When Nextel merged with Sprint two years ago, it brought more legacy network management tools and one-of-a-kind data collection systems into the Sprint fold, exactly what John Montross, VP of Sprint’s managed network operations, didn’t need.

The telecom marketplace was moving rapidly toward the convergence of voice and data, and Sprint needed to be able to offer its customers customized combined services. Before it could do that, its operations information had to be gathered and standardized. Services couldn’t be packaged or tailored for customers if the knowledge in one operations data warehouse wasn’t available to a service built with another, and few of those data warehouses could talk to each other.

To make sense of this Tower of Babel, Montross turned to the IT Infrastructure Library, a set of best practices for IT data center operations and services, encapsulated in eight volumes and published by the British government. ITIL is sometimes referred to as ‘the manager of managers,’ a way to establish standard practices in how IT staffers manage data center operations and how they use information captured by a data center’s network management, systems management and troubleshooting tools.

Done right, the use of ITIL can shave 25 percent off a company’s annual IT operations expense, according to Forrester Research.

Customer push
Sprint is still early in the adoption process. It completed the operations assessment last September, and full-scale adoption of ITIL is going to take another three years, says Montross. Because Sprint is a services provider, though, it’s feeling some heat. Customers regularly ask him what he’s doing with ITIL, Montross says. One, Fidelity Investments, has already adopted ITIL and urged Sprint to do so as well. “It’s on everybody’s radar screen,” he adds. One reason is because ITIL makes the processes that govern data center operations documentable, auditable and repeatable.

Sprint’s customers like that because it helps in compliance efforts for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other government regulations. For instance, a financial institution might have to provide details about network performance to banking regulators. Besides compliance, ITIL helps Sprint assure its customers that best practices are being followed for security purposes.

“Customers come in and ask, ‘Tell me how your network is secure,’” Montross says. “It’s the same conversation, over and over again.” Most companies are interested in ITIL for help with their internal integration and standardization efforts. The increasing popularity of service-oriented architecture is driving ITIL adoption, according to a survey of 333 IT managers conducted by Ovum Summit. SOA will strain IT management tools and techniques “to the breaking point,” Ovum analyst Mary Johnston Turner warned when the survey was published in August. “Traditional IT management approaches assume tight connections between systems, while SOA environments are much more loosely coupled,” she said. Customers who have implemented ITIL best practices “are twice as likely as other firms to report that their SOA investments are meeting all their IT business goals.”

Tom Bishop, CTO of BMC Software, which markets ITIL-related products, tells the story of a Wall Street firm which fired a security manager for closing a port in a firewall that wasn’t supposed to be left open. The security didn’t realize that an IT staffer was using the port to connect a trading application to traders, and revenue was lost when the port was closed and the app failed. Use of the port for the trading application hadn’t been authorized by an IT manager, nor documented by the staffer. According to ITIL principles, the wrong man got fired, Bishop says.

Rigorous ITIL practices will eliminate 60-90 percent of unplanned downtime, says Dennis Drogseth, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. But imposing standard practices is easier said than done, because IT professionals like the technologies with which they’re familiar. When one person documents a best practice, naming tools and technologies, and they aren’t the ones another staffer uses, resistance sets in, Drogseth says. “Who they are and how they work is allied to the tools they use.” Montross picked people who were respected by their peers to lead his initial ITIL project and rewarded them for executing it well. “Some staff members say, ‘Oh, this is just the flavor of the month,’” he remarks, “but overall, the favorable reactions have exceeded my expectations.”

British roots
ITIL began as a project sponsored by the British Office of Government Commerce to raise standards in British IT operations by providing guidelines for existing benchmark standards such as the British BSI 15000, which became the basis for ISO’s 20000, and which sets standards for IT as a managed service. ITIL also heeds other standards in its guidelines and best practices such as the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology, a set of best practices to ensure auditable, accountable systems.

The basic ideas have been around for about 15 years and have slowly gained currency in the UK as well as in Europe and Asia, where about two-thirds of large businesses have adopted the principles. About a third of large US companies have started to adopt ITIL principles, Drogseth says, and another third have heard about them.

Along with BMC, several other companies market ITIL products. Software that manage user issues and code change management systems typically run from $25,000 to $35,000; service accounting systems are $55,000 to $60,000; and configuration management databases $100,000 to $125,000.

Sprint is a good example of the need for ITIL. With a variety of systems and network management tools (including CA’s network troubleshooter CA Spectrum; Voyence’s network configuration tool, VoyenceControl, sold by HP; and Lucent’s network services manager, VitalSuite), Sprint couldn’t rely on the tools to do things in a standard way. Further, voice services managers who’ve been around a while did things in a way that was different from the processes of younger data managers, making telecom service convergence an awkward internal goal.

Sprint will soon replace one of its last legacy data warehouse systems. “It doesn’t meet what we require today for supplying our level of communication services,” Montross says. Replacing such warehouse systems with ones that are ITIL-compliant sits well with customers.