Services

The Benefits of ITIL

The benefits of ITIL are numerous and well documented on the official ITIL web site or the itSMF website. The purpose here is not to recant what you can read elsewhere, but to give a simple answer to the question “Can you give me a rough idea of what I’m going to get from all this?”

Here goes:

  1. ITIL provides optimal service provision at justifiable cost.
  2. ITIL replaces ‘chaos’ with ‘order’ and ‘best efforts’ with ‘predictable quality’.
  3. Provides ‘Definition’ – as what cannot be defined, cannot be controlled.
  4. Provides ‘Control’ – as what cannot be controlled, cannot be measured (and what cannot be measured cannot be improved).
  5. Provides a massive ‘leg up’ on the ladder towards compliance (COBIT / BS15000)

But, if all that isn’t enough to convince you of ITIL’s benefits, let us point out some figures released over the last 2-3 years that put actual monetary value on these things (after all – that’s what counts at the end, eh?)

“Proctor & Gamble representatives told about 1,000 attendees at the International IT Service Management Summit in Boston last week (2002) that the global company has saved about $500 million across multiple departments since beginning to streamline processes with ITIL four years ago”.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2002/0930itil.html

In the free booklet “An Introductory Overview of  ITIL’, the itSMF provides examples of figures from their research detailing some of the improvements business are experiencing every day:

  • More than 70 percent reduction in service downtime
  • ROI up by more than 1,000 percent
  • Savings of nearly $200 million annually
  • 50 percent reduction in new product cycles
http://www.itsmf.com/publications/ITIL%20Overview.pdf

It is frequently suggested that “IT is what drives business today”. We disagree. Competitive advantage, profits, better working practices for employees – they are what drives businesses today. But IT can help provide such things as never before. It’s about synergy and about co-operation; about understanding and not blame; about a need being fulfilled in the best and most cost-effective way possible to ensure arrival at a common goal.

That’s what ITIL is about.