it worth it to implement and how much does it cost?
ITSM is an approach to the management and organization of services in IT, implementation details and best practices from the experience of departments and entire companies are described, for example, in the world-famous ITIL series of documents.
The mentioned library appeared in the late 80s of the last century by order of the British government. Initially, they were developed to ensure the proper level of quality of IT services in government institutions. But pretty quickly the approach came to taste and business. In the mid-90s, the released library was named ITIL, and the independent professional community itSMF joined in its update.
Today, ITIL is formally owned by the UK Government Committee on Computer Engineering and Telecommunications. Axelos, owned by the UK government and local Capita, distributes the library and certifies training centers. Now this initiative, complete with not cheap educational courses, exams, local and international forums, is completely commercial.
Although initially everything was focused on government agencies and IT, as documents developed, they adapted for use by business, including outside a particular industry. True, the basic concept and the “object” model did not change. But the methodology received additions related to the latest modern trends - the same outsourcing.
The ITIL library, and therefore ITSM as an approach using library practices, is built around the term “Service”. To work with services, processes are "organized", and their functioning provides certain roles. The term “practices” and other new abstractions have additionally appeared in ITIL v4, with the help of which they tried to make a description of what is happening more detailed and meaningful at the end of the 21st century.
It is important to understand (this is clearly not told to us at any courses) that ITIL recommendations have always been focused on large "infrastructures" and companies - especially for them the functions, competencies and roles were prescribed as detailed as possible. In the ITIL v3 edition of 2011, there are 26 main processes only, and some of them can be divided into several subprocesses.
Despite such an abundance of information, questions about specifics remain behind the scenes, since the task of the library is to talk about the best approaches, and not about a specific implementation in a company. Big business can interpret this entire amount of information and, in fact, has always interpreted it very differently. But small companies have never found answers to the most important question for them: "what exactly to do first." And precisely in this lies the main "deception." ITIL is too high-level abstraction, it is too redundant, too far, too complicated for any business, and for the medium and small business it is practically not applicable . Moreover, this "inapplicability" is associated both with building internal management processes and with the provision of services to an external customer. This, however, did not prevent the thousands who received the basic course diploma from wanting and wanting to do everything “according to ITIL”.
In order not to be unfounded, we turn to the numbers.
In the itSMF 2013 domestic study ( unfortunately, nothing is newer, but it is unlikely that the situation has changed dramatically ), 41% of IT managers reported that the business simply does not see the benefits of implementing ITSM . Although by that time ITIL had a history of more than a dozen years, only the main processes took root in business - incident and service request management.
These same processes turned out to be the most automated. And another 24 processes described in the methodology were much less in demand. And the point is not only and not so much that these processes provide understandable and tangible value. The fact is that building any ITIL process involves huge costs - financial, time and organizational. As a result, if large companies, under pressure from boards of directors and the “market,” try to “implement ITIL” ( note hereinafter the phrase is used as a kind of “meme” that characterizes the maturity of the market in understanding the subject of discussion in this article, because, of course, “introduce ITIL "- that is, to introduce a library is terminologically impossible ), then medium and small businesses are in no hurry to do this.
The fact that small and medium-sized businesses do not run headlong to implement ITSM is also visible by certification. The list of ITIL Experts and service managers from Russia and the CIS countries, published on itSMF Russia, includes a little less than 350 people. And most of them work in large companies. The statistics of those who passed the exams clearly show peaks in the popularity of certification at the end of the year - during the period of mass development of budgets among the "large" in Russia and Europe . At the same time, the share of those who passed the basic exam greatly prevails over all other exams combined.
So does the masses need this ITIL? Why is he so popular?
The industry is not alone in ITIL. In the same UK, Prince2 developed a structured approach - PRojects IN Controlled Environments - for managing social projects. In principle, it is suitable even for companies from the IT segment. By the way, according to statistics of exams passed, it is only 2 times inferior to ITIL, and Axelos still owns the rights to the trademark (and certification). Some large global corporations have their own theories regarding IT management. For example, IBM in the 70s of the last century formulated ITPM ​​(IT Process Model) - a standard that differs from ITIL in a number of key respects. And Microsoft uses MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework), which, on the contrary, is very similar to ITIL, but focused on the company's own products.
