Two critical success factors in implementing ITIL

Any IT manager who wants to pursue the IT Service Management journey by implementing the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) needs to understand two very important factors well in advance.

o The first factor is to have dedicated, trained and committed process owners.

If you want to have a successful Incident Management process, which continues to improve, you will need someone who is ultimately responsible for his success and who can devote the time and focus to guide and to make sure it actually happens. Many organizations makes it one of the following errors:

o The process owner is non-existent which means that there is nobody dedicated to drive a particular process.

Is there a process owner, but he or she is bogged down in day to day reactive activities or other "more important" business-driven projects, and therefore have no time for unnecessary "red tape" like ITIL.

Ø There is more of a process owner for a particular process - a classic mistake. The idea of ​​ITIL is to have a single, consistent process throughout the organization and with two head chefs at the "cooking process" is sure to ruin the cake. Who will ultimately be responsible if there is more than one owner? Major companies that have successfully implemented ITIL have only one process owner throughout the company, although there are numerous divisions around the world. This ensures that the process is consistent across all divisions and helps break down barriers between departments and divisions.

The main problem here is that companies do not want to spend the money to devote resources to the process owners. Obviously a process owner may have a role division, doing other work and, in particular in small enterprises. As long as no other role is of a reactive firefighting. A person may also be responsible for more than one process. Although these processes should be focusing similar. The Roles Change, Configuration and Release may be shared by one person in small companies, for example. I believe in a big company these roles must be met by dedicated people, and companies that do not fill these roles are not serious enough about ITIL and it most likely lacks the commitment of management.

Which brings us to the second, but probably the most important critical success factor, namely the commitment of management?

If you are responsible for an ITIL implementation, make sure you have the commitment from the top, otherwise ITIL might not become another IT project throwing time and money down the drain.

And management commitment does not mean, "the director says that his commitment." The operator has to walk and talk ITIL and continuously show his commitment.
In practical terms this means empowering the staff through training, tools etc., appointing the right people in the right roles and management using ITIL, such as asking the right relationships and act ...

Kotter of 8 passes for organizational change is actually a good guideline for top management to follow.

Management commitment is probably the most important success factor for ITIL, but in my experience, probably the hardest to find. This is why a lot of ITIL implementations just become a black hole that sucks money.

I think there are a lot of IT managers found under this misconception, that ITIL is a silver bullet to solve all their problems. Just install ITIL (almost like installing a new technology) and everything will be OK. What I do not understand is that ITIL is an important organizational change, including a cultural change. We used to focus only on technology, but now we must focus on the customer.

Another reason for the low management commitment is that ITIL is usually an internal IT department and not any direct commitment from the business. ITIL is a methodology for improving IT and as such the business.

To overcome this, an ITIL project should become a business requirement and commitment is needed from all the way to the top, from the CEO .......