The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) during the 1980s. This discipline grew out of the need to introduce protocols and guidelines to improve accuracy, effectiveness, and efficiency in British government procedures. Currently, many companies across the globe have adopted the discipline and developed synergistic partnerships with project management principles to create centers of excellence fostering best practices in information technology operations.

Invariably, the challenges facing organizations include how to strategically align information technology service management with the ever-increasing demands of IT-related busniess requirements, while developing effective and profitable ways to manage business processes. An innovative solution points to creating a cohesive partnership between ITIL and project management to strengthen each other, while fostering keen understanding of best practices and applying them during information technology initiatives. Let us discuss below some fundamental prerequisites any organization should consider before implementing the information technology infrastructure library framework.

Customer Satisfaction and Quality
The performing organization should assist the information technology operations in gaining a higher degree of understanding of the importance to satisfactorily meet customer demands. An equally important task for the organization is to ensure its information technology team appreciate the need to embrace a recognized global technical standard.

Set the Executive Tone at the Top
The tone at the top is essential, as such senior management must be fully supportive of the need to implement the ITIL. This invilvement will ensure the expected deliverables of ITIL are squarely aligned with corporate strategic objectives, and its purpose will ensure positive decision toward a successful implementation of the discipline.

Establish Performance Baselines
The performing organization should religiously track and document historical and current project performance trends of the IT unit to determine how performance measures up to the best practices of the ITIL. The organization should establish meaningful baselines relative to organizational capacity to deliver improvements in future performance levels.

Dictate Organizational Objectives
With organizational performance baselines in place, coupled with flexible ITIL menu-driven tools and techniques, the performing organization can now leverage best practices to facilitate meeting strategic goals and objectives. Clearly, the organization should define its strategic objectives and adopt applicable tools from the ITIL framework to effectively guide the company through the processes toward meeting those objectives.

Define Realistic Goals and Identify Cost
Given established ITIL baselines as guides to meeting strategic organizational milestones, the performing organization can now articulate its expectations much clearer with regard to cost, time, effort, and quality. This essentially, facilitates better decision- making in determining the probability of meeting strategic objectives. With the ITIL, the organization has greater flexibility to refine its performance expectations to more measurable, realistic, and attainable levels.

Establish Metrics and Milestones
After a decision has been made by upper management to implement the ITIL framework, the performing organization should identify key performance indicators (KPIs) as touchpoints to facilitate tracking the progress of the implementation in terms of schedule and cost performance indices. With all those precursors in place, strong support and involvement for senior management the company can initiate the planning phase to implement the ITIL framework.

Continuing Discussion
Next time, we will discuss the various components in planning to implement service management in ITIL. This will cover the business and technology perspectives, touching slightly on other ITIL V2 service management components such as the ICT infrastructure management, application management, software asset, and security management concepts. Subsequent discussions will take a closer look at the ITIL V3 library concepts and components such as service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, and continual service improvement (CSI).

REFERENCES:
Additional required readings recommended on the subject of implementing ITIL and IT Service Management:
Randy A. Steinberg, 2005; Implementing ITIL: Adapting Your IT Organization to the Coming Revolution in IT Service Management - Trafford Publishing
Larry Klosterboer, 2008; Implementing ITIL Change and Release Management - Prentice Hall
Behr, Kim, and Stafford, 2005; The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps - IT Process Institute