If you have ever walked away from a conference, read a magazine article or had a colleague, friend or even consultant provide you with an example or case study of how an organisation has totally revolutionised it's operating model through implementing ITIL then you will have some understanding of the benefits associated with implementing the ITIL set of best practice principles.
You may have thought to yourself, could this be the key? Is ITIL the one answer to flushing out all those organisational and business issues that have been swirling around in the back of your mind for too long? You may have been thinking to yourself, I must implement ITIL straight away.
Before you set sail on your ITIL adventure journey of a lifetime to solve all issues present and future in one fowl swoop. An effective Service Management implementation is the process of transforming resources into valuable services. Without fully understanding the principles to this approach these capabilities, and the importance of coordinating the three major components of people, process and tools may well have you spending time and money on resources that by themselves has relatively low intrinsic value for customers.
No matter how good the case study was, it's important to keep in perspective that every business and or organisation has its issues and challenges, no matter how mature it is - no single organisation is picture perfect.
My suggestion at this point is not to jump in straight away, spend the time to understand the nature of your issues, and set up a Process Improvement Program (PIP) and use your PIP to document and evaluate your issues, it is then once you have analysed your issues in detail you can then start to look for solutions, and maybe then leveraging from ITIL maybe one of those solutions.
As part of reviewing and analysing the nature of the improvements you are addressing within your Process Improvement mechanism you may find that there is a certain reoccurring nature, this may include cultural or process based initiatives, you may realise that you are not using tools effectively to support your business or even perhaps a combination of all of these. In this case implementing ITIL effectively will certainly help you to resolve many of these issues, however it's important to reiterate again I would suggest you first commit to building an effective Process Improvement Mechanism to enable you to analyse and understand where your issues are before jumping into an End to End ITIL implementation.
