Information technology service management is the practice of managing an IT infrastructure by employing a service-oriented perspective. A best practice framework known as ITIL offers guidelines on how to manage an IT portfolio by viewing it as a collection of services that provide value to customers. ITIL orients its guidance around the lifecycle of a service beginning with conceiving a strategy, followed by designing the service, and subsequently transitioning the service into an operational mode.

EDUCAUSE 2008 was hosted in Orlando, FL from Tuesday, October 28 to Friday, October 31. On Tuesday, four members of Yale’s ITS department held a preconference seminar titled “Understanding ITIL and Applying It to Your Organization”. According to the presenters, this was the first pre-conference seminar to fill up! Tuesday’s preconference seminar was split into morning and afternoon sessions. In the morning session, presenters discussed the general overview of ITIL and talked about the different phases of an ITIL implementation.

Jim Haustein and Vick Dean of Cornell University delivered a presentation titled “Process Improvement in Higher Education” that discussed the process improvement program. Since mid-2007, Cornell has been using ITIL as a framework to create a more process-focused and service-focused organization. This was an excellent presentation filled with lessons learned and tips for people to take back to their institutions.

Here are a few quick points worth repeating:

Continuous management support is key to success.
Change Management was their first win.

ITSMf USA has a Special Interest Group devoted to Higher Education. You can join the group by visiting their website and submitting an email request.

Go to http://www.itsmfusa.org/higher-education-sig for more information or to join.

The ITSMF USA site mentions that the Higher Education Special Interest Group plans to have its first public meeting in early 2009.

I spent the summer of 2008 at the Information Services of Wake Forest University under John Borwick. During this time, I spent a lot of time learning about the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Information Technology Service Management (ITSM). Of course, the main purpose of this was to bring this knowledge together into an easily accessed source for everyone interested. We focused on how these things directly affect universities (being a part of a university ourselves).

ITIL Training Zone is offering free ITILv3 materials such as mind maps and an ITILv3-At A Glance page that detail the five core areas.

The URL is http://www.itiltrainingzone.com

A registration is required to access the free content.

A seminar titled "Understanding ITIL and Applying It to Your Organization" will be presented on Tuesday, October 28 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The seminar is presented by:

* William Cunningham, Associate Director Process Operations, Yale University
* Susan Grajek, Senior Director, ITS Client Support, Yale University
* John Guidone, Manager - Desktop Technologies, Yale University
* Chloe Kennedy Turnbull, Business and Process Analyst, Process Operations, Yale University