It may not solve all of your IT issues, but ITSM and ITIL should be part of your organization’s best practices.
I have seen my share of things in my 30-plus years in IT and certainly over the last 10-plus years in the IT Service Management space.
When I was first introduced to ITSM and one of the frameworks that support it, ITIL, in the mid-2000s, I thought this was the answer to all of our problems in the IT space.
It was at that time that I went from a technology geek to a process nerd (don’t get me wrong, I still love my technology and I am a geek for all things new, but the process is now in my blood).
ITSM and ITIL
As I began to dig deeper into ITSM and ITIL and began to utilize the best practices in my organization, I realized that it would not help to solve all of our ills in IT.
But it could certainly help to improve the way we work, and most importantly, how we partner and communicate with our customers. It gave us an avenue to ensure that open and constant communication would help drive improved service to both our internal and external customers.
Unfortunately, along the way, our IT brethren – that we were there to help – saw ITSM and ITIL as just more fads like Pet Rocks or Mood Rings (OK, I am dating myself once again). They wanted nothing to do with it as they felt. It did not help and it was just more overhead. In many organizations, that attitude continues today.
Fortunately, over the years, we have been able to show many benefits that have been gained through the use of ITSM and ITIL as best practices in the organization, specifically around optimizing service delivery.
Benefits of ITSM
Through one experience, we worked with a large financial institution that were experiencing outages on a consistent basis that was attributed to losing market share.
By implementing Service Level Management and optimizing core ITSM processes, primarily Major Incident and Problem Management, we were able to bring stability to an environment by having the processes and people available to execute restoration and corrective actions.
As ITSM Practitioners, we need to do what King Arthur did. We need to gather other practitioners and go out and deliver the message of the importance of policy, procedures, and processes within an organization.
We need to include in our entourage representatives from an Organizational Change Management (OCM) group so that the people management side of the quest is covered by those who have that expertise.
Just as ITIL has Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) as one of its key drivers, we too need to use CSI so that we can push for the Holy Grail and what that can mean for your organization.
