IT Service Management and ITIL Adoption at Walt Disney Company

This report provides an executive summary of IT Service Management (ITSM) practices within The Walt Disney Company. It begins by outlining Disney's objective of delivering an exceptional guest experience and the role of IT in achieving goals such as availability, change management, and updates. The report then identifies three key ITIL processes utilized by Disney's IT teams, including service design, service transition, and continuous improvement, and details how these processes support the company's objectives. Furthermore, the report describes the three-step ITIL adoption process implemented by Disney, encompassing marketing ITIL to staff, providing ITIL foundation education, and electing ITIL experts. The report also discusses the challenges faced during the implementation phase. The study highlights the significance of IT in Disney's operations, the strategic importance of ITIL, and the company's approach to aligning IT with its business objectives for improved efficiency, customer satisfaction, and ROI.

IT SERVICE
MANAGEMENT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
IT Service Management is concerned with the management and compliance of IT practices as
adopted and rendered by the different types of companies. The present report will provide a brief
understanding of Disney objective of providing its guests with perfect experience and
achievement of set define objectives such as availability, managing changes and bringing updates
etc. Report will also define three relevant ITIL processes for Disney's IT teams. Also, the report
will streamline about the three step ITIL adoption processes which will be implemented by
Disney and what challenges has been faced by Disney during the phase period of implementation.

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
SECTION 1......................................................................................................................................3
Assessing the role of IT in meeting the objectives of the Disney and discussing the three major
ITIL processes that are adopted by the company. .................................................................3
SECTION 2......................................................................................................................................5
Implementation of ITIL by Disney.........................................................................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................9

INTRODUCTION
IT services management means the set of the activities directed by the policies that are
organized and are structured in the processes and the supporting procedures. These processes and
the procedures are performed by an entity in order to design, operate, deliver, plan and control the
services relating to information technology that are offered to the customers. The present study is
based on Walt Disney Company that deals in five different segments that includes studios, media
networks, consumer products, theme parks, interactive media and resorts. It is leading and the
largest organization and the division of the theme park of this company is the much larger as
higher revenues had been gained from this department. The scale of the company is been resulted
as extraordinary. Furthermore, the report describes the role of IT department in meeting major
objectives of Disney and the three relevant process that had been followed by the company.
Moreover, it also includes the three major steps of ITIL adoption had been implemented by the
firm and the details regarding the most challenging steps. ITIL stands for Information Technology
Infrastructure Library. It is defined as a set of detailed principles or standards laid down for
compliance of IT Service Management (ITSM) having focus on alignment of proper and effective
IT Services as per the needs and requirements of the business. The present report will discuss the
aims and objectives of Disney towards its guests i.e. “The perfect experience”. It will also make
disclosure related to the role which IT will play for meeting the goals and objectives of Disney by
taking into consideration factors such as availability, managing changes, releasing updates and
managing contracts. Further more the report at last will discuss about all the three important step
in relation with adoption of the term Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) road
map as implemented in by the Disney for achieving higher growth rate, profitability level and
acquisition of market share by emphasizing on improving the performance level.
SECTION 1
Assessing the role of IT in meeting the objectives of the Disney and discussing the three major
ITIL processes that are adopted by the company.
Information technology plays a crucial role as it is considered as the series of IT service
management that emphasizes on the delivering the best experience in line with the needs of the
customers. It helps the Disney company in serving its customers in economical cost with quality.
IT department played a critical role in performing its functions by providing the better delivery of

the product with enhanced satisfaction of their customers. Better understanding has been
developed between IT and the business of Disney (Lohmann and Zur Muehlen, 2016). IT
department plays a vital role in risk management within a wider scope of the enterprise. Cost had
been assessed accurately and business changes are accommodated by providing for better service.
By this the objective of optimum utilization has also been reached by the department which leads
to higher profitability for the firm.
IT department of Disney develops various concepts relating to the service strategy, service design,
service transition, service operation and continuous improvement results in achieving the
objectives like availability, managing contracts, managing changes and releasing the updates. The
three major ITIL processes followed by IT team are as follows-
Service design- It deals with the issue pertaining to the capacity management, supplier
management, continuity management etc.
Service management- It involves the planning for and in defining the delivery targets
regarding the services of the Disney. After, planning the performance is measured against the
targets. Service level agreements are prepared to spell out the service relating goals so that easy
measurements and the comparison can be made against the actual performance of the service of
the company.
Catalog management- under this step of the service design, it is been ensured that there
will be an updated catalog for the service is been available with the accessibility to those services
that are required by the customers and for remaining productive.
Capacity management- It ensures that the systems are operating always at their full or
enough capacity for meeting the needs of the business effectively and efficiently (Wong,
Rajindran and Lee, 2019). This means that Disney has management its systems by availing and
operating at their full potential.
Continuity management- It involves the risk management and ensures the continuity of
the business of Disney with stability and in meeting the uncertainties if occurs in the future.
Supplier management- Under this step, all the supplier relationship had been monitored
that include all the parties that are adhering to the contracts and the agreements.
Availability management- This step helps in entailing or making sure that the services of
the Disney are always been available to its customers.

