All About ITIL

What is ITIL?

ITIL is an acronym that stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and it is a set of best practices and concepts for managing information technology services, development and operations. Using these as a guide, an organization can construct the procedure protocols, task lists and everything necessary for deployment.

ITIL was created by the United Kingdom Government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s as a set of recommendations. Without a set of recommendations, government and business would create their own IT management practices and policies

The CCTA is now merged with the Office of Government Commerce, an office of the UK Treasury. OGC maintains the ITIL official website at:

www.itil-officialsite.com/home/home.asp.

What once began as a collection of books covering specific practices within IT service management and also based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle created by W. Edwards Deming – the father of Total Quality Management, ITIL has grown into an industry on its own. It was based on the process model based view of controlling and managing operations.

The below image is a simple explanation of the process that ITIL uses.

The below image illustrates the organization of ITIL v3 which includes the following volumes: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

Service Strategy focuses on helping an organization improve and develop their IT over the long term relying on a market driven approach

Service Design focuses on the systems and processes required to support the service and processes which interact with the rest of the enterprise environment.

Service Transition covers the delivery of services as required in an operational scenario and also looks at the project side as well as business as usual within the enterprise.

Service Operation involves the area where the services are actually delivered, problem solving and maintenance of the operation and service desk in particular.

Continual Service Improvement comes straight out of Deming's teachings where the processes are refined and adjusted to change the business moving forward and getting better every time.

The below image is the process model of the ITIL v3 Lifecycle. (source: OGC Best Management Practice official site)

In researching this post, I found that there is support for ITIL using Microsoft Visio 2007. Per Microsoft, Visio is an important tool for implementing ITIL. A sampling of ITIL-related diagram types supported by Visio includes basic and cross-functional flowcharts, workflows, fault trees, input-process-output models, and network diagrams. Visio 2007 also includes a new ITIL template specifically for diagramming ITIL help desk processes. Now that Visio 2010 is coming out, I would imagine there will be more support for ITIL v3. The below image shows the components of an ITIL v3 implementation. There is a PowerPoint presentation which covers the use of ITIL using Visio 2007. Follow this link to get the presentation:
http://visiotoolbox.com/downloads/Howtouse/Visio-2007-ITIL-Overview.ppt

Below is a Process diagram created with the ITIL template in Visio.

One of the companies who actively helps companies develop their IT using ITIL is IBM. Follow the below link and view a flash presentation about what IBM can offer using ITIL.

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/summary/its/a1007588?cntxt=a1000074

IBM
Take the first steps today:

1. Use the IBM Service Management Self Assessment to evaluate IT processes and their importance to the efficiency and effectiveness of your service management implementation.

2. Download the no charge IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool, which can help show you how to bring together best practices, controls and standards.

3. Read the white paper IBM Service Management: Practical solutions for today based on 25 years of continuous thought leadership (PDF, 1.32MB).

4. Read the white paper ITIL v3: What it means and how IBM can help (PDF, 54KB)

5. Attend an IT workshop.

Other things IBM can do for a client with ITIL:
1 - Can help the company align their IT services with current and future business and customer needs.
2 - Can improve the quality of the IT services delivered
3 - Claims to reduce the long term cost of IT services
4 - Has over 1400 consultants who are certified in ITIL best practives
Is accredited to deliver ITIL training globally.
5 - Helps incorporate ITIL best practices with software from Tivoli and Rational, ITIL aligned solutions, Outsourced or in- house solutions.

Testamonial for IBM's services:

Yves Vlamijnck of Belgacom and Gert van Werven of Achmea Active speak about how IBM Tivoli software helps make ITIL best practices actionable. See this website for a video supporting their testamonial: http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01003c/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/LWIS-7XWVA2?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us

Business need: IBM clients Belgacom and Achmea sought to implement IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices to help IT staff gain control of their IT infrastructures and manage internal processes as efficiently as possible.

Solution: Using IBM Tivoli software these companies were able to implement ITIL best practices for incident and change management and automate previously manual processes for greater efficiency.

Benefits: Drastically decreased workloads in contact center by automating up to 80 percent of incident management detection; Decreased downtime by 50 percent over a two year period; Better control of changes to reduce outages

ITIL Certification for Individuals

Individuals can also be certified in their abilities to use ITIL. The ITIL v3 certification levels are: Foundation, Intermediate, Expert and Master.

Pursure your own learning about ITIL as the web is full of sources to further your ITIL knowledge.

More later,

CH

Software Design Patterns & Anti-Patterns

Hello Again,

In preparing for this post, I have spent a good deal of time trying to make sense of the history of software design patterns and how they could actually relate to the physical world. While recovering from a highly pollenated day out in Athens, I found much of the information interesting but at times like an acronym soup filled with a new language to further confuse the reader. This blog post is an attempt to bring some simplicity to this process and explain to the novice.

