ITIL Information:
Even though less than half of today's small, medium and large enterprises are developing business case value for their IT projects, this type of ROI analysis will be increasingly demanded by executive management. Increasingly, IT departments that hope to fund major projects will have to provide benchmark metrics both before and after project funding and show achievement of those goals before additional projects will be funded.
Findings from Evergreen Systems' Q3 2006 Survey on Calculating the Business Value of Information Technology Infrastructure Library highlight the fact although ITIL initiatives are on the radar screen for a majority of enterprises, organizational resistance to change and unproven business value, due to a lack of metrics, still plagues the implementation of many of these projects.
Service quality and service delivery are still top priorities, and enterprises seem more focused than ever on exactly which initiatives are being targeted, (CMDB, Service Catalog, Incident and Problem management and Change and Release Management). However, a good deal of work needs still to be done in the areas of root cause and work flow analysis, and organizations that have actually done this work and have metrics and deliverables associated with the analysis, are few and far between.
Even with an overall business plan, all new ITIL projects require executive support and long term funding. ITIL programs that do not have a clear strategy at the start are most likely to show little or no business value, as their organizations will resist the necessary changes.
As Incident and Problem Management are addressed, it is important to make the distinction between these two that IT Infrastructure Library makes. Incident Management involves restoring normal business operations as quickly as possible after an incident' whereas Problem Management, on the other hand, focuses on finding and removing the 'root causes' of an incident in order to prevent it from recurring. ITIL distinguishes between these two in order to prioritize keeping the business running first and foremost and fixing the root cause in the background.
Incident and Problem management may be measured based on metrics like time to restoration of service, service quality, risk mitigation, efficiency gains and simplification and improved usability of processes. These may be associated with KPIs (Key Process Improvements) which can be linked with management goals and objectives, which may be quantifiable.
Success with ITIL improvements in the areas of change, release and configuration management presents a greater challenge in that these areas ultimately impact all of the IT organization. This significantly raises the degree of organizational change required and touches many silos of existing processes.
Potential improvements in the Change and Release Management processes can include reduction of system failures, reduction in failed changes, risk reduction and improvements in efficiency, accuracy and service quality. Most potential for gain in Change Management comes from re-engineering and automating high-volume IT workflows.
ITIL with configuration management can normally calculate gains based on software and hardware asset reconciliation and underutilization and can result in redeployed assets that can save dollars on additional equipment, under optimized procurement processes and sub-optimized software licensing agreements.
Finally, metrics for ITIL are more important than ever to IT, and the types of metrics expected associated with projects have expanded. Efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction metrics lead the way for the development of a 'core' set of metrics, particularly for IT infrastructure projects and ITIL. These metrics address both 'hard' and 'soft' dollars and should be applied both before (as benchmark objectives) and after IT projects (as a percentage of metrics achieved).
