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ITIL vs. MOF Service ManagementThis page helps you score high on exams by in-depth comparison of the ITIL Service Management standard vs. the MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) in a susinct way that does not simply rehash other documents. | Topics This Page:
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What is ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, and MOF?ITIL (pronounced "eye-till") stands for "IT Infrastructure Library". It is called a "library" because effort began as a set of 5 books documenting each discipline's vocabulary around a "framework" of processes, and "best practice" guidelines for IT (Information Technology) Service Management published in Norwich, England, by The Stationery Office (TSO) of the UK OGC (Office of Government Commerce). Although ITIL has been widely adopted as a de-facto standard used for self-assessments , in 1991 the independent non-for-profit itSMF (it Service Management Forum) was formed to formally define British Standard BS 15000 so that accessors such as BSI have a basis to evaluate Service Management vendor organizations in the UK. Its affliates in the US and other countries also certify individuals Although expensive as books go, ITIL books are not "proprietary" in that organizations need not have permission or license from the OGC to benefit from ITIL. ITIL books aim to be "descriptive" in that they describes the "what", not the "how" like the "prescriptive" Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) which extends and adapts the 11 ITILv2/ISO 20000 functions to 22 Service Management Functions (SMFs) MOF groups into four Quadrants reminiscient of capability maturity levels separated by explicit management reviews Other (perhaps competing) standards for good practice include COBIT (Control Objectives for IT) V4 on IT governance and Sarbanes-Oxley on corporate governance, Six Sigma, CMMI, P3M3 (OGC's portfolio, programme and project management maturity model), PRINCE2 (Projects IN Controlled Environments -- a method that supports some selected aspects of project management), EFQM, eTOM (Enhanced Telecommunications Map), eSCM, ISO 12207, BS 8600, ISO 15505, COPC-2000, ISO 15288. | Differences between British English (en-GB) and American (en-US) spelling:
Portalsitil.co.uk is the official home of the IT Infrastructure Library.ITIL Community Forum en.itsmportal.net ITIL and ITSM World was one of the very earliest ITIL related websites focusing on ITIL. 15000.net, the ITIL and ISO 20000 Forum is the first independent self styled user community dedicated to ITIL. IT Survival FREE ITIL Fundamentals 5-hour on-line class professionally developed and offered at HP |
Why Bother? The Benefits of Adopting ITIL
IT Managers train employees in ITIL and pay them to do more paperwork clarifying functions, roles, processes, and activities hoping to achieve these objectives of Service Strategy:
According to ITIL experts Kevin Behr and Gene Kim on BetterManagement.com
Proctor and Gamble publicly attributes nearly $125 million in IT cost savings per year to the adoption of ITIL, constituting nearly 10% of their annual IT budget. Similarly, Shell Oil utilized ITIL best practices when they overhauled their global desktop PC consolidation project, encompassing 80,000 desktops. After this project was completed, they can now do software upgrades in less than 72 hours, potentially saving 6000 man-days and 5 million dollars. |
ITIL Terminology -- Confusing?
A "role" is a set of responsibilities for a person or team. "Capabilities" consists of functions and processes.
Each "process" defines a structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific set of objectives.
"Value" is a combination of utility and warranty.
A "process owner" is the role responsible for ensuring that a process is fit for purpose. A "process manager" is the role responsible for the operational management of a process. A "service owner" is the role responsible for the initiation, transition and ongoing maintenance and support of a particular service. "Service Management" is a set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services. "Services" is the "means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve, without the ownership of specific costs and risks." A lot of ITIL is about giving names to groups of seemingly random concepts together. ITILv2 (which is generally equivalent to the ISO/IEC 20000 standard) made a big deal of separating functions among SS and SD (Service Support from Service Delivery). The definitions of these clasifications confused people even further:
Service Delivery = tactical planning and control This classification is used to separate ITILv2 EXIN exam modules ITSS and ITSD.
Thankfully, the ITILv2 acronym SD (for "Service Design") was changed to mean
"Service Delivery" during the
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This page contains all the acronymns and words in these FREE itSMF pubs:
ITILv3 Acronyms
itSMF Pocket Guide - Introductory Overview of ITIL v2
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Certification of Individuals
Since Oct. 2000, Individuals are qualified by the British ISEB (Information Systems Examinations Board) administered by two Examination Institutes:
EXIN accredits training providers such as:
The differences among the two chains of centers administering tests: The EXIN ITIL Foundation Certificate entry-level qualification is gained by correctly answering 26 out of 40 question multiple choice questions during the one hour Prometric exam EX0-101 (ITV3F) or older ITILv2 exam EX0-100 (ITILF), at the end of a 3-day course offered by an accredited provider. Foundation certification is a prerequisite to the 60 minute, 40 multiple-choice question Prometric EX0-102 Essentials Certificate in Microsoft Operations Framework exam introduced June 22, 2005 The ITILv3 Expert certification is obtained by taking the ITILv3 capstone ITV3MLC "Managing Accross the Lifecycle" exam after taking 4 or 5 intermediate exams.
