My new company, an American MNC in Financial services decided to switch to ITIL. Well ITIL is abbreviation of Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It contains a library or collection of books for IT practitioners which enables the IT department to provide IT necessities of modern Companies such as workstations, servers, network devices, phones, printers, faxes, etc as a service.
The plus point from user’s view is that they get a quick service from IT guys, which can be measured in terms of response time. For the company, it gives advantages in terms of maximum uptime, optimum use of network links, maintenance of and tracking of company inventories in professional manner, etc.
Done with the advantages of ITIL, let us know how it works. As per the ITIL booklets and other sources, it is a common sense based solutions which enables us to make simple processes so that in an event of any eventuality, the processes are to be followed and impact minimized. SO ITIL uses common sense to make processes to resolve the issue. Incidentally, “Common sense is not so common.”
Does ITIL makes any difference? It surely does. Hordes and hordes of companies are switching to ITIL framework and they are getting immensely benefitted from it. They were able to track their inventories, maintain uptime with Telco and WAN vendors in terms of SLA, determine size of IT team so that the Time to respond is minimum, yet no lost of human resources. It also helps companies to make a list of issues previously happened, so that the next time it re-occurs, they could quickly get on it and resolve it. And more so over, the processes are made proactively, to see that if any issues occur, they should not impact the end users.
Still, there is something which is lagging in ITIL. What is it?
ITIL lacks the human aspect of technology. We have made the processes so much complicated that the complete IT department is made a mechanical machine, which is bound to follow the process for its efficient working. An imaginary machine which chews end user issues as its food and excrete the output, the resolution. The excretion by=products include reports like outage report, incident report, SLA reports and many more. That’s simple to be heard of, but the problem is the machines internal working at times become so complicated that it is bound to create friction. Every person, who is the part of the machines thought as if he is a mechanical part, and is ordered/ expected to do his art with utmost rhythmic sincerity. eg: “There’s a fiber cut in an area and the ETA is 5 hours. Though the ETA is known the service desk associate needs to follow up every 30 minutes for the status” The reason is, that’s the process defined and we need to follow it. Where’s the commonsense mate?
To the engineer, he cannot expand his horizons of knowledge, because knowing too many things will be risky. We are more prone to give the engineer the ‘know-wants’ (know only that much by which you can fulfill your job). We are ignoring their needs of ‘know-why’s’ and ‘know-how’s’. The aspirations of future technology leaders are curbed with complex ITIL jargons like demand management, service management and so on. The modern engineer resembles a zombie. ITIL library was started with a noble view of applying common sense techniques to otherwise complex technology. What we have made it is a complex interwoven noose of technology and management which is difficult to understand just like a girlfriend. Sometimes simple and sometimes it baffles you. Everyone working in ITIL framework is more concerned about maintaining their SLA and OLA and it have lost their essence of human touch. Let me quote an example here. Suppose in a medium office (users<500), an outage happens and the cause of outage is unknown. Say, users are experiencing slowness while accesing some applications on network, local LAN. What happens as a process. Users communicate to the service desk/support desk that they are facing an issue. As more and more users report a same issue, service desk depending on a mathematical formula (which consists of total number of users present, users affected, their role etc) converts the ticket in to an Outage. As the source of the outage is unknown, the issue is escalated to all the tems and a conference brige is opened. All the Technology Units (TU’s) are supposed to join the bridge. Ideally what should happen is that all should work together to work for resolving the issue. But what happens is each TU will check the performance of its device and update the incident manager that they are green and issue might be probably because of other TU. This is simply because they need to maintain their OLA and SLA targets. Most of the times, the issue gets resolved with no one owning responsibility and there is no RCA.
The point I want to raise is that we are transforming ourselves into mechanical robots and tearing the very essence of human qualities like logical reasoning, teamwork, co-operation, collective working and common sense.
Ironically the ITIL was started to apply common sense processes to resolve the issues!!!
Happy Reading….
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