Ann All spoke with Patrick Bolger, chief marketing officer of Hornbill, a provider of service management software. Hornbill collaborated with Ken Turbitt of the Service Management Consultancy Group Ltd to prepare a survey on ITIL adoption. Also contributing to the survey were the IT Service Management Forum, the Service  Desk Institute, Pink Elephant, ITP Report online and Mauricio Marrone of  the University of  Göttingen. You can register for a complete copy of the survey online.

All: Your survey found 56 percent of companies still using ITIL v. 2. Of the 44 percent using ITIL v. 3, 13 percent adopted it from scratch while 33 percent moved from ITIL v. 2. Are you surprised more respondents haven’t yet moved to ITIL v. 3? What are some factors that appear to be holding companies back?
Bolger: I think there are a number of reasons. First and foremost, If you look through the survey you’ll find the number of processes that have been adopted in v. 2 is still relatively small, a bit surprising considering that it’s been available for almost 20 years. I think in a lot of cases IT is not as strategic a component of the business as it would like to be. That varies considerably, of course. If you look at financial institutions, where IT failure can result in huge financial losses, they tend to get it right. They consider availability and capacity and all of the other stuff that you should be doing with your general IT services. Organizations that operate IT that is directly in front of the customer, like the kiosks at airports that allow you to change your reservations, too, these kinds of organizations have a real desire and a real need to get the processes right and make IT a strategic component of what they do. But taking a broad brush across all organizations, in some IT simply isn’t as critical. If you apply those concepts to supplying desktops around your organization, yes it’s important, but it’s not as critical or as visible that those services are maintained to the same degree of availability.

One of the difficult things for an organization to make progress with ITIL is securing backing from the business. Even within IT itself, I think you have a culture that’s resistant to change. “We’ve always done it this way, so why should we change how we are doing it?” And from IT’s customers within the organization, if they can shout loudly enough and get something today, then why would they want to do something that may make them wait longer to get access to an application? The standard process in many organizations is for someone to complain to their boss, who complains to his boss, who shouts to the CIO, and then something gets done. IT has had to perform to heroic levels to deliver and support services where they haven’t been part of the planning. That’s something IT would dearly love to change. There’s little visibility into how much it costs to deliver something and how many resources are required. ITIL gives you mechanisms to start measuring this stuff, and it’s no mean feat.

One of the analogies I use for v. 3, it’s a bit like learning a language. It’s a maturity step over v. 2. If I’m going to learn a new language, I don’t walk into an advanced class. I’ll start with the basic structure, with verbs and how to put sentences together. In IT terms, that probably translates into my service operations processes.

All: So organizations don't feel like they're ready for v.3 because they still haven't mastered v. 2?
Bolger: I think they’re still struggling with some of the v. 2 processes. If you look at the v. 2 charts within the survey, you’ll see five processes under service support and five under service delivery. Service support is things like incident, change and problem management. These are things IT operations deal with on a day-to-day basis. It’s first, the area IT is comfortable with, and second, the area the business thinks IT actually does. If the IT and business leadership don’t see IT as a more strategic component, it’s difficult to get yourself out of operational mode and into the more strategic mode.

All: And you mentioned that business users are so accustomed to getting things done by making demands, so they don't see a benefit in moving to ITIL?
Bolger: The business doesn’t really care about ITIL. As far as the business is concerned, it’s something that IT does. They just want the services. But how IT manages them is entirely up to them. I was talking to someone who has written a book about ITIL, he went to the various governing bodies and asked for examples of organizations that had implemented all 23 processes of ITIL v 3. Of course, there weren’t any. I think v. 3 is aspirational for a lot of organizations, which is why we’re seeing them move from v. 2 to v. 3 for their existing processes. Things like service design, the concept of actually thinking in advance what kind of availability a service will need, how many customers will subscribe to it, that all makes perfect sense. But in a lot of organizations, there just isn’t that type of a strategic planning process. So IT doesn’t necessarily get to know what is coming down the line. Instead, they respond to surprises all the time.

All: What are the most challenging differences between v. 2 and v. 3?
Bolger: If you look at the [v. 3] books, ideally what you want to do is start with service strategy. I think they missed a trick in terms of service strategy. The book itself was highly academic, highly theoretical. Although I can see what the authors wanted to do, it was delivered largely to a practitioner audience. The Office of Government and Commerce, the owners of ITIL, are starting a project to bring out a new edition. They are clear to say it’s not a new version, but some of the books are going to get a major overhaul.

