In the current business climate the focus for organisations is cost saving, value delivery and business transformation.
ITIL Service Management is a recognised professional practice across the world supported by an extensive body of knowledge, experience and skills, spanning 30 years. The ITIL Service Management framework provides principles and practices to help leaders deal with todays challenges.
ITIL Service Management provides common practices for provisioning business and core services that unites all teams toward a single aim that of delivering business value. Its focus is on recognising each service as a commodity and what each service brings to the business in terms of its value and benefit. It acts as a challenge to check that it is providing services that businesses need in order to meet their own challenges.
Not only this, but all team managers face the challenge of doing this in a cost effective manner.
Benefits of adopting ITIL
ITIL Service Management forms part of the body of knowledge providing a common practice for an organisation to apply
IT service managementacross the supply chain. It demonstrates a systematic approach that is responsive, consistent, and measurable.
In summary, the real benefits to the organisation are around:
1.Delivering business outcomes and value to customers
2.Common terms and language across the global supply chain
3.Simplification and reducing complexity
4.Can recognise service offerings, their value and prioritisation of investments
5.Enables business change, through a greater understanding of the influences and effects throughout the service lifecycle
6.Clear accountability, roles and responsibilities
7.Conformance to IT governance and compliance
Adopting ITIL in practice
Adopting the ITIL Service Management practices can aid the interaction between the product/service and its key business users. Taking the IT tools used by a scientist, let us show how this works in practice.
A key interactive capability would be the need to input experimental data. The requirement of the scientist would be the ability to use the application with ease, in such areas as moving between screens easily, being able to input lots of data, and following this up with the ability to report against key fields. This is known as the basic utility of the application, and if the interaction is done with ease the user would consider the service as being fit for its purpose. Due to the criticality of the service, the service would need to be consistently reliable. The service provider must therefore provide sufficient capacity, and importantly the ability to transact to a near 24 hour operation in most cases due to the locations of the laboratories. All data must also be secure. These aspects are known as warranty of a service.
ITIL Service Management provides guidance on the best practices in both of these areas to optimise the consistency and sustainability of both utility and warranty as this is key to overall customer satisfaction. It is to the whole of the Supporting organisation that we must look to guarantee that we can provide this value.
ITIL is heavily reliant on processes to provide a common discipline for sustaining consistency and cost efficiency. Its worth is also that it can be adapted to any type of service organisation: whether it be internal or external; small or large. We can only truly deliver value to our customers if we provide an appropriate service that delivers what they want under all the constraints and conditions forced upon them.
When senior managers adopt a service management orientation, they are adopting a vision for their organisation. Such a vision provides a model where staff will feel inspired to work and behave. However there is no one single best way to organise. And over time organisations will evolve - our lifecycle phase of continual service improvement protects this fundamental element.
