Table of Contents
Introduction:
The industry standard of delivering technology excellence, ITIL allows businesses to curate a distinct business plan to maximize productivity and quality of service in IT departments.
With ITIL, businesses are better able to conduct accurate risk assessments as well as create an IT infrastructure that is able to scale and deliver quality services over time. This allows businesses to achieve specific goals and outputs to be attained when delivering their IT services.
The different ways of delivering IT services in the past could often be chaotic and unorganized if left unchecked. With the gradual adoption of ITIL, businesses no longer have to deal with issues of lack of quality and communications in IT departments.
ITIL now allows businesses to focus on reducing operational costs and boosting productivity rather than constantly dealing with disruptions to their existing IT infrastructure.
The different ITIL service categories — such as strategy and design — can be streamlined and better assessed with this framework. IT-ready business growth starts with your IT-ready self, click the following link for the best ITIL certification Australia.
ITIL Guiding Principles
Over the years ITIL has gone through four versions of upgrades. These versions have always followed a set of guiding philosophies which inform how IT professionals should best use this technology to their advantage.
These values have been defined as follows: Businesses must begin with the end in mind. They should always strive to focus on curating their journey to best serve their end goal, rather than relying on short-term successes as metrics of progress. The focus must be on providing and giving value to clients always.
Next, follow the KIS rule — Keep It Simple. Often times the word “infrastructure” and “technology” rouges images of complex coding and jargon amongst business professionals. On the contrary, ITIL was developed with the purpose of simplifying and streamlining IT processes. ITIL also allows automation and optimization of complex procedures that would normally be extremely time-consuming. ITIL is essentially a tool to break down complex problems and simplify their solutions and should be treated as such in a business context.
Lastly, companies using ITIL can tap into the global network of professionals using ITIL to their advantage as well. By tapping into this powerful network for feedback and dialog about ITIL best practices, you are not only increasing your visibility as a company but also promoting yourself as one that cares about using the latest technology to maximize growth for all. This form of collaboration is essential for any business looking to take its services to greater heights.
Pros of ITIL
With ITIL integrated into organizations across the globe, businesses now have a better framework for aligning their business practices with IT services.
IT administrators can also have greater transparency in communicating their operating costs, a reduced amount of time taken for IT services, and a better response to disruptions in IT services.
This allows organizations to deliver the best possible customer service and fosters an agile operating framework in IT departments. With increased flexibility, IT departments are now seen as key players in improving organizations’ productivity across the board.
Cons of ITIL
As with any technological framework, there are bound to be loopholes and drawbacks to ITIL as well.
Some drawbacks include the following: little short-term returns on investment into maintaining ITIL infrastructure; long duration taken in the development of ITIL itself; disruptions caused to businesses by updates in ITIL technology; as well as expensive training of IT staff to utilise this technology in companies.
Although ITIL is commonly seen as a gold standard of IT servicing in the industry, businesses should take note that ITIL is not able to address internal issues or conflicts that arise within a company.
Despite these drawbacks, ITIL has constantly proven to be one of the best frameworks for companies to create agile and predictable IT departments and offers great long-term returns on initially costly investments.
How to Implement ITIL in Your Business
With a high initial cost of investment and a time-consuming process of training qualified IT professionals, ITIL may seem daunting and complex to any organization looking to improve its IT infrastructure.
Despite these concerns, many companies around the world have successfully implemented ITIL into their IT infrastructure. Here are some of the ways that businesses have implemented ITIL successfully into their daily practices:
- Investing in quality training: ITIL is a tool that requires enormous amounts of expertise to be used. There is simply no way around investing in staff who can be qualified to use this tool to benefit a business over the long term. The industry-standard accreditation used today is administered by Strategic Examination Institutes (EIs), under Axelos.
- Building from first principles: To successfully implement ITIL into your business, you may wish to consider building from the ground up by adopting a few ITIL projects at the initial stages of implementation. Through these first few projects, you will gain a clear understanding of how ITIL affects or improves a business’s productivity and performance.
- Understanding ITIL compliance: Any business looking to integrate ITIL infrastructure into their system should begin with the end in mind. What are you hoping for ITIL to achieve for your business? Metrics such as reduced costs of operation and increased customer satisfaction are just some of the things that ITIL can aid in achieving for a business.
Attaining ITIL Certification
For an IT professional to be ITIL-certified, they need to take two exams — the ITIL Foundation and the ITIL Master exams.
After passing these exams, IT professionals will be required to choose from two distinct ITIL specialization paths: ITIL Managing Professional (MP) or ITIL Strategic Leader (SL) certifications. To attain ITIL Master certification, IT professionals will need to complete both specialization pathways.
These pathways are designed with the digital IT professional in mind, with a series of four modules in each pathway required to be taken. The modules will ensure that IT professionals gain a complete and holistic understanding of ITIL infrastructure and how exactly to implement them in businesses.
Cost of ITIL Implementation
As previously mentioned, integrating ITIL into a business may be a time-consuming and costly endeavour. Training for ITIL certification can cost upwards of $1000 in totality and requires a series of exams and modules to be taken over a few months.
Interested IT professionals and departments can consider sending in an enquiry to Axelos to obtain a more accurate quote.
Conclusion
Despite its high initial costs and the lengthy period of integration, ITIL is a genuine asset to any business looking to improve its overall IT infrastructure.
Some of the key benefits that integrating ITIL into your business can bring include the following: improved IT services delivery; greater customer satisfaction; greater visibility of IT operational costs and assets; better management of IT risks; as well as reduced overall costs due to better management of resources.
No matter the position of IT development in your business’s lifecycle, ITIL is guaranteed to improve IT operations with some of the industry’s best practices and solutions in its toolkit.
ITIL has been routinely used and implemented by top global companies including IBM, Microsoft, HP, and Shell. The long-term value that ITIL can bring a business is immeasurable and is a key technology infrastructure that most companies can greatly benefit from implementing today.