John Willis's Blog

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

ITskeptic — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:26:20 GMT

I think the whole area of IT Operations was much overlooked in ITIL V2. I look forward to better attention to it now it is in the Service Operation book front and centre. I too have the ESM background - i look forward to an interesting fusion of ESM and ITSM as ITIL v3 gains traction.

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

botchagalupe — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:37:15 GMT

You got me...

If it's ITSM we are both out of a job. Like I said I posted the question to try and get some real debate on the subject. I work with a lot of the Tivoli products and I posted this question on the Tivoli mainling list and the debate went on for almost a month. The problem was most of it was complaints on how ITIL is being pushed down their throats. My main area of expertise is not really ITSM however it is more focused on a subset - ESM. However, I have a fond interest in how utility computing might effect both.

johnmwillis.com

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

ITskeptic — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:24:43 GMT

I guess the disconnect here is that I am (incorrectly) interpreting your question to be "Does ITSM matter?", or "Do we need to pay attention to the functional processes, one version of which is ITIL?"

But I understand now that you are saying explicitly "does ITIL matter?". Since you read my blog you know I think the answer is "maybe, remains to be seen". I am as skeptical as you. But I don't think commodity server systems change the equation one iota: they're technology, and I think "technology doesn't matter" :-D

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

botchagalupe — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:34:03 GMT

I'm just play devils advocate here. I read your blog and know you are very knowledgeable..

If a server fails and the system autonomously self-heals, do humans need to do anything? Do we need to know it happened? i think so. So there was an incident. The fact it self resolved does not mean we don't still want the incident recorded, and sommeone may need to do something if only after the fact.

These are clusters of anywhere from 100 to a 1000 commodity systems where the work is processed in parallel and failure is expected (google's three rules).

What if they keep failing?

They don't. They throw the cpu board away (google's three rules).

+At what point does the resulting degradation impact service delivered? Who do we tell and when?

Will we ever make a change to the environment? Will we ever replace a main power component? Upgracde the operating systems? Do humans need to consider and approve this change? I think so.+

I am not sure if at this point we are moving into the engineering domain and again maybe be something like Six Sigima is more appropriate. If you look at a GE Aircraft, Nuclear, or a Motorola plant you find a lot less ITIL and a lot more Sigma. The real question is will IT make the "Big Switch" as Carr says, and if so does IT become more like a utility (electricity, water, gas, ...). I know ITIL wants to grow beyond just IT and if it does it might still make sense even then.

With all that said, none of this is going to happen to the mainstream anytime soon. However, hears the rub, IMO the true ITIL adoption rate has been very slow among E5k customers and if it takes to long with ITIL miss it's window as a nother failed methodogy?. It's like what Mark Twain says about the weather... Everyone's talking about it but nobody does anything about it.

How do we predict growth of the farm? On what basis do we order new hardware? At which point will the farm grow beyond the absolute capacity of the technology? of the budget?

I see less than 20% of my E5k customers even using ITIL in a serious capacity and I have never seen any of that 20% anywhere near doing capacity planning as part of ITIL.

Just my 2 cents

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

ITskeptic — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:40:10 GMT

Does ITIL matter to the Operations team managing the servers? (as compared to the rest of the IT Operations organisation). Maybe not.

What if they keep failing? What if something is progressively moving through the farm taking out servers? Do we want to record the fact that there appears to be a problem here? Do we want to assign ownership to someone to work on it, and then track who is doing what?

At what point does the resulting degradation impact service delivered? Who do we tell and when?

Will we ever make a change to the environment? Will we ever replace a main power component? Upgracde the operating systems? Do humans need to consider and approve this change? I think so.

Will we ever conduct a DR test? Do we need a continuity plan?

How do we predict growth of the farm? On what basis do we order new hardware? At which point will the farm grow beyond the absolute capacity of the technology? of the budget?

I think all this matters. You can use ITIL or some other process model, but you still need to pay attention to those processes which is what I think you are asking.

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

botchagalupe — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:56:30 GMT

It's interesting how this title gets a direct to comment effect. If I may summarize the post, I am not asking what ITIL is, nor what it has. What I am asking is, if you are running an autonomic million core data center that is based on Google's three rules, then does it matter as much (i.e., really matter). Like I said in the original question, I don't know. Should there be a hardware change process in a 200k square foot, dynamically orchestrated server environment, that has less than 20 people in the building where computing power runs like an electricity grid? In fact, does a model like Six Sigma become more of a play in an environment that?

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

ITskeptic — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:22:46 GMT

Not only is CMDB vapourware, but even if they build it, it will be a fool's errand to try to implement it - see my articles and posts elsewhere on CMDB as the "dead elephant".

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

ITskeptic — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 08:15:36 GMT

You don't need ITIL to run a static environment where nothing goes wrong and nothing changes and nothing grows. ITIL has nothing to do with technology, nor can it be implemented with technology. ITIL is about how an organisation and the people within it respond to planned and unexpected variations in the environment, from outages to changes to growth. ITIL defines human behaviour.

Every organisation needs the processes ITIL describes. Every organisation already has them. ITIl is just one way of defining a standard approach to performing them. You may not need ITIL but every IT shop needs to be doing what ITIL describes, one way or another.

RE: Does ITIL Really Matter?

KrisBuytaert — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:16:35 GMT

To me ITIl is the perfect terminology to explain to an unexperienced IT manager what his organisation could look like. It's pretty much common sense when you start thinking about it.

Will I religiously implement it somewhere ? Never ..

To me CMDB is still vapourware , unless someone can point me to some real code

RE: BarcampESM Will Rock!

whurley — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:19:33 GMT

You know it will! Thanks to BMC Software (http:www.bmc.com), Zenoss (http://zenoss.com), and FiveRuns (http://fiveruns.com/) for sponsoring this first of its kind event for systems management!