America's New ITIL

Public-sector CIOs are taking notice of the rapid rate at which private industry is adopting IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. The latest set of best practices, known as ITIL V3, with its life cycle focus and formal approaches to governance, offers a greater potential to enhance the role of IT in driving business success. 

At first glance, ITIL adoption might appear too costly. And justifying the investment may be difficult in the public sector in an era of budget reductions and deficits. But issues that drive ITIL adoption in the corporate world -- regulatory compliance, the demand for more and better services from a growing customer base and the need to cut costs -- are often the same ones public-sector IT professionals face every day. And government entities that use ITIL are already reporting gains in these areas.

ITIL has its roots in the public sector -- it was developed by a UK government agency in the 1980s. However, private enterprise was first to embrace it.

ITIL V3 has a stronger management structure to drive efficiencies and help IT organizations in their quest for continual improvement. And its key performance indicators and balanced scorecards will help formalize IT governance.

With momentum building in the private sector, and with ITIL V3 offering an even stronger foundation for success, the time is ripe for the public sector to welcome ITIL. Some public-sector IT leaders are already doing so, and they are discovering that ITIL enables them to achieve their mission to support and empower the agencies, departments and governments they serve.

Compliance Drives Change
While private-sector CIOs worry about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and countless state and federal data privacy regulations, public-sector CIOs have their own set of mandates and directives that keep them awake at night.

The Real ID Act of 2005, the Office of Management and Budget's Federal Enterprise Architecture initiative and the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 are just a few examples. Like their corporate counterparts, government CIOs must prepare for and undergo audits to demonstrate regulatory compliance. Some federal agencies and state governments even require efficiency reviews.

Most regulatory requirements focus on control and repeatability, and auditors look for proof of strong governance and uniformity in handling tasks. Compliance requires foregoing ad hoc tactics for consistent and best-practice processes, and it means deploying systems-based solutions that enforce and automate these processes to minimize human intervention and eliminate human error.

CIOs with solid, standard processes are ahead of the game. For those without them, ITIL offers a proven framework of best practices for service and support processes, such as incident, problem, change, configuration and release management, and for service delivery processes such as capacity, availability, service level, financial and service continuity management.

As a result, CIOs don't have to invest in defining their own set of standards and are given a faster path to effective IT governance and control at the process level. CIOs can also better demonstrate to auditors that they are meeting or exceeding compliance requirements.

Service Quality is Job One
One of the biggest advantages ITIL can bring to government is a customer-centric orientation. ITIL promotes the idea that since customers pay for a service, they have a right to demand quality. In the public sector, the customer is the citizen who expects the government to deliver many services -- everything from issuing building permits to fixing potholes and securing the homeland. But the customer is also the government employee who uses IT systems to ensure the public gets quality service.

Quality IT service means systems are available when customers need them. It also means that systems are performing at peak