TheMadAdmin

What You Gain By Running a Non ITIL Shop

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) are a set of guidelines for running your I.T. department. They are like a best practices for setting up a department and having it work with business units, to provide those units with the IT services they need and agree to. I could go on an explain what it is and what you gain but I would rather tell you what you gain by not running an ITIL shop.

1. You always Know Who Is Responsible….It’s Not Me Without defined roles and a written policy you get to play hours of "WHo’s Handling This?" and the answer always points to that paragon of power Not Me. This has to be the hardest working person in any department I have ever heard of. He handles Contracts, On Call Duty, Escalations (Making and getting, what a hard worker). If you ran as an ITIL shop this person would loose his/her position. Roles and responsibilities would be defined and no one would have to through everything to Not Me any more.
2. You Will Never Miss an SLA (Service Level Agreement)….The printers broke when will it get Fixed?…As soon as I get to it? All jobs will be due at the same time, mostly at As soon as I get to it, some will of course be done When I Have Time. Business Unit’s will never have an idea of when they can truly expect something to be back in working order. Since there is no SLA then there are also no priorities, except the one for when the owners/managers come screaming about a printer that’s been out for 3 weeks, there is always that priority.
3. Tracking..You don’t Need No Stinking Tracking. In a non ITIL shop why track? There are no SLA, no Priorities No Tracking. That way you also get the bonus of having to do the same work over and over again. Yeah without the hassle of Tracking you also won’t be able to identify the problems that happen over and over again. You will never see them for the symptoms of the larger root issue that is causing the smaller problem, so you get to solve that small problem ….FOREVER.
4. You Support Everything. Hey without SLA’s to slow you down you’re Johnny On The Spot. If it has a plug you support it. That’s right, you don’t define your scope of responsibility then it encompasses it all. Nope managers and users will never be reasonable, they will expect you to cover all equipment, because they know for damn sure they aren’t. So when
   your clearing a jam in that paper shredder, that has claimed three fingers this year, sit back and be thankful your not an ITIL shop.
5. You Get To Support 24/7 Along with supporting every item, without those SLA’s in order you will be supporting the office every hour. That’s right 9 to 5 is out the door. You are now 9am to 9 am Sunday-Saturday. Thanks to the blackberry, and home internet access as well as not negotiating with the business units up front you are one of the companies only Full time Employees. That’s right, you have gained the ability to get disturbed at any given moment. Free time is a thing of the past, you will now call it down time. Because you will never know when you will be called on to fix a log in or rush to the city because the sewers are flooding the sales floors and the desktops are on the floor. Yep this beauty gets rid of the need to have a personal life because you won’t have time for one.
6. You get to learn new and exciting tech. Yep without defined escalations you will get a problem and work it all the way through weather you know what your doing or not. Sure this may lead to more problems but heck you get to solve those as well. By the time you have gotten that person to be able to login again, hell you might have rebuilt 3 servers, and recreated your active director, just to find out their network connection was dead. But think of all you have learned. This goes hand in hand with not having change management, yep no one to say wait a minute, you can’t do that. You have the password and the power go to it cowboy. Since you have no free time anymore this did not interfere with anything, except the companies ability to do anything besides play solitaire.
7. You Get The Blame Best thing is when you say no to some stupid request the blame for not doing it is all yours. No blaming the policy or pointing at the agreed upon service. Nope you get all the blame. Those ITIL shops love to point to the Service levels and other negotiated agreements and say, sorry that is not in the agreement. Or say you want to have Video Conferencing at every desk world wide sure we can do that….Here is what it will cost and we can charge your business unit right? We only do what the business wants. Those wimps can’t take the hate. But you are a real man and take it on the chin every time you put your foot down and you will not have it any other way.
8. Your IT Shop is the Companies Biggest Black Hole For Cash. Yep. No figuring out what department bought what, who used support 24/7, no idea who requested the live video conferencing software on every desk. Nope you get all the credit, or in this case debt. Yep when it comes to costs baby your the top. Even when it comes to cutting them. Yep your first on the block. Not marketing and their video conference system.

Those are some of the many benefits you get from running a non ITIL shop. Man I can see why you would want to taking all the stress and all the blame. Ahhh life is good.

TheMadAmin