Many organisations have invested in getting their IT services ITILised without actually taking a good look at “Where are they wanting to be in the future?” or in fact “How do we integrate our IT and Services into our organisation and the organisation’s strategic direction?”
Aligning IT strategy with the Organisational strategy. This was the old paradigm whereas today it is much more about ‘integration’ as most organisations find that IT is integral to how they go about doing business. Unfortunately most IT groups only see the need to keep services going, fix what is broken, and don’t fix what is not broken. This is investing to maintain and doesn’t really address delivering services to meet customer expectations, or providing the means to get continual service improvement. It is also a totally reactive approach.
Take a Step Back to Look at a Framework
We believe the best way to achieve a proactive perspective and to not only meet but exceed customer expectations is to step back and take a holistic view of the IT service delivery framework within the organisation. It needs to incorporate the ideal future state for ‘IT strategy’ and how this delivers on the stated organisational strategy. In fact it will need to be integrated to the current and future strategy. It also needs to be underpinned by good processes and limited to those that deliver on the stated IT strategy. Of course there needs to be a link between all the elements of a Service Delivery model of People, Process, Technology, Information, and Knowledge.
Benefits of ITIL to an IT organisation
ITIL can deliver substantial benefits to an IT organisation both in good management and control over costs, logical investment of appropriate IT assets, and deliver a high quality of service across the range of services IT provides the organisation. By creating a ‘framework’ for ITIL with a ‘services’ focus and having well defined SLAs creating a means to measure the actual quality of service being delivered, and a means to improve this level of service. A framework that incorporates the 5 areas of ITIL Version 3 of Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, and Continual Service Improvement can be optimised to maintain a high quality of service.
Flexibility needs to be built in to create a dynamic approach to delivering high quality services, great utilisation of available resources, and keep a handle on the costs. Do you really need a large number of resources on the Service Desk?
Understanding what needs to be delivered?
Understanding the key services, key stakeholder expectations, flexible SLAs, and those service areas that can be effectively ‘outsourced’ without loss in the quality of service, and those services that really do need to be maintained internally for a variety of reasons. This perspective should not be limited to just the IT infrastructure as current models of SaaS, Virtualisation, and outsourced Data Centres provides excellent cost models whilst maintaining good management of service delivery.
How to make it work?
Summing up IT needs to step back and assess the way they need to deliver services in the medium to longer term future, look at a ‘transition’ point of implementing some starting blocks that lead to the desired future state, and only then taking a look at the current state and what really needs to change.
This perspective needs to be within a ‘framework’ that really delivers on ‘services’ and constant improvement. Exceeding customer expectations is a great ideal for any IT organisation to aspire to.