When discussing the development of any great project one need only to look at history to see when things are planned well and executed with flawless perfection, that it will stand the test of time. Take the ancient Egyptians with the pyramids, or the Romans with the aqueducts. Both were engineered thousands of years ago and still there today. In fact, some aqueducts are still used on a daily basis. What does this have to do with software development you may ask? Simple, when something works in the physical world such as architecture, it will get reused and refined. As structures become more stable, the design becomes more fluid - the same follows in programming. Look at the simple arch as an example. Early arches were simplistic and modern arches can now have vast spans. When an architect decides to build a home, he or she will create the formal drawings and plans. Even if they know something about building the home it is unlikely that they would be the ones installing the electrical wiring, the plumbing or doing the sheetrock. The same is true for software. First, you need to have a solid plan which acts as the blueprint for the project. As with a home, blueprints usually have to be revised numerous times before their final completion and it is also possible that changes have to be made after the project is already underway. This is often the case in software development where there are those who are working on the project, the project manager and the customer. Translating the customer’s need into the programming necessary to complete the task can be an often difficult and cumbersome undertaking.

Software creation has been in an evolution since its inception in the 1940s. Early programming languages were not focused on finding portions of code that worked that could be reused in the future. Modern programming takes the object oriented approach which uses and reuses proven code repeated times making the programs less prone to error and providing consistency for the end user. This brings us to patterns – which in carpet or wallpaper is simply an image or shape repeated over and over. Could this have a place in the computer world???? Of course! Loops repeat commands over and over until they are told to stop and in the object oriented world, we would reuse those patterns which would successfully generate the desired outcome in the software.

Enter Christopher Alexander, noted Architecture expert, Professor, Author and Mathematician. What could he contribute to the software design world? Plenty! In the 1977 book, A Pattern Language (by: Alexander et al), he explains that “a pattern language is about patterns being like words. They stay the same but can be combined in different ways like words in a sentence. They can be used as in a network where one will call upon another. When you build something you can put patterns together to form a language.” (Source: patternlanguage.com) Sounds simple enough. It is a close parallel to how we would want to construct well organized programs.

There are several main works which use Alexander’s ideas and apply them to programming. Beginning first with works by Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham at the OOPSLA Conference in 1984, Coplein & Schmidt’s Pattern Languages of Program Design Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Vlissides (the so-called Gang of Four) Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software and Gabriel’s Patterns of Software.

Design patterns can help speed the process along in programming by using proven templates to solve problems. Typically the programming design pattern falls into one of the following categories: Creational Patterns, Structural Patterns, Behavioral Patterns or Concurrency Patterns. Additionally, there are Anti-Patterns – that go against the ‘pattern’ – there are many anti-patterns which can affect software development.

From a software design perspective, a design pattern is a reusable solution to a recurring problem. It is not the finished programming code but instead a template which will guide you to the proper solution for the problem at hand. This is reminiscent of Alexander’s work. If you are building a house or building a city, there are specific templates which offer a proper solution for the best use. As a guide, it is best for light to enter a room from two directions by simultaneously maintaining as much of a complete wall as possible. That way, the builder or architect has the flexibility to decide where the windows are best suited but is not specifically told exactly where to place the windows on the blueprints. It is much the same in programming, if you know that you need to put a particular component into the program, there is some flexibility to how it is done which is where the design pattern comes in to play.

One example of a Concurrency Pattern is using the idea of a Lock. It prevents more than one person or process having access to the data at one time.

In the above example, using a personal bank account, accessing online would lock out the ATM access and vice versa so that only one would have access to the bank account data at one time. This is often used in a database to prevent multiple people accessing and potentially causing errors.

Anti-Patterns can be just as helpful to ensure that you are following good design principles. It can help you find ways to remedy poor coding and provide a better alternative. When an anti-pattern is detected, it is generally because the code created is ineffective or wrong. Anti-Patterns differ from a bad idea or poor coding in that the action initially seems to be beneficial but instead produces more bad results and a refactored alternative to the anti-pattern exists and is proven effective. Refactoring is a process where code is altered but the functional parts are still the same, the non-functional parts are adjusted to make a better solution. The names for many anti-patterns are similar to familiar terms that come from the boardrooms across the world.

Anti-Patterns are typically classified in one of the following categories: Organizational, Project Management, Analysis, Software Design, Object Oriented Design, Programming, Methodological or Configuration Management. As part of the humor, the following are some of the types of Anti-Patterns: Death March, Big Ball of Mud, Analysis Paralysis, Mushroom Management, Lava Flow, Spaghetti Code, Reinventing the Square Wheel and Dependency Hell. All of these are readily known to programmers although it is possible to be so deep into a project to not realize that the problems are all around.

Much wisdom can be acquired by diving deeper into the subject and I recommend taking some time to read further on both Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns as doing so will help the novice programmer begin to avoid some of the pitfalls that colleagues found before.

More Later,

CH