Member Article

ITIL and your IT – putting customer experience first

Oliver Plumpton is head of service delivery at Perfect Image – an IT consultancy providing tailored IT solutions to help its customers realise real business benefits. Here, he talks about the concept of ITIL when managing your IT systems, and why the framework is certainly not simply a piece of red tape for IT teams to overcome.

You’ll hear lots of acronyms used when talking about the IT industry – the term ‘IT’ being just one of them. But have you ever heard of this one? It’s called ITIL…

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Now to a non-IT person, its full name probably doesn’t mean that much to you, but as a company owner, the concepts of ITIL are of huge importance to your business.

In essence, ITIL is a framework for good practice in IT service management or ITSM (see – another acronym for you!). It is not a prescriptive set of procedures – and as such it does not provide specific instructions. It’s a framework, not a rule book, describing processes and procedures, tasks and checklists that are relatively generic but should be tailored and tweaked to the requirements of each individual business to reap real tangible benefits.

There’s no such thing as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to IT. If you believe that, you’re probably not getting the best ROI for your investment. Rather, each business’ IT needs and requirements will differ from the next and therefore best practice for each of these businesses will look different to one another. This is where by implementing ITIL principles for your own business’ IT, you’re establishing IT integration as part of your own company’s unique business strategy; delivering value and maintaining a minimum level of competency – it’s making sure your IT works for you, your business and what you want to achieve.

It’s certainly not about ‘doing ITIL’ for the sake of it; yes, following some of the principles may help an IT team to demonstrate compliance, but ITIL shouldn’t be seen as some sort of red tape that’s more hindrance than help. Rather, when thinking about your IT systems and best practice, think about the customer or end user experience. Then, working back from this starting point, you have a clear direction as to where ITIL principles could and should be implemented in the management of your IT systems.

For example, look at customers’ satisfaction and their feedback. Was their experience of using your website and ecommerce platform enjoyable, or was your infrastructure at maximum capacity and so they couldn’t complete their purchase? Think also about your internal customers – the people that you work with in your business. Was your most recent systems upgrade unscheduled and unmanaged? Did this mean downtime for your people that they hadn’t planned for when an important deadline was looming? Ultimately, ITIL is about best practice in the management of your IT systems for the benefit of your (internal and external) customers, so that in turn it benefits your business.

At Perfect Image, we don’t think ITIL is a ‘nice-to-have’; after all, it’s not compulsory – it is simply a framework. However, we do firmly believe that ITIL is a frame of mind. It’s something that is engrained in our culture so that when we’re designing, developing and delivering tailored IT solutions, it’s done to the very highest of standards with what is right for you, your customers and ultimately your business at the core of what we do. Our service desk, infrastructure support and project services teams work hard to manage your IT systems so they are running optimally and delivering real ROI.

Ultimately, it’s nice to be able to tick boxes and say that the management of your IT systems follow ITIL principles, but unless these systems are delivering business benefits to you, ITIL is just another piece of red tape for your IT team or consultancy provider to overcome. Embrace the concept of ITIL for the benefits of your customers and end-users, and you’ll soon see the business benefits too.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Perfect Image .