ITIL: Little Acronym, Big Opportunity
Over the past few days, visitors to this site have been searching the term “ITIL” quite frequently. So I figured it was time to share some basic info about Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and its importance to the managed services movement.
ITIL isn’t a technology, a service or a tool. Rather, ITIL is a collection of best practices for IT activities and processes. Although it was developed about 20 years ago, ITIL only became widely implemented in the past decade. Managed service providers don’t sell ITIL; instead, they adhere to its practices and philosophies in a wide range of activities from project management, systems design, change management and service delivery. Think of it as a template for IT management and services.
During meetings last week in San Jose, MSP Alliance President Charles Weaver indicated that ITIL would become increasingly important to service providers that want to give customers peace of mind. And you’ll notice that Entuity, an MSP Alliance member, pitches the importance of ITIL in its own company description (see the bottom of this press release).
Hello,
I just saw your posting and thought I’d share a resource that might be of interest to your site visitors.
Last year my company, Pink Elephant, released a white paper titled ‘ITIL, IT Governance amp; The Managed Service Provider’.
The white paper examines the role of ITIL between the IT outsourcer and the customer organization. With increased requirements from customer organizations to have their external IT service providers aligning with ITIL to meet IT governance objectives, among several reasons, this paper arrives at a timely moment. It manages to explain why MSPs should start adopting ITIL and what customer organizations need to know about how ITIL functions in a MSP, and how this can impact IT service delivery.
This paper is freely available on our site if you copy and paste this link into your browser:
https://www.pinkelephant.com/NR/rdonlyres/CACF7591-183E-49F8-AC3F-995DC18EAECE/433/ITILITGovernanceTheMSPWhitePaperv42FINAL.pdf
Regards,
Ann Lamanes
Manager, Public Relations
Pink Elephant
My frustration with ITIL and COSO (and anyone remember FCAPS?) is that they are just frameworks. The are long on generalizations, and very short on specifics. They dictate what should be done, but not HOW. This problem is only compounded by the fact that the frameworks were designed with the enterprise in mind, while the world we service consists of small businesses. There has been almost no attempt to scale the frameworks down to our Lilliputian world. (Is COSO the lone exception?) Nevertheless, it is there and we have to deal with it. I just wish there was more written material available (at less than ITIL rates), and that some work was being put into a “reasonable standard of care” with specific processes and procedures like the AICPA provides for the accounting world.
A couple more articles I think you readers will find interesting on this Managed Service provider topic.
http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol3iss47.htm
http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol4iss01.htm