CIO at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) Michael Beckett used an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework to bring about positive change in the organisation’s perception of IT.
Listed below are ANSTO CIO Michael Beckett's top tips on deploying ITIL effectively.
1. Realise that deploying ITIL will take time
It took us 2.5 years to put the basic set of ITIL services in place to begin to see the turnaround. The message is that you won’t do this in the space of six months or a year.
It becomes a capacity issue, since you still have your normal day-to-day work to do. So it’s also something that you yourself, not someone from outside the organisation can do, because part of what you’re dealing with is cultural change. People have to want to do it and adopt it, and do it in addition to their normal work.
2. Look for partners
Despite the need to manage ITIL internally, we did end up going outside for a partner. We got someone to come in and do a no-holds barred ITIL assessment. Knowing how good, bad or indifferent we were let us understand what the issues were. We went off and found groups we could do benchmarking with so as to assess how well we were doing with ITIL -- we joined Help Desk Association Australia and the IT Service Management Forum.
After 18 months we stepped outside the organisation to do a second round maturity assessment from an ISO 20,000 perspective. We knew that at some point ITIL and ISO 20,000 will merge, so as that’s the long term direction, we wanted to know where we stood in relation to both those things.
3. Take your ITIL in manageable chunks
You have to slice your ITIL program up and do it in sections or elements. Sit down with the business, hear what it wants and talk through its priorities. That will help you determine what your priorities are.
We identified 10 to 15 ITIL-type services and that lead us to incident, problem, change and left release to last. There are 15-odd processes in ITIL, and you can’t do them all at once or in parallel. A number of them overlap, too, so you will need the same people, which gives you a capacity issue.
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