Is your service quality best in class?

Tagged with: itil

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For IT departments committed to improving service quality, it's time to take another look at ITIL - the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

In the past, ITIL, a framework of best practice approaches to the delivery of high quality IT service management, that is published as a series of books, has been accused of being inflexible, overly prescriptive and paying too little attention to the needs of business users.

But the latest version of the framework (version 3), released in May 2007 by its authors, the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC), seeks to address these criticisms head-on - and it does a good job of it, according to Mark Sweeney, a service quality expert at Logicalis.

"For the first time, ITIL takes a good, hard look at what end-users expect from IT service and it has finally recognised that what they want are two things: consistency of IT service delivery and an IT department that has the ability to facilitate change effectively" he says.

Developments include:

New IT strategies for managing third parties, such as outsourcing suppliers;
New features such as a Service Management Knowledge Base that helps transform captured information into organisational intelligence;
New processes such as request fulfilment;
Process expansion into areas such as event management;
New practice areas and organisational structures.

Above all, ITIL 3 makes a clearer and stronger link between ITIL and business benefits - a big improvement over previous versions, which focused more on core IT operations such as service delivery and service support.

In addition, the version 3 release has reduced the previous version's nine books down to five: Service Strategies, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

"With the new version, shortfalls are addressed that previously hampered the uptake of ITIL by many IT departments, so my advice would be to reassess ITIL and see what it might contribute to improving service quality at your organisation," says Sweeney.

Your Comments and Questions

Chris Anderton, about 1 year ago

I took a look at ITIL a few years back when working in Systems Management. I was scared off by the sheer scale of the documentation. In subsequent years I have read the odd piece here and there but never got around to looking at it in full detail. Maybe now is a good time to go back in for another look..