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Managing a technology organization from a business perspective is an ongoing challenge. This challenge includes aligning the organization’s activities and priorities with the overall objectives of the business, as well as aligning the objectives of the various functions with each other.
ITIL is the most widely used set of best practices to help address these objectives. ITIL is a set of books that brings together best practices in the management of the technology infrastructure itself (which ITIL refers to as “IT”) and the people and process-related systems (which ITIL refers to as “IS”). Building on the foundation of best practices outlined in previous books, the ITIL book, Business Perspective: The IS View on Delivering Services to the Business (for brevity in this paper, the Business Perspective book), is written for IS professionals to help align their activities with the needs of the business.
This book was written to enable IS personnel to:
Understand how they contribute to business objectives
Deliver and improve IT services to more effectively support business objectives
Develop a complementary and integrated relationship between the business and IS
Influence, innovate, and enable changes within IS to benefit the business
One of the biggest challenges is maintaining alignment of IS with business requirements. All the capabilities within IS and IT must be involved, including:
People and culture (so that IS is a part of the business)
Processes (so that IS processes support business needs)
Technology (to underpin IS and business processes)
Suppliers, partners, and vendors (to ensure they are focused on the needs of the business)
Another challenge is maintaining alignment of various internal groups with each other, which is a prerequisite to any IS organization trying to align to the business. The requirement is to adopt service automation and service management tools that integrate and share data with each other. Then, and only then, can IS take the next step to communicate and align with the business.
The ITIL Business Perspective book highlights best practices that address these challenges from the perspective of people, processes, technology, and suppliers, as seen in Figure 1.
The Business Perspective Approach
Overall, the Business Perspective book highlights an approach for managing relationships and interfaces at all levels: between the business and the IS organization, among functions and groups within the IS organization, and with external service providers.
The mission of the business perspective approach is ”to continually support and improve effectiveness through the delivery of quality IS aligned and responsive to the business needs, while maximizing the business return on investment in IS.”
The best practices summarized in the book include guidance on topics, such as:
Establishing effective relationships at the operational, tactical, and strategic levels among the business, IS, and IT suppliers
Aligning IS to address the specific needs of the business
Ensuring that the quality of service delivered matches business expectations
Understanding the role of IS in the business value chain
Identifying how IS delivers business value
Identifying how the business views the value of IS received
Establishing IS as a business unit within a business
Maintaining a continued alignment of the needs of IS and the business, especially in a rapidly changing IT environment, is difficult. To enable alignment, the IS organization must feel it is part of the business, and not just a provider of a remote service that only becomes visible to the business when someone mentions that a problem exists. In addition, the technology and tools that support the IS organization must work together to provide insight for better decisionmaking.
The IS organization needs a 360-degree view of the IT infrastructure components, their performance, and their relationships with the business processes they support. Several topics from the book are especially important when trying to understand the business perspective approach, including:
Open communication
Business value of IT
Role of IS and IT in the business value chain
Business impact
IS internal alignment
Open Communications
The business perspective approach includes effective communication among the business, IS, and third-party service providers. To facilitate effective communication, the ITIL Business Perspective book recommends two key roles within the IS organization.
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