Achieving Best Practices for IT Service Management

Many service providers talk about “best practices” and “excellence” in IT Service Management. However, few introduce to their customers (or adhere to, themselves) a documented framework for best-practices planning, delivery and support of IT services. Officially called the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®), this widely accepted framework is a cohesive yet constantly evolving set of best practices for Service Management. To ensure it is both complete and current, the ITIL draws on the experience and expertise of private and public sector companies that have successfully achieved the goals for excellence outlined in the framework.

How It Works

Rooted in the move from mainframe computers to distributed computing and dispersed resources, ITIL helps companies break down the IT silos that tend to arise in organizations and ensure consistent application of processes for technology delivery and support. For every new and existing business service, ITIL promotes the importance of a Service Lifecycle to drive organizational effectiveness and efficiency through predictable service levels. (For the purposes of this model, a business service is defined as any operation that provides value to users and is supported by technology services and infrastructure.)

1. Service Strategy—Understanding who the IT customers are, the offerings needed to meet their needs, and the capabilities and resources required to develop and execute these offerings successfully.
2. Service Design—Ensuring that the design of new and modified services and their related processes cost effectively meet customer expectations.
3. Service Transition—Successfully building, testing and implementing the processes necessary to ensure the customer enjoys the desired value from the service. This phase of the lifecycle also addresses change management, validation and testing, and other important variables.
4. Service Operation—Delivering the service and ensuring its health on an ongoing basis, including minimizing disruptions, detecting problematic trends, and otherwise managing service access.
5. Continual Service Improvement (CSI)—An overarching concept rather than a separate step, CSI provides the mechanism for an IT team to measure and improve upon the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery and process execution.

ITIL offers enormous benefit to companies that adopt it, because it fosters consistent, repeatable processes that can be measured and continually fine-tuned, not only to maintain excellence, but also to adapt to changing customer needs, emerging business opportunities and challenges and other important factors.

Mega-corporations, manufacturers and technology giants such as IBM, HP, Wal-Mart, Sony, Pfizer, Boeing and Citi have embraced ITIL and wouldn’t operate for a single day without it. More importantly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), any business working with a qualified IT partner can implement the ITIL model without excessive expense or difficulty.

DynaSis fully supports and adheres to ITIL, not only as a tool for fostering excellence in other SMBs, but also in the daily practice of our own operations. We have helped many of our clients develop and execute best-practices IT solutions using these guidelines.

Ready to get started? I’d love to tell you more about what ITIL can do for you, or schedule your company for a DynaSis Technology Assessment, which is the first step toward achieving the business service excellence of your dreams.