"Our view is that those last two actually really tie into the first one. If you can gain strong management buy-in, then the funding will come from that, and you will also gain funding to adequately train your staff before you go ahead with the IT improvement project," he says.

Knowledge and training became major issues once respondents had moved along the ITSM improvement maturity lifecycle to the "currently implementing" stage. In the "completed some processes" stage, the most commonly expressed issue by survey respondents was "having adequate funding and resources" ahead of "getting staff and management buy-in".

"From this data, we can see that it is important to carefully manage and promote management education on the benefits of ITSM early in the project lifecycle. Gaining appropriate levels of support and funding from management as well as commitment from staff early on and creating an understanding that it is an ongoing commitment will alleviate some of the pressure in these areas as ITSM improvement matures," the report's authors commented.

"It is critical to make realistic estimates of the time and resources needed to complete process implementation and this can only be achieved by having staff and management recognize the value of process improvement financially and operationally."

Notably the survey found 14 percent of participants who were "currently implementing" process improvements and 10 percent who had "completed some processes" were still struggling with "getting someone to take total ownership" of ITSM improvement. This is a significant challenge and perhaps demonstrates why there is so much focus on getting the fundamental service improvement processes in place. "Staff and management buy-in" and "adequate funding", at 17 percent each, were the most commonly met impediments to success.

That has certainly been the experience at the Department of Defence, which started to get serious about ITIL about six years ago, according to the department's technical director, Stephen Ellis. Since that time Defence has made considerable progress in some ways, while barely progressing in others, he says.

"We've got fairly mature incident and change management processes and workflows in place, although there are difficulties with change management just because of the size and the rate of change that occurs within an environment like Defence. But the other processes are still fairly immature and I think that's one of the problems we've got: we need IT managers at all levels that understand ITIL and the relationships between the different processes and how to implement them within an environment like Defence."

Ellis says from a management perspective all managers need a fairly detailed understanding of how all the processes relate, yet relatively few directors and assistant directors have done any ITIL training.

"You've got to understand the processes and then be able to link them all together — understand the relationships," he says. "We don't have a configurations management database at the moment — we're developing one but we don't have one within Defence — and that makes it difficult to link all the tools and processes together to get effective incident change in problem management. And of course one of the other things that comes out of that is a service delivery process as well.

"So you need that level of understanding. And I think if you can get your senior management and IT managers to understand what ITIL is about and how it supports the business you can then get those messages down into the worker population, which is another area where we tend to experience difficulties."

When Ellis attended an ITIL manager's course last year he says he found most participants were facing the same sorts of issues. Changing the culture of the ITIL workforce to be more accepting of change was difficult, as was getting them to understand why they had to do things differently and how ITIL could help themselves,

"One of the biggest issues to address is that cultural question and how you get people to accept the change and adapt to the new way of doing business," Ellis says. "I think technical people like to get their hands dirty, and even though often they tend to keep up with technological change, they don't seem to be as well adapted to accepting process change and that's something that we need to address and educate our staff about."