Monday, April 12, 2010

Strengths and Weaknesses of an ITIL framework

STRENGTHS

(http://www.itilcollege.com/ITILBenefits.html)

ITIL is the IT Infrastructure Library and ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark and a Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce. Developed in the late 1980's by the CCTA (now the OGC), by the mid 1990's it had become the world-wide de facto standard in service management. ITIL has become very popular as it is a public domain framework which is scaleable. Very large organizations, very small organizations and everything in between have implemented ITIL processes. ITIL focuses on best practice, and as such can be adapted and adopted in different ways according to each individual organizations needs.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices standards for Information Technology (IT) service management. The United Kingdom's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) created ITIL in response to the growing dependence on Information Technology to meet business needs and goals. ITIL provides businesses with a customizable framework of best practices to achieve quality service and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems. ITIL is organized into sets of texts which are defined by related functions: service support, service delivery, managerial, software support, computer operations, security management, and environmental. In addition to texts, ITIL services and products include training, qualifications, software tools, and user groups such as the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF), all of which you can find details of on this website.

Let’s see the ITIL Benefits: ITIL offers a systematic, professional approach to the management of IT service provision. Adopting its guidance can provide benefits such as:

* Increase Customer Satisfaction with IT services
* Reduce the risk of not meeting business requirements for IT services
* Reduce costs when developing procedures and practices within an organization
* Better communication and information flows between IT staff and customers
* Standards and guidance for IT staff
* Greater productivity and better use of skills and experience
* A quality approach to IT services

ITIL Benefits to IT service Customers, such as:

* Reassurance that IT services are provided in accordance with documented procedures that can be audited
* The ability to depend upon IT services, enabling the customer to meet business objectives The identification of contact points for enquiries or condition changes
* Provision of feedback from SLA monitoring

ITIL is from the concept no check list, as one has to develop the ideal-typical management of a IT infrastructure. The advantage and ITIL Benefits are rather in the fact that one falls back with the structure of an individual IT management to documented Best Practices and so that can jump over expensive learning curves. In addition the advantages of the standardization represented by ITIL are obvious: Modules and process goals of the IT management are defined and can be compared and evaluated with one another.

Many organizations have embraced the ITIL concept because it offers a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision along with other ITIL Benefits. There are many benefits to be reaped by adopting the guidance provided by ITIL. Such ITIL Benefits include but are not limited to:

* Improved customer satisfaction
* Reduced cost in developing practices and procedures
* Better communication flows between IT staff and customers
* Greater productivity and use of skills and experience

ITIL provides IT professionals with the knowledge and resources they need to run and maintain an effective and efficient IT Infrastructure that meets the needs of their clients while keeping costs at a minimum.

ITIL Benefits of using the ITIL framework:

* Increase customer satisfaction with IT services
* Reduce risks and costs
* Standards and guidance for IT staff
* A quality approach to IT services

Let’s see Why ITIL Can Help along with other ITIL Benefits: Many executives express frustration as they attempt to reign in the chaos and expense associated with their IT investments but find little in the way of substantive guidance. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has emerged as the worlds most widely accepted approach to the management and delivery of IT Services.

Gartner measurements on ITIL Benefits show that the overall results of moving from no adoption of IT Service Management to full adoption can reduce an organization’s Total Cost of Ownership by as much as 48%. ITIL currently has over 100,000 certified (trained) professionals and consultants, primarily in Europe, Australia and Canada, with only a small fraction of those certified professionals residing or practicing in the U.S.

By adopting IT best practices, what type of ITIL Benefits can an organization expect?

Beyond the quantifiable ITIL Benefits, delivered from the implementation of ITIL, there are also qualitative ITIL Benefits. Successful introduction of IT Service Management with ITIL should deliver type of ITIL Benefits to organizations:

* Improved Customer Satisfaction
* Improved ROI of IT
* Improved Morale of Service delivery and recipient staff
* Reduced staff turnover
* Lower costs of training, especially as the ITIL standard become widely adopted
* Improved systems/apps availability
* Improved IT employee productivity
* Reduced cost/incident
* Reduced hidden costs that traditionally increases substantially the TCO
* Better asset utilization

The economic impact of an organization adopting ITIL along with other ITIL Benefits will be felt in all of the areas listed above. The ITIL Benefits can also be viewed in terms of direct savings and indirect, the later being derived as a result of the strategy but not directly related to the actions being taken, such as minimizing the missed opportunity costs, the cost of not been able to operate. These indirect ITIL Benefits as well as the direct benefits may vary greatly from one organization to another.


(http://www.itilnews.com/index.php?pagename=itil_faq_what_are_the_benefits_of_ITIL)

The following is not a definitive list, but hopefully conveys some of the fundamental benefits, if we have missed any benefits that you believe should be included then please let us know.

* A documented approach
* Global recognition
* Accredited educational companies
* Increased and improved effectiveness and efficiency of an organization
* Potential to positively effect an organizations profits and share prices
* Improved interaction and functioning within the IT/IS department
* Improved interaction and functioning with the Business and Customer community
* Vocabulary and terms understood by all who have undertaken ITIL education irrespective of industry sector, country or continent
* Recruited ITIL qualified personnel are potentially able to integrate into another ITIL organization so much easier
* Specific roles can be recruited so much quicker and easily
* Outsourcing companies can be audited against ITIL best practice
* ISO /IEC 20000 provides the confidence for customers and purchasers of an organizations services, on both a country and global basis

WEAKNESSES

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