The Information Technology Infrastructure Library lovingly referred to as ITIL is a set of concepts and practices for managing Information Technology services, development and operation. It was founded by the UK Government in the 1980s as the need to have standard IT practices began to arise.
Some of the main tenets of this discipline are:
- Service Support- This practice focuses on the user of the service, primarily censuring they have access to the appropriate servcies to support business functions. This involves effectively managing changes, incidents, releases and other configuration related issues.
- Service Delivery – This practices is mostly concerned with the proactive services the technology department must deliver to provide adequate support to business users. This involves efectively managing service levels, capacity, continuity, availability and finanacials.
- ICT Infrastructure Management -This contains recfommendation for best practivces for requirements analysis, planning, deployment, and ongoing operations and technical support
- Security Management – This involves managing information security in the management organization. The primary goal is to protect information assets against risk and maintain their value to the organization.
- The Business Perspective – This are issues that are encountered in understanding and improving IS Services as part of the entire business this involves issues such as Business Continuity Management, Surviving change, transformation of business practices through radical change, partnerships and outsourcing
- Application Management – These are the best practices employed to improve the overall quality of IT software development and support throughout software development projects.
- Software Asset Management – is the practice of integrating people, processes and technology to allow usage and licenses to be systematically tracked and managed.This reduces IT expenditures.
The ITIL Service Desk - is the interface for IT services. It acts as a single point of contact, entry and exit for customers making it easier for communication with customers data integrity and a streamlined communication channel. Its primary functions are for managing the life cycle of all services requests and keeping customers informed of progress of incidents and any potential workarounds. Service desks are also sometimes called Call Centers or Help Desks and they can be local, central or virtual where the service desk is situated in a different country to save operational costs.
Procept Consulting is an ITIL consulting company I chose to profile because they have a branch that focuses on providing ITSM/ITSL consulting services to companies in Nigeria. In third world countries businesses are faced with the challenge of receiving the same sort of services in more developed nations and it is interesting to learn from such companies trying to bring other countries on board. Procept is a niche strategic consulting firm and their pricth is that they help organizations develop and implement a 360 strategic plan encompassing initial ITIL assessment, process design, implementation and continual improvement.
Their services include:
- Justifying ITIL to business executives
- ITIL process maturity assessments
- Design of ITIL processes
- Auditing and improving existing ITIL processes
- Project Support for ITIL implementation
- Project lead for an ITIL implementation project
- Expedite ITIL maturity through training and coaching
- Phased migration from ITIL V2 to ITIL V3
- Business and IT Service Continuity Management
- Application of formal Business Analysis to process and tool design
Their boutique approach helps them to provide industry experts and work more closely with the client. One of their client projects on the western hemisphere include a confidential large Canadian Electric Utility company where they had to evaluate PM and PPM processes and actual practices, and to make recommendations. They ended up delivering a formal benchmarking exercise against the industry best practices.
Parature Customer Service is an ITIL software tool that integrates a customer portal, rich knowledgebase and full trouble ticket software in one dynamic system that streamlines and strengthens ongoing customer responsiveness and communication. The customer service software integrates the customer portal, rich knowledgebase and full trouble ticket software in one dynamic, unified system to manage ITIL needs. The portal can be integrated to look identical to the businesses web site so they feel comfortable on familiar ground. Customers can search knowledge bases, submit tickets and even check on tickets themselves. Parature’s innovative approach lets you grow on your timetable. From a self-service knowledgebase to online chat, you can let customers select their own method of assistance. All customer communication is recorded in Parature, so you always have a complete history it is easy to find out What products customers own? What accounts they belong to and all customer history stays securely in one place, so it’s easier to confirm end user identity, and have the insight to cross sell and upsell products. Parature trouble ticket system lets you track, route and resolve support issues quickly and easily. This lifecycle ticket management system is fully personalized to meet clients needs, from the most basic to the most sophisticated.
