BEIJING, April 12 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- CCID Consulting, China's leading research, consulting and IT outsourcing service provider, and the first Chinese consulting firm listed in Hong Kong, recently introduced how to understand Information Technology Infrastructure Library ("ITIL") to Chinese Enterprises, and indicated the correct way to understand ITIL.
ITIL is considered an IT services philosophy and a type of workflow for IT management, or is specified as a procedural system. Establishing a set of such standardized service workflows is of great help for improving IT services, preventing IT risks and quantifying IT services. CCID Consulting calls for a correct understanding of ITIL and implementation of ITIL according to local conditions.
Firstly, CCID Consulting believes that ITIL is essentially a methodology and a kind of guiding thought. It lists the "best" goals, activities, input and output of each services management workflow as well as the relationship among all the workflows. However, it does not specify daily operational activities. Its focus is to ensure that workflows realize their due functions and coordinate with other workflows. As how to specifically realize these functions, organizations should adopt different ways according to the actual needs. Perhaps precisely because no specific operational steps and methods are given, many enterprises narrowly understand workflows as anything when they carry out ITIL workflow management. Regardless of their scale, degree of importance or urgency, one workflow model is invariably followed. This is bound to result in "workflows" just for the sake of "workflows". In the end, the significance and values of these workflows are lost.
Regarding how to correctly understand ITIL, CCID Consulting thinks that attention needs to be paid to two issues. Firstly, do all changes need to be controlled by change management workflows? Secondly, do all changes need to follow one procedure or the same activity?
The first issue should be a process of determining the scope of change management. When specifying the scope of change management, we need to avoid excessive change management. But in actual operations, many changes are conventional. When individual conventional changes occur, there is no need to send them to the manager for examination and approval. Changes can be directly implemented. Of course, if it is necessary to handle these conventional changes in the change management workflows, these can be defined as "pre-approval changes". In other words, register them when databases are altered but there is no need to start the change management procures.
To decide what change activities are conventional, comprehensive evaluation and examination will be needed. For example, regarding conventional changes such as modifying report form titles or creating a user ID, we may see these activities as services requests rather than change requests and use the management workflows to process them. Excessive management of these tasks in the change management workflows can only make change management complicated and inefficient, resulting in double protests from the business departments and the IT personnel.
The latter situation belongs to a problem of change management types. In the change management workflows, change requests may be divided into conventional change, standard change, emergency change, item change and so on. For different types of change, different change management procedures and corresponding provisions for authorization, examination and approval should be formulated. In addition, quantitative assessment indices should be set for the processing time in each link so that the work is completed within the set time.
When IT is managed through workflows, a full understanding of the nature of ITIL will be needed.
When actually applying ITIL, enterprises also need to combine it with their actual situation. CCID Consulting suggests that the following specific methods be used as reference:
-- First, there is a need to specify the objectives and goals of
workflows. Why do workflows exist? What problems can be solved by
workflows? What impact or consequences will result if the workflow is
not adopted? Through such level-by-level earnest analysis, many things
may not be as complicated as first thought.
-- Second, conduct analysis and comparisons. Are efficiency and effect
improved or lowered before and after ITIL is implemented? Through
workflow implementation, how many of the previous problems can be
solved? How much is the cost of solving these problems? What new
problems are caused following the implementation of new workflows?
Regarding obstacles in the implementation of ITIL, CCID Consulting suggests that the following measures be adopted:
-- Explain the necessity and rationality of implementing ITIL to
employees, teams and even the whole enterprise. Effectively organize
employees to complete their daily work, and form vigorous operational
norms and work habits; introduce professional technical management
teams to offer consulting services; and offer intern and training to
key management and technical personnel.
-- Companies should establish a series of management systems and
standards; build powerful management support platforms, such as
centralized hardware monitoring, centralized platform monitoring,
centralized application monitoring; generate events through management,
and problems through events; and perform management through the help
system.
-- Finally, what needs to be stressed is that ITIL is only a kind of
framework standard and methodology for comprehensive IT services
management. In the specific implementation of IT services management,
there is also a need for enterprises to fully understand the philosophy
of ITIL, focus on their own ability, scientifically evaluate their
resources and conditions, and make operations based on the actual
situation.
About CCID Consulting
CCID Consulting Co., Ltd. (also known as CCID Consulting), the first Chinese consulting firm listed in the Growth Enterprise Market of the Stock Exchange (GEM) of Hong Kong (stock code: HK08235), is a direct affiliate of the China Center for Information Industry Development (hereinafter known as CCID Group). Headquartered in Beijing, CCID Consulting has so far set up branch offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Harbin, with over 300 professional consultants and industry experts. The Company's business scope has covered over 200 large- and medium-sized cities in China. Apart from home market development, CCID Consulting is establishing international cooperation links across the United States, the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, by setting up agents in the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Italy and Russia, with the aim of going global.
Based on four major competitive areas of the powerful data channels, industrial resources, intense knowledge and deep understanding of information technology, CCID Consulting provides customers with consulting, research and IT outsourcing services covering strategy planning, IT application, marketing strategy, human resources and information technology outsourcing. Our customers range from industrial users in IT, telecommunications, energy, finance, automobile, to government departments at all levels and diversified industrial parks.
CCID Consulting is committed to becoming the No. 1 brand for strategy consulting, the No. 1 consultant for enterprise management and the No. 1 expert in market research. For more information, please visit our website at http://en.ccidconsulting.com/.
For more information, please contact:
Grace Gao
CCID Consulting Co., Ltd.
Tel: +86-10-8855-9020
Email: gaojie@ccidconsulting.com
