KickStart Your ITIL Implementation With "Visible Ops"

Advice by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford (COMPUTERWORLD)

"Practitioners in information technology face pressures on many fronts. In addition to the demands to become more efficient, IT must now address challenges to maintain a secure state and comply with regulatory requirements.

For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is forcing publicly held U.S. corporations to attest to the fact that internal controls are both in place and effective. IT operational best practices, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provide a framework to start defining repeatable and verifiable IT processes.

However, as organizations attempt to use ITIL to begin their journey toward process improvement, they face a very difficult question: How and where do you start? "

Behr, Kim and Spafford have developed a methodology known as "Visible Ops." Since 2000, they have met with hundreds of IT organizations and identified eight high-performing IT groups with the highest service levels, best security and best efficiencies.

What they found most amazing about them was that they shared the following attributes:-

- a culture of change management
- a culture of causality
- and a culture that fundamentally valued effective and auditable controls, promoting fact-based management.

Visible Ops reflects the lessons learned about how these organizations work and describes a control-based entry point into the world of ITIL that others can leverage to springboard their own process improvement efforts.

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