Strayer University

CIS 336

Enterprise Architecture

ITIL Adoption

Disney a company that has been in business for over 90 years and in order to stay competitive and to maintain continued growth, Disney must be flexible and open to new ideas on how to stay afloat. Disney decided to adopt the ITIL foundations best practice back in the mid-2000s after the Chief Information Officer of Disney hired Glenn Taylor. Disney was looking to utilize ITIL foundation best practices to give its visitors the perfect experience when visiting their theme parks and resorts. The ITIL foundations best practices were used to add reliability, maintainability, and availability constantly to provide the best experience possible. ITIL best practices are perfect for providing the IT department internally with tools and metrics meant to define the value of IT services within the organization.

Disney’s ITIL Results

The result of Disney’s ITIL implementation was faster response times in relation to IT department service calls and increased user experience due to lack of downtime when malfunctions arise. Disney also was able to breed early adopters of the ITIL best practices which in turn creates other users that want to learn ITIL until best practices become common among all cast members within the organization.

Challenges

The challenges that a large organization like Disney face is the cultural adoption of ITIL by the entire organization from the top down and from the bottom up. Not everyone was willing to board the ITIL ship at first so the organization had to grow through some growing pains in order to fully establish best IT practices. Disney overcame these challenges by starting at the executive level on down and meeting with different department heads to begin talks about ITIL and having lunch and learn sessions where those executive level employees could ask questions and gain insight about ITIL best practices. This was most likely a slow and painful process but the results were fruitful for Disney as they found 250 employees that were interested in becoming expert level ITIL workers.

3 Reasons for Success

Compare and Contrast

• Disney was willing to take the risk of implementing ITIL
• Disney picked 250 employees to become expert users.
• Put the customer first for user experience in their theme parks.

References

ITIL vs. ISO/IEC 20000: Similarities and Differences & Process Mapping. (2014, March 14). Retrieved February 25, 2017, from ITIL vs. ISO/IEC 20000: Similarities and Differences & Process Mapping, http://advisera.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/07/White_paper_ITIL_ISOIEC_20000_Similarities_and_Differences_Process_Mapping_EN.pdf

AXELOS. (2015, October 14). Disney’s ITIL® journey. Retrieved February 25, 2017, from https://www.axelos.com/case-studies-and-white-papers/disneys-itil-journey-case-study

Saran, C. (2010, December ). IT staff learn their ITIL lines at Walt Disney parks & resorts. Retrieved February 27, 2017, from http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/IT-staff-learn-their-ITIL-lines-at-Walt-Disney-Parks-Resorts