Look at the tools

As ITIL has evolved, a variety of IT vendors have developed tools that support its premises. Tampa's Claypool says his early work with ITIL v2 was slowed by a lack of automated software to support such vital ITIL elements as a configuration management database. "Now," he says, "you can actually go out and buy a product that matches up with the ITIL structure. That helps tremendously."

Cassidy at Progress Energy hails the better integration of topics in v3, and she says that's aided by a similar advance in support tools. She says the company in August will begin using Service-now.com, a Web-based utility that supports ITIL v3 practices. "It has much more integration between different [ITIL] processes," she says. "You could be in problem management but want to update a change ticket, and it's very seamless."

In fact, Cassidy challenges the mantra that companies going into ITIL should get their processes down pat before looking for tools that fit those processes. "We got into ITIL, and by our third year we realized that our tools were not allowing us to do some of the things we wanted to do," she says. "In hindsight, we could have made much faster progress had we had better tools."

Be prepared for culture shock

"Our No. 1 challenge is the changing of our culture," says Claypool. The difficulty, he says, lies in changing a mind-set within IT that believes current practices are "good enough" when in fact they could be much better.

Nearby in Sarasota, ITIL has been in place eight years -- long before it gained popularity elsewhere in the U.S. "Gartner didn't even have it on the hype-cycle chart in 2000," says Bob Hanson, CIO at Sarasota County Government and Schools. Now the county has mastered the basics of ITIL v2, but, Hanson says, "It hasn't been easy. It's not the process itself, it's the human side. The traditional model is that the IT person doesn't mind playing the hero role - that is, swooping in to save the day when processes run amok. And ITIL usurps the hero role by putting structure in place."

Hanson's advice: "You have to tell your people what's in it for them. Getting them out of hero mode does simplify their life a great deal in the long run."

Tampa is just getting started on ITIL but is not reaching out to pricey consultants. Says Claypool, "We are working with Sarasota County. We are looking at their processes and saying, county and city are pretty similar; let's just photocopy their processes and see if they are different from our own and should be tailored."

Don't expect to find -- or like -- everything in v3

Progress Energy's Cassidy acknowledges that v3 doesn't do everything. For example, she says, she looked but failed to find information about how to set up an IT architecture review board. She also found v3 weak in its treatment of project management. "It's mentioned in several of the v3 books, but the integration between project management and the ITIL processes is still kind of squishy," she says.

While many people praise v3's broader scope, at least one user is not impressed with the Service Strategy book, a topic new to v3. "It's my pet hate," says Humphrey at Computer Sciences. "There isn't a lot of process in there. It lacks the practicality you get in the more mature areas."

Humphrey says v3 is weak in its treatment of business continuity as well. "Unless you have sorted out business continuity, IT service continuity has no anchor," he says. He adds that it also falls short on governance, but that a coming supplement will better address linkages between ITIL and things like the audit-oriented CobiT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology).

HP's Cannon says current work to enhance ITIL v3 -- perhaps for a Version 4 -- is focused on expanding its scope beyond data center operations to other areas of technology, such as telecommunications and the mobile devices of end users. That will become increasingly important as computing continues its long trend toward decentralization, he says.