IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a best-practice framework for service-focused IT processes originally developed in 1989 by the U.K. Office of Government Commerce.
As a framework of best practices, or documented common sense, it is a guide for "what to do" in managing information technology. Its key objectives are to align IT with the current and future needs of an agency and its customers, to improve the quality of IT service delivered and to reduce the long-term cost of service provision.
Intro workshop participants split into two groups, and both went through HP's IT Service Management (ITSM) simulation. ITSM is the service management section of ITIL. Key focus areas are quality of service delivery, cost of service provision, IT-to-business integration and flexibility and adaptability of IT.
The simulation involved Formula 1 motor racing. Workshop participants became the IT staff handling operations and support of several race cars.
One group was composed of engineers that were observing race car status on a large screen. When a problem arose, an engineer reported it to the service desk group, which then gathered all required information, wrote it down on a ticket and sent it to the IT support group.
For example a car was down because an engine monitoring system failed. The ticket said: "Farino, one car, Priority medium, question 14." The IT support group marked the Farino application as down, and looked up question 14, which might be something like: "What is 2/5 divided by 1/8?" One IT support group member was assigned to figure out the answer, and the answer was given to another person who would run it to the moderator. Either the question or the answer might be wrong (indicating incorrect data was supplied or the answer was erroneous) or all was correct. When correct, the system failure is repaired, and is taken off the game board.
The IT support group must troubleshoot the problems and fix them quickly. Every meter counted as the team was competing against other computer-simulated vehicles.
A board of directors observed, and a small group of IT analysts would comment on the team's performance after races. Two managers handled communications and worked to streamline the process.
In the beginning, tickets quickly piled up in IT support, stalling everything. The service desk didn't really know what information the IT support group needed. There were communication failures and confusion. Other groups started crowding around the IT support group. The cars didn't do very well and the team lost money. After the race the board of directors was not pleased, giving a rating of 2 out of 10. One director, however, was hopeful, noting that it was the first race and that things might improve. The IT analysts concurred with the board giving the team 2 out of 10.
After this first race the IT team was given time to organize itself. There were several pieces of data that the IT support group needed to do its job. It needed to know how many of the cars a problem was affecting, which applications were having problems, and a question number that would provide the problem needed to be solved. The service desk wasn't providing the support group the question number. Instead, the service desk was providing the support group a code that the support group would use to find the question number. As the bottleneck was in the support group, this code-to-question task was given to the support desk to do.
A knowledge base was drawn up on a board for the service desk as it was realized that several of problems would probably come up repeatedly. Instead of the support group personnel solving the same problems repeatedly they would record the questions and the answers, putting them in the knowledge base. The service desk would check the knowledge base for an answer before submitting a ticket to IT support. The team worked on improving communication, including the prioritization of the tickets, as some problems were more urgent than others. In the second race the team also kept better track of the status of the various problems being solved.
The cars did better in the second race and the board and IT analysts gave the team a 4.
Before the third race management did some preparatory investments. The IT support group checked the data from the last two races, looking for repeated problem areas, which applications failed repeatedly and the causes of the failures. Basically the team was looking for system weaknesses. This data was given to management, which then upgraded one of the systems and paid for equipment to mirror several of the troublesome applications. Thus, if the team had applications that failed but were mirrored, service simply moved onto the mirrored applications, and the problems would be low priority.
The IT support group had a board that displayed each application and server as well as mirrored applications. This was used to keep track of the status of all applications, mirrored applications, and hardware. Prioritization of the tickets handled urgent and important problems more quickly. It was discovered that if several applications failed all at once, then it is most likely the hardware that is the problem rather than applications. The IT support group used the board to determine which applications depended on which hardware. In ITIL terms, the IT support group was using the board for "configuration management."
As a result of learning some basic ITIL principles, the team performed better and better. In the third race all cars finished in the top 10, including 2nd, 3rd and 4th places. The board of directors and the IT analysts gave the team an 8.
