The view of business with regard to IT is changing and becoming more favourable with only 3% of business executives considering IT a ‘law unto itself’ and 32% firmly of the opinion that IT is a ‘competent business partner’, according to a survey conducted by Hornbill Systems.
The survey entitled “ITIL: State of the Nation”, has looked into international adoption rates of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice framework version 3 since its launch in June 2007. It has shown that 70% of organisations now have IT on the board while 35% of the respondents still struggle with the planning resources to meet the demands of their organisation. The findings reveal that the UK is marginally ahead of the US across most phases of ITIL.
The survey showed that, over 54% of respondents do not charge the business for the delivery of IT and of those who do, 31% allocate a cost per use for each service, or divide the costs evenly across all employees and departments (24%). Over 51% of the respondents do not track the cost of providing IT services to the business, while the remaining said that they do not have proper metrics in place to measure the services.
The increasing importance of IT on the board (70%) is validation that the function is now considered essential to the business to help drive strategy forward and provide senior level sponsorship and support for service improvement initiatives such as adopting ITIL.
The survey revealed that, despite this trend, many IT departments do not interact with the rest of the business regularly, putting them at risk of either being out of tune with the business needs, or delivering irrelevant services at the wrong time, making IT a likely victim of outsourcing.
According to the survey, 50% of the respondents claimed that the IT department holds regular planning meetings with the rest of the business (every day, week or month) with the remaining half meeting only quarterly or even annually.
The major positive outcomes from these meetings are helping IT to ‘properly understand business goals’ (78%), and to ‘plan resources to meet demand’ (65%), and the opportunity to ‘establish clear metrics to measure achievements’ (51%).
Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems, said: “Whichever version of the ITIL best practice framework organisations are looking to adopt, the drivers are the same: improving service quality and increasing customer satisfaction.
“The challenge for IT remains to demonstrate some quick wins to secure business attention, then forge ahead with the more strategic aspects of ITIL v3, complete the service lifecycle and demonstrate the true benefits of ITIL.”