For small companies, FITS was also developed, but probably because it was not possible to make money on it, the project “successfully” was bent.
There are other standards for the management of IT services, for example, ISO 20000. However, they are very far from ITIL in popularity, and phrases like “implement ITIL” from customers, “according to ITIL, do this” from experts or questions to developers like “your system is developed based on ITIL? ”has long become winged. So is it worth it to “implement ITIL”, who should do it and how much does it all cost?
ITSM is, first and foremost, an approach that involves changing processes ( I personally have long been confused in their actual number ) in the company. Undoubtedly, such changes, like any organizational changes, require time and effort. We need people who understand how “it works”, that is, in the library and the features of its use (certified, which means that they apply for a certain level of remuneration). But this is only one side of the coin called “ITIL implementation”.
It is clear that all this huge “machine of best practices”, with history, advertising, trademarks, experts, courses and certifications, should bring money to all participants. And it brings. It is enough to look at the cost of implementing this very “best practice”. And so that the illusions finally disappear, “season” the dish with an automation system, also “based on ITIL”, which also needs to be supported from year to year.
Information on projects for organizing processes and their automation is always in the public domain. And this is only a small, far from the most shocking figure, their part :
It is quite clear that projects for introducing best practices are not available for medium and small businesses. And most importantly, it is time for small and medium businesses to understand that ITIL is not for them and they do not need it.
Costs pay off only when the scope of work is quite large. The introduction and subsequent maintenance of ITSM in the company requires certain labor costs - maintaining a database of configurations, incidents, writing and updating regulations and job descriptions. But the gain from this activity with a small complexity of infrastructure is not so noticeable. This idea is well illustrated by the break-even point analysis made in the article “ITSM and Business” in the Open Systems journal. DBMS ( picture from the same article ):
Small companies often do not have the opportunity to implement "ITIL" or, moreover, automate some aspect of their activities using Enterprise solutions. He does not always have the means even for inexpensive software and basic automation of his processes. And besides, even in the IT segment, the costs of this for small business cannot be recaptured, not to mention business in a more traditional area, where profitability can be lower.
A flexible solution that does not require fundamental changes in the structure of the business and tells you what to change right now and get a profit (albeit a small one) tomorrow will be cheaper and will cause great enthusiasm among managers.
So what do small and medium businesses do? Erase ITIL and ITSM?
Not at all! If you want to broaden your horizons or find out “how to organize IT management processes in the best (read - the largest) houses in Europe”, then, undoubtedly, it’s worth diving into it. The main thing is to understand what lies behind one of the most famous abbreviations in the IT industry worldwide, how much it costs and for whom it all suits.
If we turn to the specifics of what to do and what not to do small and medium-sized businesses, then a few tips.
The management model in small and medium-sized businesses does not have to be based on the ITIL library in general or in private. Such a business usually wants to see a ready-made solution to its problems. He does not have the opportunity to select a specialist to study all volumes of the latest edition of a flexible and comprehensive library (for ITILv3 these are 7 books) or to receive ITIL Master certification for several hundred thousand rubles and months of time spent.
A small business has no resources and no need to hire owners of each of the implemented processes, etc. Such an entry threshold is too large for him.
Therefore, the first thing that needs to be realized is that there is no silver bullet and there is absolutely no point in trying to implement it in your small company after a 3-day, even intramural course on the basics of ITIL. ITIL is not for small and medium businesses .
We see that the implementation of any practices costs serious money and the temptation to succumb to a wonderful pill in the face of "experts" or "certified specialists" is great. The problem is that most of the experts:
What to do? Do not mess with those who use clever words, abbreviations and quotes from ITIL as a confirmation of their theses or persistently “push in” ITSM products.
It often seems that the result will be a revolution. That is, I want to break the current inefficient model of work, write “how it should be” myself, start a project to implement this “how it should be” and automate it.
For medium and small businesses this is an almost insurmountable path for many reasons (monetary, organizational, etc.).
Small businesses need quick victories and an understandable and close to reality object model (applications and equipment instead of “service catalog”, CMDB, OLA and UC, “request for change”).
You are already working in the market, so you managed to rebuild processes in some form (albeit not optimally and not very efficiently). The problem is that it is not clear what to change, what to undertake and where to improve. That is why it is important to describe current processes in the form of As Is for their further automation.
