The performance and effectiveness of any organisation today depends largely on the effectiveness of its information systems. Given this importance, the IT organisation and infrastructure must have the bias of serving the customers and helping business meet their objectives. IT service provision, in all organisations, needs to evolve with both current and future business demands, while stabilising the costs of providing this service. The objective is to continually improve the quality of service, aligned to the business requirements costeffectively. Well designed IT Service Management provides the services that the business (i.e. internal or external customers) needs, but also improve efficiency and effectiveness while reducing risk when delivering the IT Service.

Best practice standards, such as ITIL for IT Service Management, COBIT for IT Governance and ISO 17799 for information security policy planning, provide a well documented, tried and tested set of practices that are drawn from the collective experience and wisdom of thousands of practitioners around the world. Many of these practices have evolved over several decades and present a reliable and sensible solution for companies.

Besides being a genuinely good standard developed by the ‘collective’ wisdom of seasoned IT professionals, ITIL has benefited from being a non-proprietary standard freely available to all who want to use it. Nonprofit organisations like IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) represent the users as well as the vendors and have also provided excellent forums and
platforms for bringing professionals together to constantly improve the standard. Over the last two decades, ITIL has quickly become a defacto standard for IT service management developing quite a following and this is further helped by translation of the standard into several languages. Adoption by many well known organisations both in public, private and government sectors has also provided significant credibility credibility to fuel further adoption.

ITSM Tools need to be a reflection of the processes in terms of terminology, activities, workflows and roles and responsibilities. Best practice processes, based on the standards, need to drive the design of the tools. By suggesting compliance to ITIL, tool vendors imply that their tools are based on ITIL processes and the workflows built in the tools are based on ITIL processes. Since the tools support the implementation of the processes by bringing them to ‘life’ their conformity to the processes is of an utmost importance.

Couple of choices – if you are not sure, start with a gap analysis, or do a mobilisation workshop (mobilisation workshops involve getting the key members of the project team to learn about ITSM and define an organisation specific plan on where the business could benefit most from ITSM). If there is a clear gap which ITIL/ITSM can resolve – such as incident or change/configuration or problem management process, then that could be a place to begin. You can look to use external consultants, or if you don’t have the budget then you have to look to build an internal project team. However, ITIL implementation could be a significant change in the enterprise’s way of working, so organisational change principles need to be strongly adhered to (get management to buy in, communicate widely, have a plan and start with quick and visible successes for example.). Begin with a manageable scope, something which will result in ‘quick and tangible wins’. This will help the project gain credibility and will give the team the necessary momentum to build the ITSM programme further.
An important note – education for both project team and IT leadership is an essential initial step.

What’s the most difficult part of implementing ITSM?

Different organisations face different challenges, some in terms of not having enough resource, others in terms of top management buy in. However, let’s look beyond these initial challenges and you have buy in and resources – then the organisational change (resistance), presents the most significant barrier to successful implementation. Organisational Change – getting the buy in from middle management could be the most significant barrier. Proper training/education, involving leaders in ITSM initiatives, fostering a good internal communications about ITSM, a clear support from the IT and the business leadership and a strong programme management are important factors to overcome the resistance to change.

How can an organisation tell whether its solution is a quality solution?

Does the solution meet the needs of the customers and users? Is the solution designed to take the organisational capability and current status into account? Are the costs and resources associated with implementing the ITSM solution (in terms of process, tools and organisation design) in line with the benefits that the business expects to gain having invested in implementation?
The answers to these questions help formulate whether a solution is appropriate for an organisation and meets their needs.

Will the organisation get real value from ITSM?

There is clear evidence from the published case studies and feedbacks in user groups from well known companies about the benefits of implementing ITSM, in terms of cost savings, cost avoidance through reduced outages and improved customer/user satisfaction. Besides these tangible benefits, the most significant benefit that the IT organisations gains is the improved image of the IT organisation among their customers (whether internal or external). Similar evidence is available from figures and surveys and studies conducted by independent research companies such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC. Most importantly, this belief in value from ITSM is evident through the promotion observed in ever growing ITSMF chapters and increasing attendance in ITSM conferences world-wide.

ROI can be measured in terms of tangibles and nontangible benefits.
- Cost Savings – Reduced FTE required to ‘keep the services running’.
- Cost avoidance by virtue of less outages, down-time, higher availability, desired performance of IT infrastructure and applications.
- Increased flexibility and an enhanced ability to outsource non-strategic parts of the IT organisation functions, resulting in potential cost savings.
Non-Tangible benefits -
- A greater opportunity to better govern an IT organisation – better alignment with the business/customers of IT services, both now and in the future.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction. ITSM/ITIL forces IT organisations to institutionalise the good habits of ‘listening’ to their customers and take their needs into account Improved employee morale – Less fire-fighting (meaning less stress!), well organised and more proactive IT operations/services departments and improved morale among employees.

In a complex environment where the IT organisation is dealing with multiple vendors and arrangements, it is beneficial for all the involved parties to use the same vocabulary and work with similar definitions. A consequence of well designed IT Service Management is good processes – which help build flexibility for organisations around decisions on what and how much to outsource and how to manage their vendors effectively.
Another benefit of using ITSM as a framework for outsourcing IT Services is the a consistent set of processes being used for delivering IT services, which can be defined in Service Level Agreements – leading to less misunderstandings and lower associated costs.
Lastly, ITSM also allows the use of common metrics (with common assumptions on how to capture these metrics) and therefore measuring and controlling the success of outsourcing can be determined and evaluated more easily.