An ITIL Consultant

An ITIL Consultant

An old friend and colleague of mine, Lane Inman, used to repeat a mantra that “Operational Readiness is all about Technology Adoption”.

“Surely not?” you say, “It’s about… Operations… and, erm, being Ready… right?”  Wrong. Operations for operations sake is The Road to Hell.  It’s not about Operations, my friend, that is just a means to an end.  ITIL, is just a means to an end.  This is what Lane says, and Lane is right.

Technology Adoption in this sense is about technical solutions in support of an effort to increase business value (either by reducing cost, increasing revenue, or both), but hey use whatever definition you like – this isn’t ITIL…

If ITIL is to be useful for anything other than being a lingua franca, it is making technology adoption successful.  Why is this?  Please step in to my office.

Firstly, I forgive you for thinking that ITIL was about operations or service delivery and NOT technology adoption, because ITIL seems to hold IT Infrastructure at arms length with a rubber gloved hand and a contorted face.  Find me any reference to virtualization (been around since 1998, people) or cloud… or, find me an ITIL Practitioner who can successfully merge tech and ITIL: they do exist, and if you find one you need to hold on to them like you would a life raft in the North Sea.

Secondly, if ITIL is useful for anything other being a new lingua franca then it is useful for pointing out the pointlessness of big and clumsy processes that are barriers to technology adoption.  ITIL present many barriers that will slow your Technology Adoption down (like a chicane to a Formula 1 car), and leaves it to brilliant folks like Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford to turn Change Management from a blunt, heavy, useless and quite-frankly-dangerous tool into “brakes on a car that let you go faster”.

I can just hear the ITIL folks saying, “Yes, we slow down technology adoption so that it is done right!” <<< is there a speed limit for technology adoption?  Or is the ITIL speed limit as useful as the 40mph speed limit on empty dual carriages in the UK?  What’s the impact of this false speed restriction?

I have a new use for ITIL: rather than lighting the way, it shows me the dark areas to avoid and take care over: what to beware of and what to change to be successful at adopting new technologies like Cisco UCS, VMware virtualization, Desktop as a Service and other great solutions that are only possible on “better than physical” virtual environments.

So, next time you have someone talking about ITIL to you, ask them some questions on my behalf and see if they blush:

  1. What constitutes a virtualization change record?  Do you need one for VMotion?
  2. How should I do Fault Isolation in a Desktop + Broker + ESX + UCS + LAN + SAN environment <- that’s IT Infrastructure baby, which is 3/4ths of ITIL.
  3. How do I do Capacity Management for a Desktop as a Service offering?

You see, to some people, ITIL makes processes like Change Management sound like a _good thing_ (and it is, if done correctly), but ITIL is actually making Change Management a _barrier to technology adoption_.  It puts up the barrier but doesn’t tell you how to succeed.

Ergo, to succeed at technology adoption you have to do processes like Change Management correctly for your use case <- see what I (and Lane) did there?  We made ITIL useful by turning into the thing it tries most not to be about: IT Infrastructure.

Related posts:

  1. Making ITIL real: Change Management for Technology Adoption
  2. Poor IT hygiene is a barrier to technology adoption
  3. Is the ITIL make-over like putting lipstick on a pig?
  4. Technology meets Service Management
  5. The ITIL believers are massing, Pink with embarrassment?