The ITILv3 Master certification is in development as of Jan 2009. Early drafts elude to a peer evaluation to verify demonstration of practional application experience, especially around cultural and organizational change. On Dec 1, 2006, this itSMF US page notes that Current pass rates nationally are averaging 97% on Foundations, and 47% on the Managers exams. | This section distills the ITILv3 Qualifications Scheme
The book recommended by EXIN for ITILv2 exam preparations is: This book is the 2nd edition to: IT Service Management: An Introduction by Jan Van Bon, George Kemmerling, Dick Pondman
Cap Mgmtr 3-day class for $1,695
PRINCE2 Process Model Wall Chart [Registration Required] ITIL Process Map Wallchart PRINCE2 Process Map Wallchart 1-903494-00-1 APM (Association for Project Management) Body of Knowledge (Bok) version 4 1-903494-00-1 APM (Association for Project Management) Body of Knowledge (Bok) version 5 apm.org.uk 0113300174 Service Delivery, Capacity Management Norwich/London: OGC/ The Stationery Office, 2001 ITIL Service Support and Service Delivery Process Model double-sided Map Key Skills ILX (December 1, 2005) from Mindscope David Pultorak |
Subject Area Functions in Intermediate Exams90-minute ITILv3 Intermediate exams structured around the life-cycle concept are worth 3 points. Capability exams are 4 points.
NOTE: "Technology Management" is sometimes written as "Technical Management".
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Assets (Artifacts) by Process/Function/ServiceIn my opinion, one of the greatest contributions of ITIL is its standardization of assets and the Processes and Services who "own" them, which might prevent or clear up a lot of territorial in-fighting. However, the list of ownership below is compiled from indirect reference the literature. ITIL defines "Service Assets" as a combination of capabilities and resources that provide value to customers to achieve their business desired outcomes.
ITILv3 added the concept that strategic information are assets as well, owned by the ISG (IT Strategy Group) introduced by ITILv3. |
Certification of ITIL Products
The other great thing about ITIL is that standardization has encouraged development of automated tools because a company doesn't have to invent their own terminology which customers may or may not adopt.
Products for ITIL are certified by Pink Elephant at $60,000 per year |
ITIL Controls
At its core, ITIL is about effective IT Gonvernance controls:
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ITIL Organizational Assessments
ITIL is not a "standard" like ISO 9000.
Compliance to the BSO 15000 and ISO/IEC 20000 standards are based on
The itSMF self-assessment areas are:
itSMF developed a complementary book on Software Asset Management (SAM) and began development of ITIL version 3 on July 2004. Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) Self-Assessment Tool (SAT) 2.0 provides a summary of the following:
The Life Cycle of: Evaluation / Procurement / Defining / Design / Development / Deployment / Delivery (Operations) / Decommissioning / Testing / Maintenance / Improvement / Support / Administration / Training |
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)The MOF extends and adapts the 11 ITIL processes to 22 MOF Service Management Functions (SMFs) grouped into four Quadrants reminiscient of capability maturity levels separated by explicit management reviews |
MOFv4 was published by Microsoft April, 2008. MOF and the Microsoft Team Model were defined based on ISO 15504 (also referred to as SPICE) from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to provide a normalized (common) approach to assessing software process maturity. MOF combines with Microsoft's Risk Management Discipline for Operations which integrates proven risk-management techniques and OGC Management of Risk products (M_o_R?) CRAMM is a formalized security risk analysis and management methodology originally developed by CCTA (now part of the OGC). MOF combines with the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for project implementation guidance on software development to provide an integrated set of guidance share responsibilities and unified approach of common disciplines to the overall IT life cycle. An "Aggregated risk" is the overall level of risk to the programme when all the risks are viewed as a totality rather than individually. This could include the outputs of particular scenarios or risk combinations. |
MOF vs. ITIL Service Management Functions
The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) (microsoft.com/mof) (V3 in 2003) is "prescriptive" in that it organizes stakeholders into 7 Role Clusters (organization "departments") within a Team Model. Here is my reconciliation of how MOF adds to ITIL's list of functions.
