IT Service Management in Practice

Management of IT services: How can the best practices advocated by ITIL improve the delivery of IT services?

According to data from Gartner, 80% of the causes of downtime in IT services arise from the following problems in the operation of these activities: failures in procedures, failures in complying with requirements, errors related to security and backup routines, untested application, bad management of change and processing overload. Addressing these items already promotes a substantial improvement in infrastructure availability. (See infrastructure monitoring solution).

Genrenciamento de Serviços de TI - ITIL

IT service management enables the adoption of a proactive attitude towards meeting the needs of organizations, promoting, therefore, an increase in the perception of delivery of value of the area to the business of the company. It also aims at allocating the available resources in a correct manner and managing them in an integrated way. With the design, implementation and management of internal process of the IT area, according to the practices gathered in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, it is possible to maintain the quality perceived by clients and users in the delivery of IT services and to minimize problems.

Best Practices – ITIL

ITIL is the most used methodology to manage IT services in the world, either separately or together with other practices. It provides a set of best practices to identify IT processes and to align services with the needs of the organization: the so called IT aligned to business. Many of its advantages are due to it being the foundation for Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).

In addition to the objective of reducing costs by increasing the efficiency in the delivery and support of IT services, mainly by optimal and efficient use of resources of IT infrastructure, ITIL promotes an approach that enables IT to provide subsidies so that the company is able to increase its capability to generate revenues. Mainly through concentration of efforts in new projects to meet the business strategy of the organization. The focus of ITIL in high quality of IT services and valorization of meeting the expectations of clients and users demands the IT area to strengthen the relationship with them, as well as with suppliers of technology and outsourcing services, as it depends on them to achieve the objectives of service delivery level.

Multisourcing

The multisourcing model, which combines internal and external IT resources related to labor, depends on a thorough assessment of what can and what should be outsourced and what must be done in house. It is worth mentioning the difference between outsourcing and outtasking, as the first refers to transferring the control and command to a service provider and the latter refers only to outsourcing tasks, and the contracting company keeps the responsibility for the management. Knowing how to integrate services managed by third parties and services managed by a proprietary IT team is key to deliver services that meet the expectations of the organization. Considering there are some difficulties involving outsourcing, there are also difficulties when you avoid outsourcing and try to do what is not the core business of the company.

Reducing costs x increasing effectiveness

For 90% of the contracts to outsource IT services, the main focus of the agreement is cost reduction. However, for more mature organizations, this should not be the only concern. In order to achieve the strategic objectives of companies, it is necessary to increase the operating efficiency and often this is done through maintenance or cost increase. In many cases this cost increase is hiding a decrease in the cost of property (TCO) and in the opportunity cost. The need to standardize activities or internal IT services often hides outsourcing opportunities.

Ultimately, the issue of managing IT services is long and there is no pretension whatsoever to cover it completely in this article. Keep following our blog to learn more about this topic or other topics related to technology.