Companies look to reshape IT operations with ITIL

Computerworld - CHICAGO -- The word on GuideStone Financial Resources' help desk could be summed up by what company employees called it: "the helpless desk." Not only was the moniker unflattering, it reflected lingering system problems that hurt employee productivity.
With that in mind, the Guidestone IT department turned to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standard. A driving goal of ITIL is to reshape IT operations into a service model, with service levels and detailed processes spelled out for delivering and managing IT. Proponents say the standard can help cut IT costs and improve business alignment -- which may explain the interest in it among IT managers at the AFCOM data center conference here this week.
AFCOM is the Orange, Calif.-based user group that focuses on data center issues.
At GuideStone, tech support workers were retrained or replaced with systems analysts and employees who could probe application problems. Using workers with better skills boosted help desk payroll costs but led to increased responsiveness and a dramatic turnaround. Most IT problems are now resolved in seven minutes, said Dawn Sawyer, operations manager at Guidestone. In contrast, some problems once took longer than a day to get fixed, she said.
Sawyer began implementing ITIL processes across Guidestone's IT organization four years ago and work is still under way. Although Sawyer said many of her peers haven't adopted ITIL, she recommends that anyone considering it start with the help desk, given the "marketing payoff" it's likely to have throughout a company.
ITIL was developed in the 1980s by a U.K. government agency, the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency. The standard incorporates best practices across a spectrum of IT processes while detailing and documenting how to manage these processes.
Jim Marrs, data center manager at Austin Energy, said the Austin-based utility started implementing ITIL this year. He sees it as a framework for organizing service processes, "so IT is more focused as a service."
For IT staffers, that means documenting activities in more detail, as well as spelling out the steps and processes used to manage incidents and changes.
Getting IT workers to change their ways isn't always easy, said Slater M. Butts, director of network services at Safeway Inc., in Salt Lake City. When it comes to standards, IT workers "don't like to adhere to them... they just like to carry the banner."
Butts, however, sees value to the ITIL process, which his IT operation began gradually deploying four years ago. Having a framework "takes cost out of the process because you don't have