Have you heard of ITIL? No, it’s not a new Apple product. It is an acronym short for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library. What does that mean? According the official ITIL homepage it is “the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally.” It is basically a set of guidelines and best practices for managing all things IT. ITIL gives detailed descriptions of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any organization can tailor to its IT needs. It has been adopted by the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard just to name a few.
ITIL started as a collection books, each one covering a different IT management topic. The emphasis of ITIL is service quality, and it also focuses on how IT services can be efficiently and cost-effectively provided and supported. IT activities are broken down into process and divided up into levels – strategic, operational, and tactical. Here is an image that may help get your arms around what ITIL is:
A key component of ITIL is the Service Desk. The Service Desk function describes best practices for establishing and managing a central point of contact for users. By having a central point of contact it streamlines communications , thus making it easier for users, and also helps ensure data integrity. Two of the Service Desk’s most important responsibilities are monitoring incidents and communicating with users. The Service Desk function can be filed under a few names – call center, help desk, service desk, etc. They all perform the same basic activity that ITIL calls the service desk. Here is an image depicting the Service Desk aspect of ITIL:
There are a number of companies out there whose specialty is ITIL consulting. One such company is Evergreen Systems. Their pitch is that they can help your IT company implement ITIL, thereby maximizing operations, avoiding excessive costs and improving customer service and bringing measureable value to the business. And they will provide you with the metrics to back it up. They provide a ‘No Risk’ guarantee – the results are guaranteed and ROI on assignments or the client doesn’t pay. Their services include ITIL Assessment and ITIL Consulting. They have a case study on their site for Cleveland-based KeyBank. They are one of the nation’s largest bank-based financial services companies, with assets of approximately $93 billion. They worked to develop and IT Asset Management (ITAM) program for the bank. They were successful in the task with the results being:
* Clear governance for ITAM.
* Increased efficiency in business operations.
* Proactive management of IT assets.
* Introduction of continuous improvement processes.
* Increased fiscal responsibility.
* Introduction of operational metrics and measurements.
* Better employee focus and enhanced productivity.
There is a plethora of software available that is designed to enhance the service desk function of ITIL. ProcessWorx is a company that provides several pieces of software in this vein. The ProcessWorx CMDB provides a way for IT organizations to improve their core operational processes by establishing a standard, centralized information repository. This solution helps IT organizations record, maintain and report on infrastructure configuration items, including applications/software, devices/peripherals, servers, databases and related IT documentation. A few of the benefits listed includeL Record and maintain CI attributes & IT service dependencies; Establish & track CI ownership and accountability; Track CIs by type, owner, dept., environment, status and vendor; etc. All of these benfits, of course, fall right in line with the core functionality of the service desk. They also have a few other software solutions geared towards ITIL and the Service Desk.