Service transition- This stage of ITIL processes acts as the guidelines that helps the firm in
addressing the activities that are aligned to the change evaluation, project management, change
management, application development, service validation, knowledge management etc.
Change management- It ensures that the services provided by the company will remain
scalable, reliable and relevant as the needs of the business changes.
Change evaluation- It involves an anticipation and in managing the changes as well as
assessing that which changes benefits the organization in moving forward.
Application development- this activity of service transition involves the development of
the software while ensuring that the changes impacts the environment of the production very
minimally.
Service validation- It details out the testing, measuring results and the services changes for
developing the continuation in the service decision making.
Knowledge management- It focuses on accumulating and in assembling the useful
knowledge so that technicians and the customers can use it in resolving the issues.
Continuous improvement- This process of ITIL define a road-map for managing the process
evaluation, service review and monitoring the CSI initiatives. This process is adopted by Disney
for evaluating the service growth and the enhancements in the service (Smyth, Razmdoost and
Mills, 2019). It includes three sub processes such as process evaluation, defining the continual
service improvement initiatives and lastly monitoring the CSI initiatives.
Process evaluation- It involves the consistent assessment of the processes for attaining the
potential options for the improvement in the service of Disney.
Defining CSI initiatives- under this step the continuous service improvements are chosen
based on the review and the analysis.
Monitoring CSI- this step include keeping the track of the CSI initiative program.
Thus, by putting the improvement plan in the place and assigning the responsibilities to the
appropriate members of the team that will helps in ensuring IT for continually delivering the value
to the business of Disney on the basis of their stated goals.

SECTION 2
Implementation of ITIL by Disney
ITIL, is a service management standard developed by UK's OGC which is most accepted
and adopted standard in the world. ITIL is service oriented and is composed of 5 main categories
that are service strategy, service deign, service transition, service operation and continuous
improvement of service (Jäntti, 2016). By adopting ITIL for managing IT, businesses and
companies are able to use IT as a service provision partner rather than just a back end solution.
Disney is a huge umbrella corporation that invested in many industries. Even the theme
parks of Disney involves management of restaurant and planning of event. It is also one of the
largest organizations to adopt ITIL followed by other agencies like IRS, NASA, HSBC, HP etc.
By aligning IT elated assets, costs and tasks to objectives of the company, the business provide
better services at lower costs which attracts customers and improves efficiency. Disney adopted
ITIL which helps it in matching changing business objectives with IT service management and
delivery.
ITIL is well suited for large organizations like finance, entertainment etc. due to its IT
infrastructure centric nature to achieve business objectives (Wang and et.al, 2017). It helps in
increasing ROI of the company as well as has increased customer's engagement and level of
satisfaction among customers. ITIL simplifies the relation between assets, costs and returns which
improves morale and retention rate of employees and improve the performance of services
offered by the company.
Disney's adoption of ITIL
The adoption of ITIL by Disney began in year 2008. The goal was sot adopt an integrated
and holistic approach to IT service management (Disney ITIL adoption, 2018). For Disney,
adoption of ITIL for IT service management was of utmost importance in order to manage its
operations and to provide better services to its customers. ITIL helps in dealing with distributed,
decentralized and heterogeneous computing architecture and assets.
The IT service management is critical to Disney as it accounts for only 30 % of the
revenue of company and is the only part of Disney that directly deals with customers in a minute.
The scope of IT infrastructure and operations is huge in Disney as it has 42 resorts, two cruise
ships and over 36,000 rooms all over the world.
The 3 step approach of ITIL adoption

