Can an IT Services Concern live without ITIL?, please Help

[stud3]

hi,
I am writing a thesis about IT Service Management. One chapter refers to ITIL. I would be grateful, if someone give me Information, reasons about the following questions, that I have:

- What is the difference between using ITIL Tools, which are offered by many
companies and thought to help IT Services companies to get the processes better; and implement IT Processes without the use of these Tools? which is better?, Advantages and Disadvantages in both cases?

- Can an IT Services concern make a good, optimal IT - Service Management without the use of ITIL? Reasons?

- Which are the limitations of ITIL?

I hope anyone can help me and explain me, what I don't know. Greetings from Germany.

[arnoldmram]

stud3,

First of all, I firmly believe that there is NO ITIL tool. ITIL is only a good practice gathered from the industry.

some of the tools given by companies like HP, CA, BMC, IBM etc help in implementing the good practices but for that, they cannot be called at ITIL tools.

Assume a situation in a service desk where there are so many calls that keep flowing in. If one of the tools mentioned above (or anything similar) were not implemented, imagine the amount of confusions it would be created to track the calls manually. I believe the tools are used for comfort and to avoid clutter rather than for "complying" with ITIL. Good practices cannot be complied with, they can only be followed.


You CAN implement ITIL without tools but can you manage it that way. It would be cumbersome way of doing it even if anybody did it.

" Can an IT Services concern make a good, optimal IT - Service Management without the use of ITIL? Reasons? "

Is it ITIL or tools that you wanted to mention.

Advantages of going the ITIL way - The philosophy that "if it has worked for somebody else, it may as well for me"

Limitations of ITIL - My personal views

1) The current version does not give a project perspective at all
2) The CMDB mentioned in the configuration management database ends up becoming a theoritical concept. In reality, I am yet to hear of somebody who has been able to implement a single CMDB for the complete SM.

hope this helps. There may be many more ideas from others.

[stud3]

hi arnoldmram,
thanks for answering, your answer helped me to understand some things. When I asked: " Can an IT Services concern make a good, optimal IT - Service Management without the use of ITIL? " I wanted to mention ITIL as a Framework for IT - Service Management, not the tools.

I only don't understand, when you say: f it has worked for somebody else, it may as well for me" , I understand so, for me as a Service Concern, that offers Services to Customers , ITIL helps me to get better my businesses, for the Customers, because they can receive a better service and can be satisfied with that.

Another question, you are right. I find in many Informations in books, that the CMDB a central database where Releases, Changes, Tickets and so on are saved. What is the reality? Are there databases for every ITIL - Processes but not a central database?, that makes me confuse : -(
What are the advantages if you implement a central CMDB?

Why do you think, the current version does not give a project perspective at all?
I would be really grateful for answers. Greetings.

[arnoldmram]

stud3,

I am not aware of anybody implementing IT service management without basing it on ITIL. The whole idea of ITSM was popularized by ITIL and then BS15000 - the idea of looking at IT as a service and not just a component.

When I said "if it worked for somebody, it may work for me as well", I meant to highlight the fact, that the biggest advantage of using ITIL is help in NOT reinventing the wheel. As ITIL is a set of good practices from not just one individual, but from lots of people in the industry, it can be termed as more or less a good practice to be followed generally by most IT industries.

Practically, an implementation of a CMDB may be both manually and through the use of a tool which may be a Database. Imagine having one large database for updating the whole ITservice management stuff on! It would need to have enormous amount of storage to hold all the details of the components, etc etc..

In most the implementation, while the effort is to build one CMDB, it may practically end up with multiple databases, all put together logically called as CMDB.

On the projects front, I am not sure why it was not factored in the ITIL v2. May be it is going to get factored in ITIL v3.

there may be opinions from others as well.

[stud3]

thanks arnold for answering. Greetings.