( note: as we already hope, it is clear to the reader whose automation systems in the title appear in the abbreviations indicated in the heading of the article, it makes sense to consider them last and only if you still decide to “implement ITIL” )
Instead, clear requirements must be formulated for an automation system that:
In our blog we talked about such systems more than once or twice .
ps We planned to write this article for a very long time and for a long time we “moved” it. Because we understand that the opinion voiced in it affects a whole "layer" of what is not accepted to talk about.
At the same time, we really want to understand whether the audience of Habra shares our point of view.
What do you think about ITIL and our opinion? Ready for the "massacre" in the comments, including comments from experts :)
ITSM is a well-known and proven approach to organizing IT management processes over the years. ITIL is the source of ITSM best practices. A huge number of articles on Habr on the topic ITIL / ITSM only confirms the wide interest in the topic.
Last year, the next version of the ITIL library was released. The “concept” has perhaps become even wider than the IT industry itself. And the next version of the library only confirms the relevance of the changes it generated in approaches to IT management, taking into account the development of technologies, new challenges, etc.
But is ITIL and ITSM so useful? What and whom did he “deceive”? Does it make sense to follow his recommendations, especially for medium and small businesses, and when? Is it worth it to implement and how much does it cost?
ITIL and ITSM. What is it? Background and Highlights
ITSM is an approach to the management and organization of services in IT, implementation details and best practices from the experience of departments and entire companies are described, for example, in the world-famous ITIL series of documents.
The mentioned library appeared in the late 80s of the last century by order of the British government. Initially, they were developed to ensure the proper level of quality of IT services in government institutions. But pretty quickly the approach came to taste and business. In the mid-90s, the released library was named ITIL, and the independent professional community itSMF joined in its update.
Today, ITIL is formally owned by the UK Government Committee on Computer Engineering and Telecommunications. Axelos, owned by the UK government and local Capita, distributes the library and certifies training centers. Now this initiative, complete with not cheap educational courses, exams, local and international forums, is completely commercial.
Although initially everything was focused on government agencies and IT, as documents developed, they adapted for use by business, including outside a particular industry. True, the basic concept and the “object” model did not change. But the methodology received additions related to the latest modern trends - the same outsourcing.
The ITIL library, and therefore ITSM as an approach using library practices, is built around the term “Service”. To work with services, processes are "organized", and their functioning provides certain roles. The term “practices” and other new abstractions have additionally appeared in ITIL v4, with the help of which they tried to make a description of what is happening more detailed and meaningful at the end of the 21st century.
ITIL. How to use it?
It is important to understand (this is clearly not told to us at any courses) that ITIL recommendations have always been focused on large "infrastructures" and companies - especially for them the functions, competencies and roles were prescribed as detailed as possible. In the ITIL v3 edition of 2011, there are 26 main processes only, and some of them can be divided into several subprocesses.
Despite such an abundance of information, questions about specifics remain behind the scenes, since the task of the library is to talk about the best approaches, and not about a specific implementation in a company. Big business can interpret this entire amount of information and, in fact, has always interpreted it very differently. But small companies have never found answers to the most important question for them: "what exactly to do first." And precisely in this lies the main "deception." ITIL is too high-level abstraction, it is too redundant, too far, too complicated for any business, and for the medium and small business it is practically not applicable . Moreover, this "inapplicability" is associated both with building internal management processes and with the provision of services to an external customer. This, however, did not prevent the thousands who received the basic course diploma from wanting and wanting to do everything “according to ITIL”.
Implementation of ITIL. Is there any reason? What are the benefits?
In order not to be unfounded, we turn to the numbers.
In the itSMF 2013 domestic study ( unfortunately, nothing is newer, but it is unlikely that the situation has changed dramatically ), 41% of IT managers reported that the business simply does not see the benefits of implementing ITSM . Although by that time ITIL had a history of more than a dozen years, only the main processes took root in business - incident and service request management.
These same processes turned out to be the most automated. And another 24 processes described in the methodology were much less in demand. And the point is not only and not so much that these processes provide understandable and tangible value. The fact is that building any ITIL process involves huge costs - financial, time and organizational. As a result, if large companies, under pressure from boards of directors and the “market,” try to “implement ITIL” ( note hereinafter the phrase is used as a kind of “meme” that characterizes the maturity of the market in understanding the subject of discussion in this article, because, of course, “introduce ITIL "- that is, to introduce a library is terminologically impossible ), then medium and small businesses are in no hurry to do this.
