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GCN Home > 05/19/08 issue

Tools and techniques

GCN Leadership Awards

By GCN Staff

The winners of this year’s GCN Technology Leadership Awards used some of the most effective technologies and project management techniques available. Here is a brief primer on those approaches.

ITIL

What it is: The Information Technology Infrastructure Library provides a framework by documenting best-practices approaches to managing IT services.

Developed by the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce, ITIL’s approach is explained in a number of books and continues to evolve — it currently is in Version 3. ITIL provides checklists and other procedures in areas such as incident management and service delivery, and it has gained international acceptance.

To get more information, start at www.itil-officialsite.com.

What it can do: ITIL’s systematic approach can help organizations improve IT development, operations and delivery of services. However, implementation can be a slow process, and it can require extensive staff training.

Example: Drew Jaehnig, chief of the Operations Division at the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Joint Staff Support Center, used ITIL as a guide for reorganizing JSSC’s service-desk functions in one of the first successful ITIL implementations in the U.S. federal government.

Fast fact: ITIL got its start in the late 1980s in the British Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency and was called Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management. It caught on in Europe in the early 1990s. In 2000, Microsoft used ITIL as the basis of its Microsoft Operations Framework. ITIL Version 2 was published in 2001; Version 3 followed in 2007.

ERP

What it is: Enterprise resource planning software has been around for some time, but its role in large organizations could grow as more enterprises seek to consolidate systems and integrate their data. The effects of ERP, which grew out of an approach called manufacturing resource planning, extend beyond information technology to all facets of an operation.

What it can do: Operating from a central database, ERP can allow you to integrate data and systems and, by extension, help enable the data sharing within and outside an organization that many government agencies strive for. Implementation can be difficult, however. It often requires breaking down long-established IT fiefdoms in addition to being expensive and requiring thorough planning and ongoing training.

More news on related topics: IT Management



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