Convincing Management on the Need for ITIL

March 28th, 2014 | Posted by Don Boylan in ITIL
Q:

Hi, I hope someone can help me.  I’ve been dropped in it by my boss and I need to give a short presentation about what ITIL is and why it was created – all at a very high level.

Can someone help me with pointers/advise about how I can start the presentation?  I’ve seen the below and this is how I plan to start the presentation:

“Bob works in the IT department of a Financial Services company. When the Office staff have a problem, they call him and say, “Hey Bob, I have a situation here, Can you fix it”. Bob knows all the employees by name and their assets details. He fixes all problems and runs a great show. The business is going great and the company expands adding more employees providing them more IT Services. Can Bob still run the show?”

I need something catchy like that that follow on from this that then goes into why we need ITIL – all very basic as it’s for people who have never even heard of ITIL.  What can I add on from this?

Can anyone help??

A:

I can see two directions to take this, and perhaps you will want to present both options.

1) The organization becomes reliant on Bob and one day Bob leaves the organization. All the institutionalized knowledge is lost. All the common issues that he was able to solve become insurmountable roadblocks to the business operating overnight. ITIL is there to ensure that there are documented, reproducible processes in place. It helps the organization survive growth and change by capturing (in Incident, Change, Release, and Problem Management) the solutions to issues the business encounters.

2) The future growth of the IT department is organic and without Service Management, leads to heavy siloing of information and knowledge. ITIL attempts to cut through those silos of information by staying focused on the delivery of Services instead of the old school System support. By understanding that Services cut across multiple systems and platforms, ITIL tries to keep the silos of knowledge at reasonable levels. Look at challenges of a growing IT group would have without ITIL while pointing out the way all the Service Support and Service Delivery processes deliver the needed information to differing IT groups.

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