As I’ve started networking and meeting some of my new IBM Tivoli peers, I’m digging into some of the exciting activities and solutions we’ve been working on. They have created a tool called IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) which serves as a knowledge base of various best practices for ITSM. This is the only fast track IT best practice implementation enabler that I’m aware of that’s free of charge (with registration) for anyone to use.

At the core of the ITUP tool is something called the Process Reference Model for IT (PRM-IT) which is deeply rooted in the thousands of real world experiences undertaken by IBM’s Global Services (IGS) business unit. PRM-IT is strongly aligned with ITIL and adds more content outside of ITIL’s service management focus.

While ITIL focuses on the ‘what’ in terms of IT best practices, ITUP focuses on how to implement and align them with the technology and people components. ITUP includes detailed discussion on the following:

• Scenarios: How the various components of ITUP work together to solve IT problems
• Tool Mentors: Hoe to use specific Tivoli tools to implement process activities
• Processes: Strongly ITIL aligned processes for managing IT down to the actual activity
• Roles: Descriptions of the Roles performed in the processes and details of their responsibilities
• Work Products: What is consumed and produced by each process activity

I will be getting much more involved with ITUP as we work to bring the Netcool suite of applications into ITUP. I encourage everyone to visit the ITUP home page and download ITUP version 1.3.1 and take a look at what it can offer. Version 2.0 is planned for release this month and adds more content and alignment/mapping information of PRM-IT with other best practices such as TMF’s eTOM. While ITUP is aligned with the IBM Tivoli family of solutions, it can certainly be adapted and leveraged by anyone starting their ITIL journey – for free!