The fact that small and medium-sized businesses do not run headlong to implement ITSM is also visible by certification. The list of ITIL Experts and service managers from Russia and the CIS countries, published on itSMF Russia, includes a little less than 350 people. And most of them work in large companies. The statistics of those who passed the exams clearly show peaks in the popularity of certification at the end of the year - during the period of mass development of budgets among the "large" in Russia and Europe . At the same time, the share of those who passed the basic exam greatly prevails over all other exams combined.
So does the masses need this ITIL? Why is he so popular?
Alternatives to ITIL. What are the differences?
The industry is not alone in ITIL. In the same UK, Prince2 developed a structured approach - PRojects IN Controlled Environments - for managing social projects. In principle, it is suitable even for companies from the IT segment. By the way, according to statistics of exams passed, it is only 2 times inferior to ITIL, and Axelos still owns the rights to the trademark (and certification). Some large global corporations have their own theories regarding IT management. For example, IBM in the 70s of the last century formulated ITPM ​​(IT Process Model) - a standard that differs from ITIL in a number of key respects. And Microsoft uses MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework), which, on the contrary, is very similar to ITIL, but focused on the company's own products.
For small companies, FITS was also developed, but probably because it was not possible to make money on it, the project “successfully” was bent.
There are other standards for the management of IT services, for example, ISO 20000. However, they are very far from ITIL in popularity, and phrases like “implement ITIL” from customers, “according to ITIL, do this” from experts or questions to developers like “your system is developed based on ITIL? ”has long become winged. So is it worth it to “implement ITIL”, who should do it and how much does it all cost?
How much does it cost to “implement ITIL” and “automate by ITIL”? And what about the scale?
ITSM is, first and foremost, an approach that involves changing processes ( I personally have long been confused in their actual number ) in the company. Undoubtedly, such changes, like any organizational changes, require time and effort. We need people who understand how “it works”, that is, in the library and the features of its use (certified, which means that they apply for a certain level of remuneration). But this is only one side of the coin called “ITIL implementation”.
It is clear that all this huge “machine of best practices”, with history, advertising, trademarks, experts, courses and certifications, should bring money to all participants. And it brings. It is enough to look at the cost of implementing this very “best practice”. And so that the illusions finally disappear, “season” the dish with an automation system, also “based on ITIL”, which also needs to be supported from year to year.
Information on projects for organizing processes and their automation is always in the public domain. And this is only a small, far from the most shocking figure, their part :
- a tender for the acquisition of services for the implementation of the automated Service Desk system and for the acquisition of licenses for Service Desk (BMC Remedy) AS in 2012 for ~ 20 million rubles;
- tender for the transfer of rights to use OMNITRACKER implementation of works on the implementation and maintenance of an automation system based on OMNITRACKER product in 2013 by ~ 10.5 million rubles
- tender for technical support for HP Service Manager and HP Operations in 2016 for almost 10 million rubles;
- Axios Assyst support in 2018 for almost 5 million rubles.
It is quite clear that projects for introducing best practices are not available for medium and small businesses. And most importantly, it is time for small and medium businesses to understand that ITIL is not for them and they do not need it.
Implementation of ITIL and ITSM. When will it pay off?
Costs pay off only when the scope of work is quite large. The introduction and subsequent maintenance of ITSM in the company requires certain labor costs - maintaining a database of configurations, incidents, writing and updating regulations and job descriptions. But the gain from this activity with a small complexity of infrastructure is not so noticeable. This idea is well illustrated by the break-even point analysis made in the article “ITSM and Business” in the Open Systems journal. DBMS ( picture from the same article ):
Small companies often do not have the opportunity to implement "ITIL" or, moreover, automate some aspect of their activities using Enterprise solutions. He does not always have the means even for inexpensive software and basic automation of his processes. And besides, even in the IT segment, the costs of this for small business cannot be recaptured, not to mention business in a more traditional area, where profitability can be lower.
