ITIL

ITIL is increasingly becoming more important in today’s modern organization. In order to remain competitive and successful, businesses must have high performance IT organizations which provide cost effective solutions and timely support. Many IT organizations still operate in a reactive manner to break/fix situations and a sense of agility is often unrealistic for responsible individuals. This is where ITIL comes in.

ITIL enables the IT organization to:

• Plan and execute proactively based on a strategy
• Develop a customer-focused approach
• Provide IT services that are highly available, reliable and secure
• Produce IT operational excellence for the business

By providing quality IT services to the business, the IT organization becomes a critical vehicle in working together with the business to achieve common goals.

At Intact Technology we understand that in order for IT to provide quality service delivery there needs to be a solid service strategy in place. In order for organizations to maintain successful growth, the IT service provider must be able to think and act in a strategic manner. ITIL provides the strategy principles which underpin the service design, service transition and service operation disciplines. Service strategy lives at the heart of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, providing the necessary policies and objectives for each service discipline. This foundation provides IT a strategic thought process on “why?” IT operations performs specific tasks before the “how?” in defining procedures. It defines service offerings with a focus on what is valuable to the customer and is based on service outcomes which the customer needs to achieve.

IT service providers that adopt ITIL with service strategy into their organizations can transform service management capabilities to improve the integration of IT with business goals, but most importantly, deliver quality services to the customer that provide the expected value. Thus, the strategic process leads to IT implementing good practices with proactive measures and customers receive value added services.

In order for organizations to be profitable and maintain shareholder loyalty, IT needs to produce service outcomes that represent high levels of availability, reliability, security and performance of IT services. This fact has made IT highly visible and there are increasingly more demands today for IT to become a seamless part of the business. This can be achieved by IT taking an active role early on with strategic initiatives. Collaboration is critical and will require a common IT service management thought process with people, processes and enabling technologies to be in place day one.

IT organizations that have a strategic business alignment by adopting ITIL can make great strides in maturing their operations which will enable the business to be more competitive and improve operations in support of mission critical IT services. One of the greatest strengths of ITIL is that it brings process disciplines around the delivery and support of IT services. The best practices from ITIL have been proven methods in providing cost-effective IT services to customers.

• Providing cost justifiable services aligned with the Business. Implementation of Service Level Management provides an understanding of business needs for the IT service provider and identifies the required IT capabilities in order to support these needs. Formal service level agreements provide contractual obligations for both IT and the business
• Responding to customer issues and requests while providing effective communications in a controlled and timely manner. Prevention of recurrence of faults within the infrastructure. Implementation of Incident Management will decrease the downtime per user making the business more productive when IT services are utilized. Implementation of Problem Management will decrease recurring incidents and support major outages. This adds to better availability levels which is directly proportional to IT services demanded by the business everyday

Achieving stability, maintaining control of the IT infrastructure and supporting business change. Implementation of Change Management with Release and Deployment Management provides the business the competitive advantage and the agility necessary to change based on business requirements. The IT service provider will have the ability to support efficient handling of changes with timely results.