The recent cases of Dell and Lehman Bros wrapping up call centers in India, put forth a very important issue–that of service delivery improvement. Today, CIOs are under immense pressure to decrease response time, improve resource utilization, eliminate redundant work, and justify service quality cost, besides ensuring availability, reliability and security of critical IT services.

What is ITIL?
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was established as the standard framework for IT Service Management, which entails a comprehensive, consistent and coherent set of best practices.

Today, ITIL is the most widely accepted IT-process management framework in the world. ITIL describes the processes needed to manage the IT infrastructure efficiently and effectively in order to guarantee the service levels agreed upon by the IT organization and its customers. The diagram presented along gives an idea how ITIL processes fit in and act as a conduit between strategic and operational processes.

Originally created by the CCTA, a UK Government agency, ITIL is now being adopted and used across the world as the defacto standard for best practice in the provision of IT Services. In the US, organizations such as Procter & Gamble, Caterpillar, State Farm and Boeing have shared how they have incorporated aspects of ITIL and IT Service Management into their IT management strategies. Although ITIL covers a number of areas, its main focus is on IT Service Management.

Why ITIL?
ITIL introduces a process-oriented way of working within IT, all focused on delivering high quality and guaranteed IT services to the customer. ITIL enables

• Measurable quality improvements
• Efficient IT Service Management processes
• Consistent way of working
• Standardization of terminology
• Improved communication process
• Increased customer satisfaction

ITIL Service Support & Delivery Processes

ITIL is organized into a series of processes, which are clubbed into two main areas:

• Service Support: It is a practice of six disciplines that enable IT Services to be provided effectively like configuration management, service desk, incident management, problem management, change management and release management. These processes lay down standards for managing the day-to-day operations of customers by IT service organizations.
• Service Delivery: It encompasses six processes that cover the management of IT services—availability management, capacity management, IT service continuity management, financial management and service level management. These are the business aspects that service providers must consider to maintain a steady and satisfying relationship with its customer.

Intangible Benefits
CIOs today are interested in allocating costs to the less tangible benefits of service provision or business performance. IT organizations are striving to detect and eliminate problems before, or at the very least when they occur. The problem with traditional measures, such as revenue or market share, is that they reflect a delayed snapshot of business performance, thus making it too late to avoid a problem once detected. By having a balance between these lagging indicators, and other measures that help forecast those early warnings, organizations can begin to manage proactively and more precisely. Further, measures such as customer satisfaction, staff training, internal processes and service metrics will be recognized as those indicators of whether an organization will achieve its business goals.

Measuring these provides early warnings and a more accurate measure of the internal business or IT contribution. These internal metrics may also be used to measure and manage the operational aspects of the specific, and optimize their operation and the contribution it makes to the business.

Return on Investment
Companies are beginning to value return on investment by addressing three key inputs to any project—people, process and technology. They then translate these into quantifiable returns, related to utility of the products and services they offer and the cost of delivering them. Once investments are viewed in this context, it is easier to define expected benefits and subsequently measure those returns. Another crucial outcome is that this explicitly demands the creation of multi-skilled, cross- functional teams with shared accountability and responsibility for success. No longer can users point fingers at IT and vice versa, because the degree of mutual dependency for success is explicit.

IT and business alignment is a key ingredient to the successful implementation of ITIL best practices. By knowing the direction that the organization is going and what the customers of IT are demanding, it can begin to improve its own internal processes to meet customer demands. Driving IT on business value is becoming ever more important, although for many IT organizations, costs is still the primary steering indicator. ITIL improvement programs need to make the business case clear—what is the added value to IT not just in terms of cost savings.

The Benefits

• Efficient problem management enables organizations to increase the L1 (Level 1) resolution rate, and in turn, decrease the required work by L2 (Level 2) professionals that is typically, four to six times more expensive.
• Reduced incident handling time by agreeing to improvements between L1 and L2 support teams.
• Quicker root-cause analysis and improved impact and risk analysis for change management due to available configuration management information
• Release management requires improved testing, resulting in a reduction in failed changes
• As organizations develop and scale their internal processes to compete in the knowledge based economy, the ability to exploit and automate intangible assets, such as knowledge and business processes, has become far more decisive that simply managing static physical assets.
• Cost analysis applied to a process or services assists in answering the following questions—what product or process should cost; what the non-value adding activities that contribute to its current cost are; what the cost-based pricing for a product or service is; and what the organization can do during the design and engineering stages to avoid unnecessary costs in the first place.

Since IT is what drives businesses today, service provision to customers has a major bearing on the key concerns of the CIOs. This accurate measurement of service provides them with strategic information for decision making in their quest for RoI and the alignment of IT with their business.

Anant Gupta COO, HCL Comnet