A flexible solution that does not require fundamental changes in the structure of the business and tells you what to change right now and get a profit (albeit a small one) tomorrow will be cheaper and will cause great enthusiasm among managers.
What to do and what not to do to small business? Tips & Tricks
So what do small and medium businesses do? Erase ITIL and ITSM?
Not at all! If you want to broaden your horizons or find out “how to organize IT management processes in the best (read - the largest) houses in Europe”, then, undoubtedly, it’s worth diving into it. The main thing is to understand what lies behind one of the most famous abbreviations in the IT industry worldwide, how much it costs and for whom it all suits.
If we turn to the specifics of what to do and what not to do small and medium-sized businesses, then a few tips.
DO NOT implement ITIL or “best practices”
The management model in small and medium-sized businesses does not have to be based on the ITIL library in general or in private. Such a business usually wants to see a ready-made solution to its problems. He does not have the opportunity to select a specialist to study all volumes of the latest edition of a flexible and comprehensive library (for ITILv3 these are 7 books) or to receive ITIL Master certification for several hundred thousand rubles and months of time spent.
A small business has no resources and no need to hire owners of each of the implemented processes, etc. Such an entry threshold is too large for him.
Therefore, the first thing that needs to be realized is that there is no silver bullet and there is absolutely no point in trying to implement it in your small company after a 3-day, even intramural course on the basics of ITIL. ITIL is not for small and medium businesses .
DO NOT pay hundreds of thousands or millions of rubles to experts and consultants
We see that the implementation of any practices costs serious money and the temptation to succumb to a wonderful pill in the face of "experts" or "certified specialists" is great. The problem is that most of the experts:
- They do not have real practical and confirmed successful experience in introducing new approaches to third-party organizations
- Those that have are obviously very expensive
What to do? Do not mess with those who use clever words, abbreviations and quotes from ITIL as a confirmation of their theses or persistently “push in” ITSM products.
DO NOT go into writing regulations / procedures for several months.
It often seems that the result will be a revolution. That is, I want to break the current inefficient model of work, write “how it should be” myself, start a project to implement this “how it should be” and automate it.
For medium and small businesses this is an almost insurmountable path for many reasons (monetary, organizational, etc.).
Small businesses need quick victories and an understandable and close to reality object model (applications and equipment instead of “service catalog”, CMDB, OLA and UC, “request for change”).
You are already working in the market, so you managed to rebuild processes in some form (albeit not optimally and not very efficiently). The problem is that it is not clear what to change, what to undertake and where to improve. That is why it is important to describe current processes in the form of As Is for their further automation.
You do NOT need to run a Service Desk or Help Desk search project corresponding to “ITIL”
( note: as we already hope, it is clear to the reader whose automation systems in the title appear in the abbreviations indicated in the heading of the article, it makes sense to consider them last and only if you still decide to “implement ITIL” )
Instead, clear requirements must be formulated for an automation system that:
- uses an understandable model of abstraction and terms, that is, close to each participant in current processes and, most importantly, to your clients / users
- developed taking into account the expertise (many years of experience of the founders, hundreds of companies from the industry, knowledge and understanding of “world experience”, including ITIL, etc.) and having a clear development vector and focus in terms of solving problems (that is, it does not automate “a little bit of everything” , but in the end, “nothing”)
- has sufficient flexibility and, including, include the possibility of future adaptation of settings (as a result, automated processes)
- as easy as possible to get started (ideally with the ability to register applications through different channels, which are set up in a few minutes)
- has the most simple and intuitive interface for both your employees and customers
- It has built-in control mechanisms for the main metrics of support processes (control of reaction time, decision time, tracking of overdue applications, KPI for performers, for one-time work outside the scope of subscription services, etc.)
- actively develops, but does not “live out its life” ( paragraph correlates with paragraph 2 )
- has built-in modern tools that will allow you to take your customer support to a new level (telegram bots, mobile applications, etc.)
- Recognized and recommended by your peers
In our blog we talked about such systems more than once or twice .
ps We planned to write this article for a very long time and for a long time we “moved” it. Because we understand that the opinion voiced in it affects a whole "layer" of what is not accepted to talk about.
At the same time, we really want to understand whether the audience of Habra shares our point of view.
What do you think about ITIL and our opinion? Ready for the "massacre" in the comments, including comments from experts :)
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