The Disney ITIL Implementation Journey

Disney's Information Technology Infrastructure Library
Disney adopted ITIL in order to keep up with the current growing trend of offering the best experience to visitors in their parks and resorts. The main idea was to ensure that new and returning visitors all received the best and similar experience globally. Disney's Theme Parks & Resorts is the largest division and it contributes about 30 percent of all revenue for the Disney company. It made sense to ensure that this large division remained profitable and that the numerous applications running across the 11 parks, 42 resorts, cruise ships, and water parks were streamlined (Nelima, 2013). The number of visitors that the organization receive annually exceeded the total number of visitors that visited South Africa during the world cup, and does indicate the magnitude of the organization. Therefore, it was vital that the company adopts a service delivery system that would ensure there was systems availability at all times. Theme Parks and Resorts is the only segment of Disney that directly interacts with guests and there was a need to ensure that the interaction is favorable at all times. With the magnitude of visitors who come to the parks on any given day, it is vital the parks have all systems working in unison at all times. The number of applications that TP&R uses is enormous and this necessitated for them to implement ITIL in order to ensure that all their applications and servers are available and reliable. Increasing reliability of the different applications and systems was the main goal because the failure of one application could result in negative guest experience.
The results that Disney obtained from implementing ITIL is that the company was able to align their IT systems and Information Technology with the goals of the company. This ensured that the company grew into a more proactive IT organization and not a reactive organization. By making use of ITIL, Disney was able to define the value of IT services because ITIL provided the company with the tools and metrics that it needed. Adopting ITIL allowed Disney to offer a great guest experience to all its visitors to the theme parks, cruise ships, and resorts. The guest experience would not be impacted in any way because whatever is happening behind the scenes is not visible to the visitors, and everything is running smoothly all the time. Adopting technology and using the best practices available has allowed Disney to offer its guests an experience that is not rivaled by its competitors (Esteves & Alves, 2013). Visitors can be able to check the availability of their favorite rides, and characters using their mobile phones. Using this feature guest are able to plan accordingly. Employees have also benefitted in that they do not forget to pick all the costumes they require for a particular role. This saves time and reduces the instances of an employee lacking all the costumes. Disney has implemented a reorder system that is user-friendly and vendors can reorder stocks with a few keystrokes. This ensures that a vendor does not run out of stock and customers will always find what they want.
One of the main challenges that an organization will face during the ITIL implementation is transforming the organization to a service oriented culture. ITIL mainly focuses on service delivery and not only for the IT staff but for all the employees. In order to fully implement ITIL, the organization will need to handle all the different factions and groups within the organization and ensure that they all buy into the new proposal. Changing how people operate is normally fraught upon and most employees will be resistant to change. However, with effective communication this can be a smooth ride and implementation would progress without issues. Any new changes would require the commitment of senior management. This is not only effective for ITIL but for any change, within an organization the senior management to embrace and demonstrate to all employees, they are on board with the new changes. If there is any resistance from senior management then the employees will also resist the proposed changes. ITIL processes are highly dependent on other processes. An organization cannot successfully implement the change management process without having to fulfill configuration and asset management processes. The continuity of IT services cannot be considered or guaranteed without first considering the financial concerns. An organization needs to ensure that it has conducted a proper analysis to establish the processes it requires in order to ensure that it only focuses on what the organization needs (Lavine Sr, 2011). Attempting to implement all the ITIL processes at once would result in efforts being wasted.
Disney was successful in adopting ITIL because it first ensured that everyone within the organization was on board with the transition. This was done by having effective communication and demonstrating to the employees and all stakeholders of how the new implementation would improve upon the company and the guest experience. The communication ensured that all employees were aware of the new changes coming and this got them excited. There was manager meeting that employees were encouraged to attend in order for them to understand the new changes. These meetings were used to raise awareness of the issues the organization was facing and how implementing ITIL would help in addressing these issues. The CIO also ensured that all the IT staff were fully trained and no one was forced to undergo certification if they did not want. The advanced training was offered and paid for by Disney and this was encouraging to the employees. With the training, the employees also had an opportunity of advancing their careers not only at Disney but also if they wanted to seek employment elsewhere. The workload and processes of the IT staff would be simplified by the implementation of ITIL within the organization. This message was widely spread and a majority of the IT staff knew that they would be more focused on the difficult tasks and not have to keep handling some mundane and time-consuming tasks.
The main difference between ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, and Val IT is simply that ITIL deals with best practices and the others deal with standards that have to be followed by an organization's IT department. ITIL is a library that has a set of best practices, functions, and processes in a lifecycle path. ITIL is more descriptive than prescriptive and it is full of possibilities that an organization can use, but does not have to employ (Temple, 2014). ITIL allows an organization to any of the processes or part of the processes without fearing that it will not work. This was beneficial for Disney because the company did not have to fully implement all the processes of ITIL and this allowed the company to adopt the best practices that would enable it to gain certification of the other two options. ITIL makes it easy for an organization to transform its processes without having to undergo a lot of stress. It would not have been possible for Disney to attain the same results had it opted to use ISO/IEC 20000 or Val IT because these two are standards and they require an organization to fully implement the standards in order for an organization to reap the benefits. They also place a huge amount of workload on the employees and organization to streamline the processes before they can be implemented.


References
Esteves, R., & Alves, P. (2013). Implementation of an information technology infrastructure library process–the resistance to change.Procedia Technology, 9, 505-510.
Lavine Sr, D. A. (2011). Leveraging ITIL/ITSM into Network Operations: AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB OH GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT.
Nelima, S. M. (2013). INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE LIBRARY (ITIL) ADOPTION AND ITS EFFECT ON ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE–A SURVEY OF LISTED FIRMS ON THE NAIROBI SECURITIES EXCHANGE. UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI.
Temple, K. L. (2014). Transformational process mapping to theory U: A case study of a United States city government's information technology and innovation branch transformational alignment to improve business service. Capella University.