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Computerworld - In 2004, the Food Lion supermarket chain needed to automate its change management to help comply with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. It decided to adopt ITILs change management processes, but initially it put aside the rest of the best-practices framework. Were not going to do everything ITIL says to do  not if it doesnt make sense for us, says Dale Edmiston, the companys senior manager of IT operations.

Even so, Salisbury, N.C.-based Food Lion LLC soon began to look seriously at the other pieces of ITIL and has been expanding its adoption ever since.

Like many companies, Food Lion turned to ITIL to help with one problem area and ended up using it much more widely. Thats because ITIL  the Information Technology Infrastructure Library  is a framework of IT best practices that has something for everyone. The service support and service delivery sections, for example, include guidance for incident management, problem management, configuration management, change management, release management, IT financial management, IT continuity management, capacity management and service-level management. Try finding a company that doesnt need improvement in at least one of those areas.

In fact, the breadth of ITIL can make it seem intimidating. We have to explain exactly what ITIL is, what value it brings and how to get the process going, says Rick Lemieux, vice president of ITSM Solutions LLC, an ITIL training company in Lexington, N.C.

But the bottom-line value is something anyone in IT can understand. ITIL teaches you what you should be doing to align the IT goals with the business, says Lemieux.

Start Small

Although adopting ITIL involves a lot of work, it is not terribly complex, especially when you take it one step at a time, starting with the areas that need the most improvement.

At Carfax Inc., a provider of vehicle history records in Centreville, Va., the trouble area was capacity planning. Thats what got us started, says senior analyst Robert Stinnett. We liked how ITIL handled capacity planning, so it just sort of grew.

Stinnetts experience with ITIL began in 2004, when Carfax bought BMC Software Inc.s Control-M enterprise job-scheduling software. BMC offered classes on ITIL, so Stinnett and his colleagues signed up.

For Carfax, the first step toward applying ITIL was to diagram IT proc­esses and workflows. We had huge flowcharts on the wall  for a credit card process or the running of a vehicle history report, says Stinnett. We broke each process up into services, like the dealer log-in, with Server A talking to Server G, and so on, says Stinnett.