ITIL Gets an Upgrade

After much ado about “how-to,” the UK 's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) released ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) Version 3 to awaiting fans. This latest version is an important evolutionary step in the 20-year history of ITIL. Version 3 builds upon the previous version but moves past the former process-based model to a service-driven lifecycle model that offers guidance about the strategy, design, transition, operation and continual improvement of IT services as an integrated part of the overall business.

EDSer Phil Montanaro
Member of IAG

Phil Montanaro

EDS employee Phil Montanaro has been a member and contributor to itSMF (Information Technology Service Management Forum) for more than 15 years.

Montanaro's primary focus in service management has been with the EDS Defense group. He was instrumental as the Infrastructure Director of the Armed Forces Personnel Administration Agency (AFPAA) in implementing ITIL best practices for that organization. Montanaro is an example of EDS' commitment to establishing and maintaining industry leadership and practices for service management delivery.

As a member of the ITIL Advisory Group (IAG), Montanaro was able to influence the scope, structure and content of the new ITIL Version 3 material, providing input based on his experience as a Service Delivery Executive at EDS; his work with the British Computer Society as an independent accreditor of training organizations and as an examiner for Service Management examinations; and as President of the Institute of Service Management representing the interest of service management professionals working in the industry.

ITIL first appeared on the IT scene in the late 1980s when the OGC, whose responsibilities included driving standards and best practices on government capital projects, introduced a best practice framework focused on IT service management. ITIL, which was widely adopted in the U.K. and Europe, started gaining popularity among U.S. companies in the past five years. Today, it is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world and provides a cohesive set of best practice guidance drawn from the public and private sectors across the world.

“ITIL's recent refresh project makes the library more practical, easier to use and provides specific guidance for companies wanting to implement best practices to integrate their IT functions,” says Phil Montanaro, service delivery executive at EDS and member of the ITIL Advisory Group (IAG). “The lifecycle approach brings the way we manage IT services today much closer to reality by dismantling the operational process silos and truly integrating IT into the business.”

EDS and ITIL

In the early 1980s, EDS began implementing best practices similar to the ITIL framework available today. We wanted a consistent and reliable way to deliver services globally that would benefit us and our clients. When ITIL was introduced in the late 1980s, we saw many similarities between how we were currently doing business and the new ITIL framework. And we saw many ways to use ITIL to help our clients align their IT goals with their overall business goals.

In fact, EDS' Phil Montanaro has played a pivotal role in the development of ITIL since its inception with involvement in the QA and review processes as well as several other areas. And other EDS employees helped develop process models for Version 2.

“EDS follows an ITIL-compliant framework because we know it will benefit us as an outsourcer and it will benefit our clients,” says Kim Stevenson, Vice President, Enterprise Service Management at EDS. “It gives us a guideline so we're all working from the same manual and consistently delivering global services.”

Aligning You and Your Outsourcing Partner Via ITIL

With the increase in multi-vendor environments, it's vital to choose a common framework to ensure everyone is communicating clearly and working toward the same goals to seamlessly delivery IT services. When both you and your outsourcing partner follow the ITIL guidelines, you'll benefit in several way:

• Common Language – Implementing common terminology ensures everyone is speaking the same language, reducing variations, service disruptions and confusion. This is especially true for global companies that require continuity across many different countries, regions and cultures.
• Reduce Costs – Bottom line: when you implement proven best practices processes and better integrate and manage your infrastructure, you'll reduce costs and improve productivity. Through EDS' use of ITIL, we helped a large manufacturing client reduce over 60% of their downtime related to IT.
• Customer Satisfaction – When everyone is working from the same set of guidelines, you'll present a unified approach and an improved end user experience whether it's across town or across the globe.
• Improved Productivity – When your IT organization is well run, integrated and minimizing risks, you'll not only save money but also increase productivity by allowing your employees to make the most effective use of their skills and experience. Using the ITIL framework, EDS helped a client eliminate 90% of it's lost engineer productivity time by changing the way incidents and availability were handled.
• Improved Delivery of Third Party Services – Specification of ITIL alignment or ISO/IEC 20,000 accreditation is used as the standard for IT Management in services procurement.
• Greater Efficiency – Redundancies across the organization are reduced through clearly defined process roles and responsibilities. EDS has helped a client reduce a request process from 40 days down to five days using the ITIL framework.
• Business Alignment – The IT organization becomes an enabler as opposed to a barrier in the journey to grow the business. IT is integrated with the business plan at its beginning as opposed to being on a parallel track with hopes of catching up to the business at some later point.
• Rework – With a good repeatable process aligned to the business objectives, the cost of redoing tasks is reduced, if not eliminated, by using best practices to help ensure that organizational communication is effective and work is done right the first time.

EDS has been implementing best practices for more than 40 years to ensure we deliver consistent services and value to our clients and help our clients deliver superior service to their customers. The ITIL framework is built-in to everything we do from Data Center Services to Workplace Services. For us, it's just a way of doing business, and we're continually working to improve.

“At EDS, we've been utilizing a lot of the same how to processes that we're now seeing in Version 3 of ITIL,” says Bernie Mamon, vice president, EDS GM Service Delivery Global Operations. “So we're thrilled to see that the OGC has reached the same conclusions as us, and we know we're both on the right track to helping clients be more efficient and successful.”

For more information on how EDS is implementing ITIL to help support your business, call us today.