# How to Optimize the Implementation of ITIL through a Process Ordering Algorithm
## 1 Introduction  
There is no doubt about the importance of information resources in organizations. The management of organizations may be very different from one to another but in all cases the quality of IT (information technology) services is directly dependent on common principles, such as adding value, improvement of customer satisfaction and productivity, and/or reducing costs [1]. The main goal of an IT manager is providing the best quality service with fewer resources as possible, and achieving parameters of efficiency, time, cost, etc. To do it, it is possible to adopt and adapt several standards, good practices handbooks, and rules [2; 3; 4; 5; 6]. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a market standard practices library completely oriented to services and its management, development, and operation [7]. It defines a complete set of processes to offer better IT services from IT companies and IT departments. It could be deduced that these ITIL reference practices are specifically designed for software, technology, or information systems companies, but, in fact, the ITIL can be applied to any organization as it does not depend on its activity. It is just required that the organization is using technology for internal purposes or as services offered to clients. ITIL has been developed to be applied in any type of company [8]. Currently, ITIL is divided in five groups of processes (service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, service continual improvement) but ITIL does not define a strategy to implement the processes: No order of processes is presented, no dependency on the company whereITIL is implemented, no dependency on the industry, etc. It just includes the processes needed for proper management of IT Services [9]. There is much interest in companies about ITIL implementation [10], and, more specifically, in how it should be implemented: The order of processes to implement, factors that may affect the success of implementation, strategies to follow when implementing, among others. But this interest is just partially solved as there is no a clear methodology or algorithm which provides, to companies, a clear and sequence of processes to implement the ITIL. This lack of criteria (in the order of implementation of the ITIL processes) is one of the reasons that leads to a failure in ITIL implementations. It is clearly addressed in [11]: \"Many of the organizations attempt to implement all or many of the ITIL processes at once, that it causes confusion, staff unrest, and poor integration between the processes. Therefore, it is better to select the most important processes for target organization and then schedule their implementation.\"; and in [12], a single report explaining why implementations fail: \"Traditionally most organization start implementing Incident Management/Problem Management/Change Management/Service Request processes without fixing a configuration management database (CMDB)\". There are several studies which make approaches around ITIL implementation and how this implementation should be conducted. These studies consider different points of views [13]: Analysis of success factors [14; 15; 16] (i.e., the factors that most affect the implementation of the ITIL and may have a great influence on the success of the ITIL implementation); the strategy that should be followed to implement ITIL in [17; 18; 10], that is the overall steps to follow when implementing ITIL; order of how processes should be implemented [9; 19; 20] (i.e., the sequence of processes should be followed to implement the ITIL properly to maximize success options); considering the characteristics of the organizations [21], which means to consider the size, age, and other specific parameters that may influence the implementation of the ITIL; and finally, an approach considering other specific topics. Summarizing, authors focus their attention on next issues [13]: 1--Strategy. 2--Success factors. 3--Order of processes. 4--Characteristics of organizations.