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Many IT professionals consider the Information Technology Infrastructure Library a standard for IT best practices. ITIL offers best-practice guidance for IT service management, including service support and service delivery.

In theory, the ITIL model makes sense. In practice, however, many ITIL initiatives fail or take longer to achieve than expected. This is because ITIL requires ongoing, highly detailed process tracking and control, which most organisations try to do manually. Instead, you should implement ITIL using automation to help improve your implementation success.

ITIL best practices act as a framework for process improvement and governance for IT professionals who are responsible for ITSM. By adopting and adapting ITIL to your needs, you can significantly:

• Increase availability by reducing your IT infrastructure downtime and instability while cutting mean time to repair
• Reduce your operating costs and improve IT staff productivity
• Improve the quality of your internal and third-party IT services
• Raise customer satisfaction

ITIL also can help you build a foundation for service excellence while meeting budget and regulatory requirements.

ITIL requires you to catalogue your environment, track what is changing and enforce best practices and change processes. But most organisations try to achieve these goals manually, which is almost impossible to do. Manual processes are vulnerable to errors, time limitations and competing priorities, which is what causes some ITIL implementations to fail.

The goal of ITIL is to improve IT service quality, and most organisations rely on manual processes. As a result, these processes are vulnerable to errors, time limitations and competing priorities.

• Tedious manual processes – Manual processes are tedious to follow, and IT staff may circumvent them. Manual processes are also difficult to enforce. When IT staff members need to work on problems outside normal business hours, they might not take the additional time required to update records because either they have other issues to work on or they just do not have the time. Tasks such as backing up configurations tend to have a lower priority. As a result, they may not use process controls.
• Impossible manual verification – Most infrastructures are so complex and dynamic that no one knows the complete architecture and its elements, how it is changing or what interdependencies exist. Managing this environment is difficult enough; manually verifying physical infrastructure and validating approved changes is a colossal task that is almost impossible.
• Overwhelming tracking responsibilities – Ideally, every time you upgrade firmware, change a port or detect an incident, you should document the activity. You also should understand how your infrastructure assets relate to each other. In reality, resource limitations mean deep knowledge of thousands of systems and accurate, detailed tracking is rare in most IT organisations.

To achieve success with ITIL, you must automate your processes, not just deliver statistics and device reports. Automation can provide a current, accurate picture of your overall infrastructure and system relationships, no matter how large, how dynamic or how widely deployed your enterprise is.

HP Data Center Automation Center solutions provide integrated, comprehensive discovery, tracking, policy enforcement and process automation across servers, networks and applications. It discovers and visualises your virtual and physical IT environment, automates manual tasks and audits your infrastructure to meet security and compliance requirements. In addition, it allows different groups within IT to work from a consistent view of your enterprise while automating changes and coordinating change controls, significantly reducing errors and change collisions.

Implement ITIL successfully and automatically with HP Data Center Automation Center to significantly accelerate ITIL implementations and achieve far greater success than with traditional, manual methods and point solutions.

To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/getbsa