Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a library having frameworks that are designed to deliver the best practices to the services associated with IT. These frameworks help is better planning, selection, and maintenance of services within a business. The major aim of ITIL® is to achieve predictable delivery of services and improve the efficiency of the products delivered.
Started in 1980, it decentralized itself and spread across various diverse architectures across the world. The major aim of the organization behind the development of such a process is to impart practical guidance to the professionals, delivering them practices and knowledge from real-world scenarios.
Why ITIL?
Implementing ITIL not only provides the best IT services but also helps to solve wider business issues. ITIL standards are recognized all over the world by larger industries and governments. Employees within an organization should have a deep understanding of the ITIL processes to achieve maximum benefits after its successful implementation.
Some of the benefits of ITIL include:
- High Paying Opportunities
Attaining ITIL certification, not only boosts your resume but also provides value to the business. You automatically get higher payrolls after attaining the certification, as your attaining of the certification gives you an upper hand over your counterparts.
- Global Recognition
This certification is the most accepted approach to Information Technology Service Management and delivery. This service is not only well regarded among the employees but also among the organizations all over the world.
- Aligns Business with IT
ITIL has not limited its compatibility with the frameworks of Project Management but also with the goals of the businesses. It helps in making IT as a service provider and eventually creates it as a core for any business. Though ITIL does not create any business strategy it provides a way to support all the existing ones.
- Minimizing Disruption
It requires Information Technology to be stable and undisruptive for better functioning of the businesses. The processes with ITIL like problem management and incident management helps in quick restoring of services and the development of effective workarounds.
- Reliable
The management processes of ITIL allows the organizations to eliminate the root cause for the disruption of the incident and completely eliminates the chances of its reoccurrence. Other than this, ITIL helps in continuous improvement of the organizations and allows them to become better with each passing day with these reliable services.
- Better Quality Services
Certain processes of ITIL include business management and service management. With the in-depth knowledge of the processes, you can help your team gain a better knowledge of the understanding and management of the customer expectation.
- Gaining Knowledge and Credibility
Taking up ITIL will not only help you in gaining expertise in your new role as an IT professional but will also give you credibility over your managing supervisors and your peers. Your hard work in the new job will be paid off when you have a comfortable, and clear understanding of the frameworks, strategies, and guiding principles associated with ITIL.
- Cost Transparency
ITIL provides the best practices that help in the unnecessary ramping up of the service costs. It helps the organizations with accounting, budgeting and charging requirements. One can easily account for the money spent on the services provided by creating metric-based strategies. You can easily make tricky cost-cutting decisions with exact numbers in-hand.
- Risk Management
Analysis and management of risks are taught in all the processes with ITIL. Though you might be using ITIL to minimize costs, you will have to find ways to maintain quality and manage risk. By using the management activities with ITIL you can prioritize, identify, and manage services effectively.
- Competitive Advantages
It helps the organizations to deliver the best of services to the customers. It emphases on continuous change and the feature attracts various institutions to adopt the processes linked with ITIL. Undoubtedly, an agile environment helps in the growth of various businesses. It manages and checks customers’ requirements and set high expectations warning them with the calculated risks and ways to prevent them.
ITIL Frameworks
There are five major publications linked with ITIL that are periodically reviewed and updated as and when the technology changes. Each publication collects the best practices linked with ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) lifecycle. The core concepts associated with each book are:
- Service Strategy: Guides the professionals on how to align and set the goals for the business as per the customers’ requirements.
- Service Design: This part of the publication mentions the practices for the production of policies, architecture, and documentation.
- Service Transition: This advice on the management of the change and release practices, guides the professionals through environmental changes and interruptions.
- Services Operation: This provides the ultimate help by providing ways to manage services on a daily, monthly and yearly basis.
- Continual Service Improvement: This covers the ways to introduce policy updates and improvements within ITIL.
ITIL shall not be considered as a set of rules, but these are the guidelines that you need to follow to design and deliver the best of services to the consumers. Using ITIL processes with your business is not an easy task to undertake. It requires you to have a deep understanding of your business requirements, and its customization in the right manner.
The most common mistakes made by businesses include focusing too much on the technology rather than the need of the customers and the services they want from your organization.
You can work under the guidance of an experienced, and managed provider that can help you in building processes and providing scope for continuous improvement. Also, the risk of starting the process will be significantly reduced along with saving time, and resources. This helps you to focus on improving your business, diverting it from the day-to-day time-consuming tasks of IT operations.
Whereas there are plenty of opportunities to learn on-job, but having a head start with ITIL will help in getting hired for the job role that you are longing for. It not only adds a star to your resume but knowing the terminologies, strategies, foundations, and lifecycles will help you succeed within an organization.
