Invest to Save: How Can ITIL Save My Organization Money?
October 16, 2011
Hitesh Patel
Share this

Is your organization ready for ITIL? Whether you're ready or not, ITIL is here to stay!

By implementing ITIL best practices, companies in the public or private sector will experience positive results. As your organization grows, either internally or externally, the need to be a better service provider increases in importance. As a service provider, you need to know when it’s time for your team to change processes to become effective and efficient in meeting the needs of your customers via the delivery and support of services that achieve key business outcomes. To better serve your customers and the organization where you reside, investing in ITIL could be the winning x-factor needed to jump-start this powerful journey.

ITIL best practice is given from service management professionals across the world. ITIL is comprised of a wealth of experience (successes and failures) documented and published that continues to foster the growth and maturity of IT service management best practices.

The Magic Formula:

“Customer satisfaction + positive perception = value for the service provider”

The investment in ITIL addresses key organizational needs, but it's an investment. So how can ITIL really save your organization money?

1. It increases alignment between the business and IT

Focus is provided on the need of the customer and ongoing realignment to adapt to changes in requirements / desired outcomes. Savings are generated through avoiding rework and delivering solutions that are right the first time!

2. It's not a standard – it's best practice advice

The principles, concepts, methods and techniques can all be tailored toward your organizational needs. (Remember, ITIL has the ingredients; you have to create the recipe that works.) Savings are generated through the adoption of practices that work, mitigating risks and costs as the best practice has been implemented before.

3. Cost savings across IT and the business

This is achieved through improved utilization and management of resources and their capabilities. Savings are generated through ensuring the organization receives the optimal performance from its assets in the delivery of services.

4. Best practice addresses key needs

Knowledge management: “Knowledge is power,” but the focus within ITIL is to ensure we are capturing the right level of knowledge and communicating it to the right audience. Savings are generated as this avoids wasting time and resources on gathering and communicating irrelevant information.

Continual service improvement: The keyword being “continual.” This is not a one-off event or something that should be triggered when things go wrong. The goal is to be continually proactive and to identify opportunities or areas of innovation. Savings are generated through investing money now to save money in the future.

Governance: The need to have controls in place to manage functions and processes in the delivery of services. But more importantly, to clearly identify people within IT who are ultimately held accountable and responsible for the delivery of services. Savings generated are intangible but incredibly valuable, as the customer will have a better perception of the IT service provider, knowing that risks and costs are being actively managed and controlled.

Synergy of People, Process, Technology and Supplier: Do we take this for granted within our organization? We need to consider all four elements in the delivery of services – People, Process, Technology and Supplier.

Trained people can lead to changes in processes. Changes in process can lead to changes in technology. And changes in technology can lead to changes in supplier.

Organizations always seem to recognize the key forces of people and processes. But technology and suppliers have a major part to play, directly or indirectly, in the delivery of services and saving the organization money.

ITIL ensures that best practice advice is offered that will contribute to allow close integration of the right mix and more importantly raise awareness that any change can potentially impact all four areas.

About Hitesh Patel

Hitesh Patel has more than 10 years experience in ITIL and is an instructor and course author for Learning Tree International. He trains globally and is the course author of the Learning Tree course - Putting ITIL into Practice: A Roadmap for Transformation.

Patel’s primary role is a director of his own company, offering service management consultancy. He has extensive program and project management experience and has successfully undertaken business, service, technical, process and cultural change programs.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...