MOF, a pocket guide, 2nd Edition (Van Haren Publishing, 2004) by Dave Pultorak (of Fox IT), Pete Quagliariello and Rolf Akker is the book recommended by EXIN. Microsoft Operations Framework Essentials Instructor-led Two-day Course 1737 Microsoft Operations Framework Changing Quadrant instructor-led 3-day class 1787A
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RACI Model by Function - Process Information Flows
R = Responsible for getting the work done.
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An ITIL Book for Each Discipline
Conceptually, according to itSMF's Overview, ITIL "bridges" businesses with their information and communications technology infrastructure (Hardware, Environments, Networks, Processes, Databases, Software) through these broad disciplines:
Each of these disciplines have organizational functions, similar to ISO's FCAPS:
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The Business Perspective
The MOF Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR) applies business perspectives to IT as a strategic asset. |
ICT (Information and Communications Technology)
Service Catalog (Catalogue)Some examples of service solutions in a Service Catalog are: Domain specific knowledge.
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CMDB (Configuration Management Data BaseThe CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base) contains data obtained from automated discovery or manual instantiation of these logical databases:
It is owned by the Configuration Librarian, who has authority to update configuration items (CI's) in the CMDB. Each CI can be Connected to, Part of, Copy of (have relationships with) other CI. Dennis Drogseth commented in a May 2005 Network World article:
Use the DCML (Data Center Markup Language) XML-based standard for interchange of data describing IT Service environments. Its maintenance by OASIS keeps it an open heterogenous vendor-neutral standard for interoperability. It provides a semantic structure to describe several types of relationships among Configuration items (CIs)
Domain specific knowledge.
The Capacity Database (CDB) records activity within Capacity Management. |
Metron-athene in the UK, co-author of the original ITIL Capacity Management definition. myCMDB by Tom Klein, a hosted application infra on MS.NET platforms ESS (Enterprise Service Suite) from Bouyant Products which proclaim themselves "ITIL-verified" simply means that they have given money to consulting company Pink Elephant to review their software according to minimal functional requirements" established by the consultants, not the ITIL organization. |
Planning to Implement Service Management
"Planning to Implement Service Management" examines the issues and tasks involved in planning, implementing and improving Service Management processes within an organisation. It also addresses the issues associated with addressing Cultural and Organisational Change, the development of a vision and strategy and the most appropriate method of approach.
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IT Infrastructure Library Practices in Small IT Units (CCTA, Aug 1995, Paperback) is being revised. |
Smaller, Better?
Several organizations claim to offer slimed down version of ITILv2 to deliver a "bigger bang for the buck". The four phases of Visible Ops (using TripWire tools) are: IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) presented as a complete, integrated process model.
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The above is a new edition to: |
Service Delivery Management
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Service Support
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Service (Help) Desk |
Incident Management |
Problem Management |
Change Management |
Release Management |
Configuration Management |
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- | Record, Classify, Investigate, Resolve, Close, Monitoring, Escalation | Identify, Classify, Solve, Raise KE, Review KE for Error, Analyze trends in KEdb Major activities involved with Problem Management: - Problem control - Error control - Prevention of problems - Identification of trends - Obtain information from Problem Management data - Complete review of major problems | Log/Filter, Categorize, Assess, Authorize, Schedule, Build, Test, Implement, Review | Define Policy, Schedule, Design/Develop, Build, Test, Accept, Plan Rollout, Distribute/Install, Activate | Plan, Identify, Control, Status accounting, Audit/Verification of CMDB |
In ITIL v3, service requests are handled by a new, independent Request Fulfillment process separate from incidents, with their own records, prioritization, and fulfillment approach. This is because in ITIL v2, where all service requests were handled as part of Incident Management, service requests may get delayed due to other more important incidents, or unnecessarily passed through too many checks and balances that were more appropriate for handling problems and outages. Ref: ITIL Service Operation book, 2.4.5
Application Management
"Application Management" describes the management of applications from the initial business need, through all stages in the application lifecycle, up to and including retirement. It places emphasis on ensuring that IT projects and strategies are tightly aligned with those of the business throughout the application lifecycle, to ensure that the business obtains best value from its investment. |
Security ManagementThe Security Management function details the process of planning and managing a defined level of security for information and IT services, including all aspects associated with reaction to security Incidents. It also includes the assessment and management of risks and vulnerabilities, and the implementation of cost justifiable countermeasures.
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