Step 1 : Marketing ITIL into staff – The staff of Disney is well aware of their work but was not
aware of ITIL. It was Glen the vice president of the company who used company's lunch and
learn sessions and meetings of manager. Glen made the executives aware about issues of company
and how ITIL can help. This technique was used for top officials to make them understand the
importance of ITIL. For bottom up marketing, Glen used 'Backlot' which is company's internal
social network (Zipes, 2016).
Step 2 : ITIL foundation education program – Disney provided 250 employees from CIO level
down the training of ITIL foundation. After the training, they were given the opportunity to take
certification exam in which 50 % of trainees got certified.
Step 3 : Electing ITIL experts - Disney has hired mix of different people with different
responsibility to make expert level path for the company. The candidates were picked on the
basis of their personality and ability to articulate the vision for the processes they manage or work
with.
ITIL was marketed by Glen to hundreds of staff members as well as executives of Disney.
This helped ITIL in embedding in the company. Glen used lunch and learn sessions, manager
meetings and Backlot. ITIL has become a staple of Walt Disney (Why ITIL adopted by Disney,
2016).
There are several reasons for why ITIL was successfully implemented in the company.
The one being it was not possible for Disney to adopt ITIL in short span of time which required
phased out and incremental implementation. Secondly, it ensured successful implementation of
ITIL within the company by market it to the employees and executives. It included top down
marketing approach which went down the executive level by lunch and learn and a bottom up
approach using methods such as Disney's internal social network named BackLot which enables
the employees to hold discussion and share documents (Knudsen, 2018).
There were many challenges face by Disney in implementing ITIL adoption. It has faced
challenge like decentralized and distributed nature of IT architectures in different locations that
made it hard for the company to standardize IT services. The other challenge was disparate
architectures, hardware, language, protocols which must be harmonized in order to offer
integrated IT services management and adoption of any standard is relatively large in large
companies is a big challenge itself (Da Silva, 2018). The technical challenges faced by the

company was employee indifference, resistance to culture, and the scale problem of implementing
a service management in large organization like Disney.
Among all these, Electing ITIL experts was the biggest challenge faced by the Disney as choosing
20 professions was a hard task for the company and also choosing one over the other created
chaos in the company and lead to individual indifference, lack of motivation and dissatisfaction
among high level professionals that were not selected.
CONCLUSION
From the above report, it was concluded that how effective ITIL is for IT service
management. The report depicted the adoption of ITIL in Disney by facing various challenges but
was successful in fulfilling its objective for which it thought of adopting ITIL. However, the
Disney started implementing ITIL in year 2008 with the help of providing training to its
employees, by hiring 20 expertise from the organization who can make the implementation of
ITIL work and by using internal social network for workers. As the implementation was being
done by the company, it faced many challenges like employee dissatisfaction, cultural differences,
personal grudges etc but yet with the help of proper planning it became successful. With the help
of ITIL, it became easy for Disney to provide its services to its customers in more efficient way, it
has enhanced the operations of Disney and made it easy for the company to work and operate in
different field. However, it can be concluded that implementation of ITIL was a great decision of
Disney. It can be concluded from the above report that by having proper Information Technology
principles and set of standards, Disney is able to provide its guests with “the perfect experience”.
ITIL has also focused on encouragement of compliance with the set of detailed IT practices. Many
challenges have been faced by Disney during implementation process related to the ITIL adoption
such as decentralized and distributed nature of IT architectures in various places and locations
making it hard for the Disney to standardize the services of IT. ITIL allows the company in
establishment of baseline from where Disney can implement, plan and measure its performance
level and services. The Information Technology department of Disney has emphasizes on
development of various concepts, procedures and checklists related to the service strategy &
design, service transition, service operation and made continuous improvement which has resulted
in achievement of the objectives of Disney viz. availability, managing contracts, managing
changes and releasing the necessary updates.

REFERENCES
Books and journal
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Using TIPA for ITIL. In Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination:
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Proceedings(Vol. 918, p. 104). Springer.
Jäntti, M. and Hotti, V., 2016. Defining the relationships between IT service management and IT
service governance. Information Technology and Management. 17(2). pp.141-150.
Knudsen, K. and Duncan, T. K., 2018. Using Disney As a Pedagogical Approach. Available at
SSRN 3279043.
Lohmann, P. and Zur Muehlen, M., 2016, September. Business process management skills and
roles: an investigation of the demand and supply side of BPM professionals.
In International Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 317-332). Springer,
Cham.
Smyth, H., Razmdoost, K. and Mills, G. R., 2019. Service innovation through linking design,
construction and asset management. Built Environment Project and Asset
Management. 9(1). pp.80-86.
Wang, Q., and et.al., 2017, June. Constructing the knowledge base for cognitive IT service
management. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC) (pp.
410-417). IEEE.
Wong, W. Y., Rajindran, S. and Lee, C. W., 2019, May. A Roadmap to Quality Improvement
Methodology (QIM) for IT and Non-IT Related Project: Factors Affecting the Adoption and
Implementation of QIM. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Systems, Process and Control
(ICSPC) (pp. 153-158). IEEE.
Zipes, J., 2016. Demystifying Disney: A History of Feature Animation by Chris Pallant. Marvels
& Tales. 30(2). pp.373-375.
Online
Disney ITIL adoption, 2018. [Online]. Available through :
<https://medium.com/@david.kabii/disney-itil-adoption-journey-casetudy-6ce818d16140>
Why ITIL adopted by Disney, 2016. [Online]. Available through :
<https://www.itiltraining.com/blog/2017/04/11/disney-itil-adoption/>