ITIL survival.com - ITIL, Keep at it.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices used to deliver high quality IT services. The best practices described in ITIL represent the consensus derived from over a decade of work by thousands of IT and data processing professionals’ world-wide, including hundreds of years of collective experience. Because of its depth and breadth, the ITIL has become the defacto world standard for IT best practices.

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Why ITIL Can Help

Many executives express frustration as they attempt to reign in the chaos and expense associated with their IT investments but find little in the way of substantive guidance. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has emerged as the worlds most widely accepted approach to the management and delivery of IT Services.

Gartner measurements show that the overall results of moving from no adoption of IT Service Management to full adoption can reduce an organization’s Total Cost of Ownership by as much as 48%.

ITIL currently has over 100,000 certified (trained) professionals and consultants, primarily in Europe, Australia and Canada, with only a small fraction of those certified professionals residing or practicing in the U.S.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) represents a drastically different approach to IT by framing all activity under two broad umbrellas named Service Support and Service Delivery respectively. By focusing on the critical business processes and disciplines needed to deliver services around IT, the ITIL provides a maturity path for IT that is not based on technology. This accessibility allows senior executives to both sponsor and shepherd IT quality improvement efforts. The ITIL has become the most widely accepted approach to IT service management.

ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent volume of best practices drawn from the collective experience and wisdom of thousands of IT practitioners around the world. By defining IT quality as the level of alignment between the actual services delivered and the actual needs of the business the library serves as a common point of engagement for IT and the other business units.

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By adopting IT best practices, what type of advantage can an organization expect?

Beyond the quantifiable benefits, delivered from the implementation of ITIL, there are also qualitative benefits. Successful introduction of IT Service Management with ITIL should deliver type of benefits to organizations:

•           Improved Customer Satisfaction

•           Improved ROI of  IT

•           Improved Morale of Service delivery and recipient staff

•           Reduced staff turnover

•           Lower costs of training, especially as the ITIL standard become widely adopted 

•           Improved systems/apps availability 

•           Improved IT employee productivity

•           Reduced cost/incident

•           Reduced hidden costs that traditionally increases substantially the TCO

•           Better asset utilization

The economic impact of an organization adopting ITIL will be felt in all of the areas listed above. The benefits can also be viewed in terms of direct savings and indirect, the later being derived as a result of the strategy but not directly related to the actions being taken, such as minimizing the missed opportunity costs, the cost of not been able to operate. These indirect benefits as well as the direct benefits may vary greatly from one organization to another.

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ITIL Success Stories

Has anyone successfully adopted this framework? The answer is a resounding yes. Over the last ten years organizations ranging both in size and industry have successfully integrated the best practices guidance and taken their results to the public.

It has become clear that focusing on the development of a process driven IT organization can yield significant efficiency related savings. What is also interesting is that effectiveness of services delivered has also ranked highly as one of the many positive outcomes of best practice adoption. Moving into the realm of IT Service Management requires the attention and focus of the IT organization as well as many important stakeholders from other business units.

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Who in the US has implemented ITIL and what was the outcome?

Many high-profile U.S. organizations have adopted the best practices described in ITIL. Companies such as Procter and Gamble, IBM, Caterpillar, Shell Oil, Boeing, and the Internal Revenue Service have all reported great success and significant operational cost savings as a direct result of ITIL adoption.

Procter and Gamble publicly attributes nearly $125 million in IT cost savings per year to the adoption of ITIL, constituting nearly 10% of their annual IT budget. Similarly, Shell Oil utilized ITIL best practices when they overhauled their global desktop PC consolidation project, encompassing 80,000 desktops. After this project was completed, they can now do software upgrades in less than 72 hours, potentially saving 6000 man-days working days and 5 million dollars.