All: The survey found the majority of respondents are not moving beyond incident management, change management and problem management, suggesting that companies are not moving toward the service lifecycle approach stressed in v. 3. Is it because they don’t yet feel their v. 2 processes are mature enough?
Bolger: We’ve had ITIL about 20 years. I don’t think it became mainstream until the early 2000s, so it’s only been around about a decade in the mainstream. From 2003 onward was when it got some serious momentum. So we are still getting used to changing from an operational mind set to a more strategic one. That takes some time.

If IT is operating in an operational mode and getting a better handle on things like configuration management and change management, that’s all well and good. But it still doesn’t make IT a strategic function. That comes from leadership and from a desire within the business to recognize the value of IT and how it can enable business growth. If that exists, then you’ll get some serious backing from management.

All: So you need a strong business sponsor. That can probably be a challenge, as business may see ITIL as an "IT thing."
Bolger: Right. That mind set isn’t going to simply change. One of the things we’ve been doing is something we call bite-size ITIL. We say, “We’re not going to sell you a full set of software.” We start with a tool, with the option to upgrade at any time. People are sill focusing on getting the basics right, so we sell them a tool that does incident, change, problem and service-level management. We say, “When you can prove you can operate more efficiently, you can get the go-ahead for more.” We advise them not to talk about ITIL, which will probably raise some objections, but to talk about service improvement or “service first” or whatever they want to call it.

When you’re logging problems and predicting stuff and becoming more proactive, then you’ll see a significant benefit. As you do it, baseline where you were before. Then you can say, “We need to set up a service catalog. And underpinning that needs to be a CMDB (configuration management database).” Now you can begin to progress your maturity levels, and underpinning it all the way has to be this continual service improvement.

I think that’s the mistake most organizations make. It’s like the ball rolling uphill. You have to have some measures in place, like a block that stops the ball from rolling backwards. So define what you’ve got in place and what metrics you are going to use to determine the improvements you’re making. When you’ve figured that out, you can plan the improvements you still need to make. Part of that is taking on some additional processes to help you with things like service definition and service-level management. A lot of organizations aren’t even doing those basic things.

All: So you recommend taking a step back, in a sense?
Bolger: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. You’ll fall flat on your face if you start with service strategy aspirations. Start with what’s wrong now, what’s really hurting us, and what efficiencies can be created by just addressing those. To move forward, you need to create capacity on your existing team. Improving the basic service operation process can give you that capacity.

You need to be realistic. Think big, but start small. Be realistic in terms of where you are today, what you want to achieve in a short time period. Don’t underestimate the cultural resistance you’re likely to face, and don’t forget continual service improvement is what it’s all about. If you haven’t got the metrics in place to measure where you’re going, what you’re achieving, what’s still going wrong and what you need to address next, then you’re unlikely to keep the ball rolling.

All: It seems as if that's the point where you might face the most resistance, when trying to transition to the more sophisticated processes. How can organizations deal with that?
Bolger: A customer from a real estate company said they introduced the Web self-service concept and got real pushback from the business. First they encouraged people softly, saying “Did you know you could log this in a self-service manner?” Then they went a little harder, with “Is there any reason you couldn’t do this in a self-service manner?” They used metrics to find the people who were reluctant, then went to them and showed them how it worked. Now 73 percent of all requests – incident, service, change – came in through self-service in September. Ninety-five percent of their calls are responded to within five minutes, and the perception of IT has gone through the roof. Their people are free to solve problems, because they are not spending as much time answering phones. If you do it that way, I think you can get past resistance.

All: Thirty-two percent of the respondents said they intend to remain with ITIL v. 2 but add some v. 3 concepts, 19 percent haven’t yet looked at v. 3 and 17 percent don’t anticipate moving to v. 3 or have already ruled it out. Do you think some v. 3 processes may never catch on?
Bolger: V. 2 stressed it was a framework. With a framework, you have options to adopt and then adapt the processes. It doesn’t really mention framework in v. 3, so it does seem as if it’s trying to be more prescriptive. To some extent, the framework concept is at odds with the service lifecycle. The service lifecycle says start with strategy, go through design and so on.

But I think the point is, if you’re an immature organization, starting with strategy isn’t an easy thing to do. In my opinion, if I was the CIO of an organization that wasn’t very mature in its approach and I was looking at where I wanted to go with ITIL, I’d start with ITIL v. 2. The education is more detailed, for one thing. In my foundational class, I’d cover 10 processes and one function in three days, two-and-a-half days of study and the remaining half-day for the exam. If I do v. 3, in the same period of time I cover 23 processes and four functions. So if I’m relatively immature, I’m going to want more depth on the operational stuff. Once I am doing that, then I move to my bridging course to understand the concepts introduced in v. 3.