ITIL makes sense in concept: focus IT efforts on the support and delivery of services that meet the needs of the business. Manage risk. Improve. Rinse and Repeat. It’s really a common sense approach, and it’s hard to argue with that.

The CIO who attends a 60 minute talk about IT Service Management likes what he/she hears, but at 2:00 AM she wakes up with some nagging questions:

So… How do we actually DO this? ITIL talks about all of these different types of Managers… Change Manager, incident Manager, Problem Manager, Configuration Manager, Availability Manager, IT Service Continuity Manager, Capacity Manager, etc, etc… Does ITIL require us to hire an additional management team? If we repurpose the managers we have, how will all of the existing managers’ work get done? They’re already overwhelmed as it is!

Indeed, this is a common dilemma. The IT organization already has a number of Managers, but they’re arranged in a different way. For example: a Director of IT Operations, a VP of Engineering, Several IT Managers (broken up by technical and functional group – i.e. Linux Manager, Desktop Support Manager, Network and Telecom Manager, Storage Manager, etc).

The problem is that the majority of the IT organization is currently built around delivery of technology, not services. Even if everyone wants to deliver end to end service, the daily activities of the staff are focused on delivering the technology that they are responsible for. The Network team is focused on network throughput and uptime, the Unix / mainframe / storage teams work on the equipment of their particular type, and so on. Everyone has their own set of metrics to concern themselves with, and problem solving efforts often focus primarily on proving that the root cause lies elsewhere.

Specific projects bring resources from the separate areas together, but projects are, by definition, temporary. Moreover, these cross functional projects are often seen as a nuisance and an interruption to the “normal” workflow, since they require one or more members from a given team to be pulled out of the rotation.

To address this issue, start by writing job descriptions for everyone in IT (your legal and HR teams will likely agree that this is a good exercise anyway). What you’re likely to discover is that the existing managers all perform a LOT of different roles, and that there is a lot of overlap.

To illustrate, here are some of the tasks I performed as Manager of the Linux and Enterprise Storage teams at a well known Domain Name Registrar:

• Select hardware and software vendors, evaluate solutions, manage contracts
• Develop reporting tools and forecast future purchasing needs
• Develop operating and capital expenditure budgets
• Hire and manage staff, conduct performance reviews, develop quarterly MBO’s for each staff member
• Serve as Project manager for any storage or Linux related project
• Develop system architectures, including software, OS, hardware, and network concerns with a focus on business continuity and high availability
• Evaluate and approve changes to the Linux and Enterprise Storage Infrastructure
• Lead team in scheduling and deploying new applications to the live environment
• Troubleshoot incidents and determine root causes “often with only a portion of the information necessary to make a decision” (quote taken directly from my job description)
• Manage software and OS licenses and support contracts
• Research and evaluate new technologies, make recommendations, purchase when appropriate
• Work with corporate accounting team to track physical assets from purchase to retirement and schedule
  
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