What's ITIL?
It helps manage risk, improve customer relations, establish cost-effective practices, and build a stable IT environment for growth and change.
Comprising five books, ITIL standardizes service management processes, aiming to reduce operational costs, enhance productivity, and mitigate risks. Its goal is to create predictable IT environments and provide top-tier customer service by streamlining processes and improving efficiency.
ITIL 4, the latest version, maintains this focus while emphasizing agility and flexibility in the IT department's approach.
Why to use ITIL?
ITIL Principles serve as universal guidelines applicable to any organization, enabling systematic adaptation in evolving business environments.
They aren't tied to specific technology or entities but should be integrated into strategy, value delivery, and maintaining competence.
Their significance necessitates awareness and active implementation by all members across daily operations.
This discussion will outline these principles and explore their practical applications.
- Reduced IT costs
- Improved IT services using proven best practices
- Improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
- Standards and guidance
- Improved productivity
- Improved use of skills and experience
- Improved delivery of third-party services through the specification of ITIL or BS15000 as the standard for service delivery in services procurements
7 ITIL guiding principles:
An organization's primary objective is delivering value to stakeholders, which extends beyond customers and shareholders to include society, employees, and more.
ITIL 4 accelerates value delivery by leveraging the Service Value System, integrating diverse practices into a cohesive whole.
'Value' emerges from collective organizational efforts, processes, and technology utilization. ITIL 4 stresses the importance of co-creating value with all stakeholders, emphasizing not just financial but also customer experience value. This focus on value aligns with the Lean-Agile approach, a pivotal principle within ITIL.
Start where you are:
'Starting where you are' reflects a Lean-Agile mindset, minimizing waste and enhancing current value delivery mechanisms.
This principle, integral to ITIL, necessitates a realistic evaluation of the current architecture. It also emphasizes collecting and analyzing crucial metrics to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Progress iteratively with feedback:
Iterative improvement is key to refining an organization's value delivery. This principle advocates breaking larger tasks into manageable ones with smaller deadlines, emphasizing feedback.
Adhering to this ITIL principle aligns with Lean-Agile, promoting incremental steps validated by stakeholders. Lean-Agile utilizes short, time-boxed iterations involving stakeholders, contrasting with the 'waterfall' method's single-cycle approach.
Short cycles facilitate data collection and metrics, enabling continuous improvement and building trust among stakeholders by showcasing progress. Internal metrics guide service enhancement both upstream and downstream, fostering stakeholder trust and organizational advancement.
Collaborate and promote visibility:
Lean-Agile utilizes short, time-boxed iterations involving stakeholders, contrasting with the 'waterfall' method's single-cycle approach.
Short cycles facilitate data collection and metrics, enabling continuous improvement and building trust among stakeholders by showcasing progress. Internal metrics guide service enhancement both upstream and downstream, fostering stakeholder trust and organizational advancement.
Think and work holistically:
Focusing solely on individual parts of the value delivery pipeline leads to suboptimal outcomes. It's ineffective for one department to operate faster if it burdens another.
For effective results, the entire service, encompassing information, technology, stakeholders, and organizational principles, must be managed cohesively. By coordinating efforts toward a common value, organizations ensure satisfaction for internal and external customers.
Adopting a holistic approach enables decisions that benefit all stakeholders. In today's interconnected landscape, no service, department, or provider exists in isolation—they all interconnect to produce value.
Therefore, any organizational upgrades or decisions must consider the bigger picture for maximum impact.
Keep it simple and practical:
It enables organizations to streamline complex offerings by rationalizing rules and procedures to adapt to changing environments.
While regulations ensure compliance, excessive processes can impede information flow and decision-making, slowing down workflow and hindering value delivery.
DevOps and Agile methodologies focus on eliminating waste and improving workflow for all value streams. ITIL 4, emphasizing Lean-Agile, advocates granting autonomy to organizational members and encourages simplifying system processes by reducing micromanagement.
Optimize and automate:
The ITIL principle of 'optimize and automate' mirrors manufacturing strategies, enabling faster response and higher-quality IT services. Prioritizing customer needs and experience is crucial for effective value delivery.
Simplifying processes is key to maximizing resources and delivering value swiftly while maintaining quality, availability, and security. An inflexible delivery system hampers quick value delivery.
Automation minimizes time, labor, and liability costs, aligning outcomes with stakeholder expectations. Leveraging internal data is essential for automation to ensure predictable and accurate results.
ITTL Products:
ServiceNow:
ServiceNow offers a comprehensive suite of applications catering to various workflow tasks in modern offices, with a focused emphasis on IT desk responsibilities like asset management, access governance, and service desk operations.
Their ITSM product aims to centralize ticket filing and progress tracking, utilizing mobile and web-based portals supported by predictive intelligence for efficient ticket routing and swift resolutions.
The product consists of three tiers, starting with foundational features in the base tier and progressively enhancing tracking and routing capabilities in higher tiers tailored for larger operations.
It boasts versatile integration options facilitating automated connections with systems like Jira for seamless tracking.
This led to the creation of Jira Service Management, a separate product line. It offers a user-friendly architecture tailored for average users, emphasizing streamlined workflows and increased automation for self-service.
The service tiers vary from a free introductory version to premium or enterprise-level tools, providing advanced integration options and additional features such as the Incident Command Center for handling major issues.
Cherwell:
It features a low-code configuration model capable of modeling workflows, from simple to intricate, without necessitating scripting or programming skills.
Primarily centered around the 11 standard ITIL management processes, it's adaptable to tackle more complex challenges. Its objective is to achieve one-step resolutions and enable self-service for users.
Freshworks Freshservice:
It operates on a ticket-based system within a suite of tools for service desk management and task automation.
Integrated with discussion boards like Slack and Teams, it enables issue discussions, assignments, and potential deflection to standard documentation.
Following triage, resolutions can be tracked via the Change Management Database. Additionally, its AI-engine, "Freddy," contributes to workflow automation and expedites issue resolution.
InvGate Service Desk:
Through ticket filing, users can access self-service information.
The tool efficiently tracks assets to ensure optimal functionality across hardware and software. Automating repetitive tasks is facilitated by a low-code, visual programming IDE aimed at accelerating workflow efficiency.
ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus,
ProProfs Help Desk,
Spiceworks,
SysAid,
TOPdesk,
ProProfs Help Desk,
Spiceworks,
SysAid,
TOPdesk,
Wrike,
Zendesk,
Zendesk,
ETC