In business, technology, and business technology efficiency can make or break an organization. Redundancies, prioritization errors, and sloppy processes in IT service providers and helpdesk groups can lead to outages, downtime, and substandard service.

How can IT groups offering ITIL services better serve their client organizations?

That’s the central question that Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set out to answer. First developed in the 1980’s at the advent of broad adoption of information technology, ITIL services are a detailed set of practices that focus on aligning IT services with the overall needs and goals of the business.

Currently overseen and accredited in part by the UK Cabinet Office, ITIL services have been adopted by IT groups across the globe including Microsoft, NASA, and Disney.

A Better Path for ITIL Service Providers

At its core, ITIL advocates that IT service providers need to be clearly aligned with organizational goals. It also outlines how to best use technology as a sustainable tool for business change, transformation, and growth.

There are 5 major tenets of ITIL that correlate to business processes:

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement

Some of these efficiencies in action:

Too many calls about a certain topic to the helpdesk? ITIL suggests reducing headaches for users and the helpdesk by implementing an FAQ document that enables users to help themselves and frees support technicians to work on more pressing issues.

Low urgency tickets muddying the top of the queue? Better prioritization and triage of ticketing allows critical problems to stick to the top, while password resets and patches are prioritized more efficiently.

At SSI, clients may have already noticed some changes in our processes.

“We have recently revamped our priority system to allow for proper SLA benchmarks across incidents,” said SSI’s Service Delivery Manager, Kris McMenamin of some ITIL implementations he’s spearheaded since joining the organization. “These enhancements enable us to better keep our clients informed on a number of fronts. When they’ll be contacted, the frequency of contact during an incident, and resolutions times are all things that are better communicated now.

Business Benefits of ITIL Services

ITIL processes also increase transparency between the IT groups and the business in regards to cost and asset management and provide a more stable environment for organizational growth and change.

According to a recent survey brokerage firm Pershing reduced its incident response time by 50% in the first year after restructuring its service desk to ITIL guidelines. This allowed users to get back to work more quickly and freed the helpdesk to proactively innovate on the organization’s behalf.

Reporting also indicates that reducing wasted tech time allows businesses to better manage risk and mitigate the harm of downtime and outages.

The “priority matrix”, as McMenamin put it, represents that triage system.

“We are able to base this off a priority matrix that takes into account both overall company impact with the severity or urgency of the incident or request. With this revamped system, SSI is able to better categorize our client’s issues, and ensure that when major request or incident occurs we have our focus on the correct issue. “

Implementing ITIL at SSI

At SSI we have embraced much of the ITIL methodology to our technical and Service Desk operations. Allowing SSI to provide a higher level of service and more secure technical operation.

As a technical organization in charge of many clients’ infrastructure, we take great care in the process and procedure of changes made to our overall environment. We have implemented a rigorous change management system for all changes to our datacenters both virtual and physical. By following change management procedure, and proper approval flows we are able to ensure that all reasonable possibilities have been considered prior to implementation.

How is your IT group working to gain efficiencies? A business IT assessment from SSI can help root out inefficiencies throughout your environment and help your business run more effectively.