An IT organization may have made huge investments to improve its infrastructure. However, that does not guarantee that the organization will deliver excellent performance in terms of cost reduction and profit enhancement. The implementation of ITIL within an organization ensures to a large extent that the business is making maximum utilization of resources, offering solutions to customer issues at the earliest, enhancing customer satisfaction, and thereby turning towards a customer focused organization.
There are multiple ways by which the implementation of ITIL benefits an organization, and here is a glance at a few reasons which makes the use of ITIL and ITSM worthwhile today.
7 Reasons to Start Using ITIL and ITSM Today
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Reduces Ownership Cost:
In an IT organization, expectations are set between end users and service providers regarding the kind of services provided, in what form, and at what cost. A catalogue is outlined consisting of the kind of services provided by the business, along with the costs involved. When new software is decided to be implemented within an organization, there is a certain amount of cost involved for catering to the network, hardware requirements, set up costs, configurations etc. Certain parts of the service are supported by the business itself, the rest by a third party. The introduction of ITIL helps, in this case, by identifying the existing services that can be leveraged, which in turn, reduces ownership costs. The business can also take advantage of shared services with third party service providers, which also results in cost reduction.
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Enhances Existing Projects:
ITIL provides the best practice methods that can be adopted in all existing and new projects within an organization. Based on ITIL principles, project managers can streamline their projects and identify the shortcomings and areas of improvement.. For some managers, ITIL acts as industry’s standard metrics, and they believe in comparing their existing processes with the best practices on a regular basis, to identify any scope of improvement.
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Offers Communication between Service Providers and End Users:
ITIL has laid a common language of communication between end users and service providers making it extremely convenient for both parties. For example, a customer is need of a service and requires submitting a service request. ITIL has already laid down the terminologies to be used in the process of submitting the request, making the communication easy between both parties.
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Clarifies What the Service Desk Can and Cannot Do:
When an issue occurs, employees wait for an answer from the service desk without knowing whether or not it falls under the parameter of the service desk. Sometimes, employees wait for services that the service desk is not entitled to provide. This results in waste of time and effort.
The best practice methodologies outline very clearly the services that come under the portfolio of a service desk. Therefore, on the occurrence of an incident, employees know exactly when to approach the service desk and when not to. In case the solution to the problem does not come under the purview of the service desk, IT personnel will know that a third party needs to intervene. -
Eases out Scaling:
Often it is observed that when you scale, your systems and hardware don’t grow along with you. This results in a gap between organizational growth and infrastructural growth. This kind of situation will not occur if the organization is following ITIL best practices. Service Desk ensures that situations like this are under control. It takes care of the upgrade of infrastructural components, like hardware and networking elements along with organizational growth. Optimum utilization of resources is facilitated, redundancy is eliminated and central processes are strengthened, resulting in seamless transition, with the service desk in picture.
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Enhances Service Quality:
An organization needs its internal operations to be clean and proactive. Maintaining Excel sheets and time trackers can only help to a certain extent. These are traditional methods of maintaining work-related information and may not respond actively to innovation and survive in the competition. Additionally, if there is confusion in internal operations and management, there is very little scope for an organization to try newer things. ITIL ensures that there is no mismanagement and operations are seamless internally. Having ensured that, ITIL also makes room for innovation and ensures that quality of service is maintained by having a keen eye on performance indicators. The best practice methodologies come with specific management processes which ensure that past mistakes are used as a learning tool.
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Enhanced Efficiency on the Floor:
With efficient internal operations, fast turnarounds, quick resolution and fixes, the overall functioning of an organization improves significantly. Organizations following ITIL methodologies have improved operations when compared with other organizations. Smooth functioning of organizational capabilities ensures minimum downtime, negligible delays, leading to happy employees, and satisfied customers.
Few organizations who have adopted the ITIL best practices have publicly announced the benefits they have achieved. For example, Procter and Gamble disclosed that almost $125 million in cost saving per year have resulted with the implementation of ITIL. Shell Oil on the other hand, saved 5 million days and 6000 work days with the adoption of the ITIL best practices.
In the last decade, few of the world’s biggest multinational corporations embraced ITIL and grew exponentially. ITIL helped streamlining their processes, enhancing time and cost management and thereby enabling them to respond fast to negative circumstances, if any, at workplace. ITIL has also helped simplifying process oriented structures of large scale businesses. Well-known multinational corporations have been able to simplify their complex bureaucratic structures with the introduction of ITIL into their systems.
