A few years ago, I attended an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) training session at a major financial services company with >$3-billion annual IT spend. Each of the line of business IT managers being trained had about 100 people working under them, and each had multimillion-dollar IT budgets.So at that time, one of the first steps of ITIL training was to ask these folks what the process was for some common scenarios. For example, if they needed a new exchange server for their group — who did they order it from, who installed it internally, and how long would the whole process take, start-to-finish?And what we found was that all nine of them had different answers … there was a complete lack of consistency across the processes. The point of ITIL is to get your IT organized in such a way that you’re as streamlined as a McDonald’s burger assembly line. When someone needs something, that’s a service that you provide to them. Getting an Exchange server up and running, for example, should be a very well-baked service, with very exact costs known. ITIL also draws an important distinction between “incidents” and “problems.” Time and again, IT groups work to fix incidents rather than problems — for example, tinkering away at an FTP server (that no one is using internally), when an Exchange server is down (a ‘service’ that might be worth more than $50k to that type of business).The ITIL principals suggest that the proper way to run an IT organization is like a service provider, and large enterprises today are increasingly charging individual business units for IT services. These so-called “operational level agreements” are getting more common every day. Technology Industry