Sun and ITIL - why?
Tuesday Jun 12, 2007
Within the larger field of IT Service Management, does Sun have anything to say, anything to offer, regarding ITIL? I'm sometimes asked "why should Sun be interested in ITIL? - Sun is a technology company"; and "why would anyone come to Sun for advice on ITIL?"
I'll leave the discussion about Sun's use of ITIL and CoBIT internally for now - subject for a later posting - but you may want to refer to the ISACA case study on Sun
The importance of ITIL is as an "enabler" for our customers – it's something we can use to help them. If they are looking to improve they way in which they are delivering IT services to their users, or to drive towards some goal related to operation excellence, ITIL provides a framework for that. The term “best practice” is used and abused; it's really just plain good practice- if you want to support business, support your users, ITIL gives some ideas about how to go about it.
As an aside – ITIL is not a rule book, it's a framework. Brad Vaughan has captured it nicely in his blog - “"ITIL cannot be implemented"
But I've still not answered why Sun would be interested. It's really about making sure that our customers are able to get the best out of their investment in our technology. Some of our technology is complex, and we have teams of experts to help our customers architect and implement large scale infrastructures. However - all too often the focus is on “getting it up and running” - then what? To look at the flip side: there are lots of anecdotes out there of major system outages; (not on Sun kit specifically!) that have ultimately been caused by a failure of process, not technology. Wrong patches applied, no change approval, no backout plan.... and so on.
So, in a way Sun's interest in ITIL could be seen as analogous to why we provide training courses, or work with open source communities: it is to enable our customers to make better use of our technology.
We don't promote ITIL on its own, as a specific offer. Firstly we are a technology company. Secondly, ITIL is systemically embedded into a number of our services, such as OCA and Managed Operations – back to Brad's point. ITIL is a means, not an end.
What is different about Sun's approach here is that we are not specifically trying to sell consulting, training, or systems management software (unlike most other vendors with an ITIL “play”). Sure – we will charge – we are a commercial company. But we are not doing this to hook our customers into endless consultancy, or “advise” them to buy our management software. It's about our customers getting the best use from what we are providing them.
So ITIL is important; but not a “core” offer for Sun (part of the reason for the name of this blog)
Does Sun have any credibility / track
record in ITIL?
Well, since we started taking a more systematic approach, about 8 years ago, we've moved to a point where all our Services personnel have some level of awareness. More and more staff are achieving ITIL Masters; I even come across Sales people who've been certified (in ITIL, that is!). We also have a number of staffers who've joined Sun with deep, lengthy experience (in other words
they're really old ;-) )
Sun has also been an active sponsor of the itSMF for a number of years. We were one of the first Global sponsors, in 2002,and have provided speakers to events such as the global conference in 2003 - Lesley Lambert / Bobbi Burn's presentation ( you may need to be logged into the itSMF portal to get access)
In addition, Sun staff have been instrumental in getting local chapters going in France, Norway, Venezuela.
In the past, Sun's point of reference for ITIL was based around SunTone. Now that we've retired SunTone in favour of ISO/IEC 20000. As we move forward we will be addressing that standard; and transitioning to ITIL version 3 . More about these two another day.
|
|
|
|
