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ITPI ANNOUNCES HANDBOOK TO JUMPSTART IT CONTROLS, PROCESS IMPLEMENTATIONS

Visible Ops Methodology Provides Prescriptive Guidance on How to Implement ITIL in Four Practical Steps

Eugene Oregon, August 4, 2004 - The Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI), a nonprofit organization developing guidance that solves the common objectives of IT security, corporate governance, audit and operations, today announced the availability of the "Visible Ops Handbook: Starting ITIL in 4 Practical Steps." The handbook, co-authored by ITPI president and founder Kevin Behr, ITPI vice president of publishing George Spafford and Tripwire CTO and founder Gene Kim, outlines a methodology designed to help organizations quickly implement controls and process improvements needed to increase service levels, decrease costs and increase security across the enterprise.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of compiled best practices collected from thousands of IT professionals by the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC). By adhering to ITIL guidelines, organizations leverage previous successes to help ensure high quality solutions.

"We developed the Visible Ops methodology because we could not find a satisfactory answer to the question of where to begin IT process improvements," said Kevin Behr, president and founder of ITPI. "Although ITIL provides a wealth of best practices, it lacks the prescriptive guidance which we provide in the Visible Ops handbook.

By studying dozens of companies with impressive IT operations, we were able to identify best practices that were common across organizations and then used ITIL to normalize the processes definitions." "The Visible Ops handbook provides a great roadmap for IT executives to see their way through the thicket of chaotic operations, and into the clearing of repeatable processes," said Jeremy Epstein, senior director, Product Security at webMethods, Inc. "It follows in the footsteps of software development processes like the Capability Maturity Model and offers the potential to provide a real ROI by reducing the effort in wasted firefighting." The Visible Ops methodology includes four key steps:
  1. Stabilize Patient, Modify First Response – Almost 80 percent of outages are self-inflicted. The first step is to control risky changes and reduce Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) by addressing how changes are managed and how problems are resolved.
  2. Catch and Release, Find Fragile Artifacts – Often, infrastructure exists that cannot be repeatedly replicated. In this step we inventory assets, configurations and services to identify those with the lowest change success rates, highest MTTR and highest business downtime costs.
  3. Establish Repeatable Build Library – The highest return on investment is implementing effective release management processes. This step creates repeatable builds for the most critical assets and services, to make it cheaper to rebuild than to repair.
  4. Enable Continuous Improvement – The previous steps have progressively built a closed-loop between the Release, Control and Resolution processes. This step implements metrics to allow continuous improvement of all of these process areas to best ensure that business objectives are met.
Because technology is pervasive and its controls are foundations upon which other controls are built, its effective management is critical to all stakeholders. Visible Ops' intuitive methodology is readily understood by both IT and business stakeholders making it an effective tool to assist organizations in meeting this need. For additional information or to order the "Visible Ops Handbook: Starting ITIL in 4 Practical Steps," please visit the ITPI website, www.itpi.org.

In addition to the Visible Ops Handbook, ITPI provides a benchmarking tool, Integrity Management Capabilities Assessment (IMCA), which captures a clear and detailed picture of an organization's current strengths, weaknesses and areas of risk with regards to integrity management and presents specific recommendations.

About the ITPI
The IT Process Institute (ITPI) is independent research organization that exists to support the membership of IT audit, security, and operations professionals. Our mission is to advance IT management science through independent research, benchmarking, and prescriptive guidance. Our vision is to pair industry based volunteers with leading university based researchers, to identify and study top performing IT organizations and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the industry. www.itpi.org.