Business Value and Improved IT Capability from the ITIL Lifecycle

Many IT organisations now have mature Service Operations’ processes and are making progress with Service Transition, so now is the time to start thinking of how to get further advantage from ITIL, in particular, with the release of version 2011.

There is a lot of benefit to be gained by implementing the rest of the lifecycle, in particular:

Being able to demonstrate the Business Value your organisation brings
Improving alignment with the business
Managing Cloud Computing
Driving better efficiency and effectiveness across the whole of IT
IT Strategy Planning from the IT service Viewpoint
Improved IT Governance.

A challenge for many IT organisations is how do you demonstrate the Business Value that your organisation brings to the business. The only way that it can be achieved it to align with the business and agree with them as to what they see are the most valuable IT services.

Can you answer the 4 key questions?

Our paper, entitled "Challenges for IT Leaders" explains this in further detail, and introduces 4 key questions IT leaders must ask . They are:

1. Do key business stakeholders see the business value in what IT is delivering, and if so, can we measure that value?

2. Does the IT management team understand the difference between the delivery of end-to-end services versus the delivery of technology services?

3. Do our strategic and operational plans enable us to adopt and integrate new paradigms such as Cloud Computing, BYOD and Social Media into the delivery of IT services to the organisation?

4. Does the culture of our organisation enable or inhibit rapid change required to adapt to being a provider of technology solutions to the management of business solutions?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you need to understand what you should be doing to rectify the situation. ProActive can help you to put into place the required processes, structure, plans and strategies to deliver value and transform to achieve improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Some common steps involved in identifing which services are not performing and to establish a service improvement plan to achieve the required performance include:-

Conduct a CobiT Business IT Alignment assessment. This delivers a report in the form of a Balanced Score Card
Conduct a Customer Quality of Experience Survey on your top three IT services
Review your IT strategic plans to ensure that you have an IT service approach, rather than a technology approach and to define a suitable planning framework. (Our free technology-business continuum survey may help you understand your position on the continuum)
Define your vision and mission
Understand where you are now and what your IT service lifecycle framework needs to looks like for the future
Create a plan to achieve your future objectives, starting with what you need to do to improve the quality of your key IT services, as per the above so that you are able to demonstrate the business value of service improvement. We recommend an "Agile" and "transformational" approach.

To find out more how ProActive can help you achieve the above outcomes, take a look at the Challenges for IT Leaders brochure, or contact us.