ITIL processes are a set of best practices for managing a company’s IT services. Due to the constant shifts and advancements in IT, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is more of a framework of guidelines versus a specific ‘how to’. And that leads to the first and most basic benefit of using ITIL practices.
Align Your IT with Your Business Goals
The ITIL framework is designed to be adaptable to each company’s unique requirements of its IT systems. In doing so, using ITIL processes ‘tunes’ your IT systems to align with and better serve your business goals.
Understand the Real Costs of IT
With a deliberate focus on your business goals, ITIL reveals areas of wasteful spending. This would include redundant, unnecessary or underutilized software applications, hardware and infrastructure.
Improve Customer Service
ITIL practices help accelerate your systems and issue resolutions as they relate to IT processes that affect customer service. Subsets of ITIL, including service-level management, help you understand your customer’s expectations and deliver your services to meet and exceed them.
Minimize Business Disruption
ITIL includes change, incident, and problem management processes that not only help you deal with IT disruptions more efficiently but help prevent them from happening. Considering many of the hidden costs of disruption, from lost productivity to customer service issues, this benefit alone may be reason enough to use ITIL processes.
Better Risk Management
So far, all of the ITIL benefits we’ve listed really have to do with business risk. Inefficient systems, unnecessary spending, customer service issues and business disruptions are all risks that every business faces. The following are just a few other ITIL process benefits that mitigate business risk
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Remain Competitive
If your systems don’t stay efficiently up-to-date, with precisely the options that help you serve your clients, you may find your customers going elsewhere and wondering why.
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Manage Digital Transformation
Even if your company has gone through significant digital transformation, it’s a never-ending pursuit. ITIL processes and practices shift with technological advancements to help your business stay up-to-date.
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Constant Improvement
Businesses can’t improve upon what they don’t measure. ITIL includes regular monitoring of system performance so you can regularly measure and analyze performance as a means of constantly improving your business.
It’s the Industry Standard
Without ITIL, if you suffer an IT issue, the issue may be more difficult to diagnose, and more time-consuming to solve. ITIL guidelines are recognized around the world and offer a basis from which IT technicians and service providers can work to solve your issues more effectively.
One of the best ways to implement ITIL processes in your business is to partner with an IT Services and Support provider that is equipped and ready to do it for you.
If you found this post helpful, check out our recent article What is First-Time-Fix & Why is it Important?