ITIL Process Terminology

The terminology used in ITIL is another challenge that IT practitioners face, it is much like the terminology that is used with software development. A good example of this would be the fact that for years software developers have used confusing terms much like change and configuration management to communicate how code changes are versioned, corresponded, reviewed, and released.

Are you seeing the pattern here yet? Moving on, these are very well recorded disciplines described in the Capability Maturity Model, which was developed by the Software Engineering Institute in the 1980’s.

Even so, as most IT practitioners can reluctantly attest, you can have the most talented developers working with the best change and configuration management and still have terrible service levels due to the sub-standard coordination with IT operations.

The changes and the updates that are made by your developers may even fail. This could result in large amounts of Break/Fix fire-fighting, the blame game, and a continuous counter productive association between IT operations and research and development teams.

It is said that most of downtime is the direct result of changes that are made by authorized IT personnel. In order to achieve a high availability and reliability, production changes must be managed. Without this management there is very little capability to achieve any predictable level of service. There are also various areas where changes can come from, other changes can even come from patches, maintenance releases, outage remediation, and even hackers.

Working with a full-grown Research and Development organization is a true asset for an IT operations group, especially one that has first class change management processes in place.

Situations such as these mean that the research and development team will manage the IT operations release management and change management teams to better synchronize and organize how software releases are positioned into production.

Conclusion

ITIL is very obviously an unrivaled collection of best practices, and it can guide IT practitioner toward improvement. That said it is important to understand that ITIL is complicated, and there is no volume that will hold your hand and guide you through the process. ITIL is just like any other tool, how well it works for you and your organization depends on the skill and dedication of the person using it.

The core of most IT operations are where change and configuration management processes can be found, this is due to its very descriptive nature. Those who wish to take on ITIL but are not open to exploring how their own processes work in comparison to ITIL are most likely to be very dissatisfied with the end results.

First Page: Mastering ITIL