From Deming's Cycle to ITIL 4

INTRODUCTION

ITIL, formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a set of detailed best practices and processes  for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on paralleling IT services with the needs of business.

ITIL describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists which are not specific to one organization nor secific to one type of technological development.It can be applied by an organization for establishing integration with the organization's strategy, delivering value, and keeping  the minimum level of competency that can be achieved. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement. There is no formal independent third party compliance assessment available for ITIL compliance in an organisation. Certification in ITIL is only available to individuals.

Since July 2013, ITIL has been owned by AXELOS, a joint venture between Capita and the UK Cabinet Office. AXELOS licenses organisations to use the ITIL intellectual property, accredits licensed examination institutes, and manages updates to the framework. Organizations that wish to implement ITIL internally do not require this license.

ITIL has been adopted by thousands of organizations worldwide, including NASA, Microsoft and HSBC. There have been case studies with The Walt Disney Company and Müller Dairy in which the the ITIL framework was used  to make improvements to their businesses.

Currently studies in Turkey show that most companies are employing the İTİL process and implementing it in their digital transformation and İ.T departments.  İntellectuals such as Prof. Mehmet Demir; who is not only a lecturer at Computer Engineering Faculty of İstanbul University-Cerrapahşa, but also a co-founder of chief digital officer platform for Turkey,and founder of Netax Tech is at the front of İTİL implementation in companies in Turkey. İn just a few years, great accomplishments have been chalked by companies that implement the İTİL processes well here in Turkey. Companies such as Flo are drastically at the forefront of this digital transformations.

HISTORY

      The United Kingdom Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations after  it recognized that, without standard practices, government agencies and private sector contracts had started independently creating their own IT management practices which were not necessarily the best pratices and were most repeated. A simple product being developed was done very differently by different organizations which usually led to inconsistencies and difficulty in cross-platform integrations. İt also unncessarily strained on the budget of the companies involved in the development process of such products. The recommendation was a flexible and  general set of best standards which every organization could use in developing whichever products they were working on.

Deming's Cycle

The IT Infrastructure Library originated as a collection of books, each covering a specific practice within IT service management. ITIL was built around a process model-based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to W. Edwards Deming and his plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle which was sometimes referred to as the “Demings cycle”.

PDCA was made popular by W. Edwards Deming, who is considered by many to be the father of modern quality control; however, he always referred to it as the "Shewhart cycle". Later in Deming's career, he modified PDCA to "Plan, Do, Study, Act" (PDSA) because he felt that "check" emphasized inspection over analysis.

The concept of PDCA is based on the scientific method, as developed from the work of Francis Bacon (Novum Organum, 1620). The scientific method can be written as "hypothesis–experiment–evaluation" or as "plan–do–check". This could arguably be one of the first standards that direcly followed a scientific approach to things.

A fundamental principle of the scientific method and PDCA/PDSA is iteration—once a hypothesis is confirmed (or negated), executing the cycle again will extend the knowledge further. Repeating the PDCA cycle can bring its users closer to the goal, usually a perfect operation and output.

Another fundamental function of PDCA is the proper separation of each phase, for if not properly separated measurements of effects due to various simultaneous actions (causes) risk becoming confounded. Deming continually emphasized iterating towards an improved system, hence PDCA should be repeatedly implemented in spirals of increasing knowledge of the system that converge on the ultimate goal, each cycle closer than the previous.

Continuity Diagram

In 1950, Japanese businessmen turned to Deming to help them rebuild an economy shattered in World War II. That industrial expert, W. Edwards Deming, taught Japan’s manufacturers how to produce top quality products economically through his Demings Cycle. The Japanese used that knowledge to turn the global economy on its head and beat U.S. industry at its own game.

Companies such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Sony Corp. adopted Deming’s concepts and became world-class producers in their fields, helping Japan become one of the planet’s dominant economic powers.

MODERN-DAY

Currently, ITIL is currently evolving from ITIL v3 to ITIL 4. ITIL 4 expands on previous versions by providing a practical and flexible basis to support organizations on their journey to the new world of digital transformation.

ITIL 4 expands on previous versions of ITIL by providing a practical and flexible basis to support organizations on their journey to the new world of digital transformation. It provides an end-to-end IT/digital operating model for the delivery and operation of tech-enabled products and services and enables IT teams to continue to play a crucial role in wider business strategy.

ITIL 4 development is a community and industry-led initiative who have been working with a team of industry experts based around the globe, including 150 content writers, reviewers and contributors from the wider IT industry. Axelos also  created the ITIL Development Group, now at 2,000+ members, which has helped steer the development of ITIL 4 and continues to do so. Anyone who will like to contribute his or her quota to İTİL4 can do that by joining the ITIL Development Group.