Did you Agree with the Pitfalls ?

Did you read the 5 Pitfalls of ITIL article a couple of days ago?

Did you agree with the pitfalls ?

Let's review Pitfall [1] - look out for Dr. ITIL's comments embedded within the text...and feel free to post your own comments anbd let us know what you think...

Pitfall 1: Structuring around ITIL processes.ITIL processes each involve a broad cross-section of the professions (specialties) within an IT organization. **What does involve really mean? Sure there are interfaces, inputs, overlaps in real life - but each process does not comprise of a broad cross section of professions, let';s read on...** Conversely, multiple ITIL processes may draw on any given profession. Thus, if you design your organization chart around ITIL processes, a given profession (needed by many processes) will be fragmented throughout your structure. **Not really, shared service centers work in commercial organisations, plus it benefits from a service approach rather than a silo'ed mentality**

This fragmentation of professions creates two significant performance problems:
Work will be replicated by multiple groups that are all studying the same skills, developing the same methods, and reinventing work products. **This is pushing the argument too far! The degree of fragmentation results from poor management and a lack of control in the service environment - not just because an organisation seeks to drive results through processes** Because work (and skills development) are replicated, costs rise. Due to reinvention of products and methods, consistency is lost. Synergies are lost when multiple processes no longer share common people, information, methods and reusable objects. **As above - this is a doomsday scenario, pushing the argument without considering control and governance in the environment**

With any given competency scattered about, specialization is reduced. Instead of one consolidated group of experts comprising professionals who focus on sub-specialties, many different groups have to know the entire profession. By necessity, they become relative generalists. When specialization is reduced, performance naturally suffers. Generalists cannot keep up with the literature as well as specialists because there is too much to cover, so the pace of innovation slows. Generalists’ knowledge is wide rather than deep; and for lack of depth, quality suffers. Generalists take longer to complete projects, since they are continually at the beginning of their learning curve; therefore, response times are slowed. Furthermore, no one leader will be responsible for a given line of business (now fragmented).

For example, a given service (such as storage) will be managed by multiple process managers (availability, capacity, etc.). No single entrepreneur has the job of planning, budgeting, managing, delivering and growing that line of business. This results in a loss of accountability, entrepreneurship, and customer focus. Additionally, there’s no single owner of infrastructure. This leads to internal friction when multiple groups, each accountable for attributes of the infrastructure (its reliability, security, performance, etc.), compete to control those assets.
A healthy structure gathers everyone of a given specialty into a single group, and focuses them on running a line of business. Infrastructure is owned by these various entrepreneurships. For example, storage devices should be wholly owned by the storage-services entrepreneurship. **If you study the ITIL models the concept of the services layer overarching the underpinning technology layers comes through loud and clear. The two layers work in harmony. You can absolutely have an owner of the Infrastructure and an Owner of Service, as apparent in thousands of IT organizations worldwide.**

This encourages accountability and entrepreneurship. Once structure sorts out the lines of business within IT, ITIL processes can draw on their products and services as work flows across organizational boundaries. In short, ITIL describes processes that need to get done. Structure defines who does what within those processes. **ITIL describes so much more than processes, but it just so happens that the core texts lack a prescriptive approach due to their evolution and multiple specialists having written the earlier books. ITIL V3 promises to address these issues.**

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