ITIL Logic for Quality Gains and Cost Reductions
In a recent survey conducted by Evergreen Strategies on ITIL Maturity Benchmarks, an impressive 77% point to service quality as the top business driver of ITIL efforts. However, 72% reported that the biggest barrier to ITIL adoption is organizational resistance. So what do these findings mean?
Service quality is the primary driver behind ITIL initiatives, yet there is still overwhelming organizational resistance to the change required to implement ITIL on an enterprise level. In order to overcome this resistance, powerful justifications must be developed to secure funding and senior IT management support for long term ITIL investments. The drivers of those justifications surfaced in the same ITIL Maturity Benchmark study:
93% of those surveyed have a mandate to drive down cost (staff) of operations (70-80% of the budget) and increase funding / time for increasing strategic projects (25% of the budget) but don’t have a plan to do so.
Improving service quality is a CIO level strategic goal.
Compliance needs are being met, but the effort to do so is very high and primarily reactive.
IT Operations staff is lean and demand is still rising. There is genuine concern around losing top IT staff to burnout.
If demand and complexity continue to rise, so will workload. If IT Operations is lean now, working harder is not an answer. If nothing else changes, customer service quality will fall, and good staff will leave.
Simple logic dictates, IT must either increase spending, reduce quality, or improve efficiency.
Unless you have a better strategy to reduce IT operations expense by 20-40% while also improving service quality, then ITIL best practices should be investigated thoroughly.
A roadmap for mining this value in your organization and building these justifications is laid out in one of our whitepapers:
“Developing the Business Case for ITIL”.
I welcome your thoughts!
Don Casson
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