Enabling ITIL with BPM 2.0
Tuesday, May 30th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
From time to time, customers of BPM systems ask vendors for process templates, and the answer they get varies, depending on the vendor’s willingness to move away from remaining a pure platform provider, or the suitability of the suggested business scenario to be turned into a template that could be reused by multiple customers. One set of standard processes that would benefit from the development of such templates is ITIL, and requests for it have been expressed more and more frequently over the past six months.
According to the British Office of Government Commerce, “ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools. The best practice processes promoted in ITIL support and are supported by, the British Standards Institution’s standard for IT service Management (BS15000).”
Up to this point, ITIL processes have been hardcoded into dedicated applications, without much opportunity for process enhancements to be developed by users. The best applications — Kintana among them — would provide advanced workflow capabilities for managing trouble tickets and requests for change, but any deviation from the standard set of ITIL processes would require customizations that are expensive to develop and painful to maintain, especially when changes to the ITIL specification would occur (version 3.0 is scheduled for release in 2006).
In order to work around this issue, several Intalio customers in Switzerland and the United Kingdom have recently started a discussion trying to identify a good way to implement ITIL processes on top of Intalio|BPMS. One benefit of using a BPMS to support ITIL processes is that enhancements to the core ITIL specification could be applied with minimal efforts. Another is the ability to interleave ITIL processes with software development processes and IT asset management systems, effectively laying the foundation for the development of an ERP system optimized for the needs of the IT department. As the responsibility of the CIO evolves from being a Chief Information Officer to becoming a Chief Innovation Officer, such a thing could not come at a better time.
The development of ITIL templates for Intalio|BPMS will take place through our Demand Driven Development program, and a first meeting is being scheduled for the end of June in Geneva, Switzerland. If you’re interested by this project, feel free to drop me a line and I will put you in touch with like-minded folks.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0
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VERY VERY interesting. can we talk to references? Would like to hear more — right on Ismael — the ITIL wave is huge, but too much IT process automation is proprietary. Could be an opportunity to refocus on flip to SAP…
Ismael -
Having spent some time promoting automated processes within IT departments as a software-supported service, I agree with the value of focusing on ITIL. I’m eager to find out more about this work you are doing.
My experience with U.S. IT departments, though, is:
(a) Process automation within IT is frequently shuffled into the PMO with a resulting focus on administrative features. This can be good — or bad.
(b) Justifying BPM within the IT department brings you up against the “shoemaker’s children” irony, i.e., IT is more accustomed to helping business units automate processes than its own processes,
(c) Purely administrative processes (e.g., those related to HR, hiring and firing, etc.) usually need to integrate with existing ERP-based and other “best practices processes”.
James,
We will share more information as soon as possible.
Dennis,
I agree with all three points, and I would certainly not want to focus Intalio on ITIL only. As indicated before, we will get started by developing a set of templates. If customers want more and find a way to get it deployed within their organizations, we will do more.
[…] Ismael talks about how clients are asking for more content out of the box from their BPM vendors. […]
Ismael,
You are right on the hot issue of customers facing the challenge to meet with compliance requirements, i.e. SOx compliance. More often than not, I talk with customers (usually CIOs) about compliance. Often they ask the question about how to implement ITIL processes in much easier ways to cope with the pressure of meeting SOx requirements. Your apporach will shed some light on this issue.
Process and ITIL go together. No question. But this is an environment where pretty complete specialized product suites are playing. I’d be interested in what is the disatisfaction customers have with the suites for the big 4 infrastructure vendors. My blog on one aspect of ITIL is at servicecatalogs.typepad.com.
The ITIL templates could be the first ones to be uploaded to your repository.
Lucas,
Indeed, that would be a very good idea.
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