Asset Management, Service Catalog Development and Developing the Business Case for ITIL® Part 2

Strategic Views

Every issue of Evergreen Strategies explores key challenges facing IT organizations today, with common-sense approaches to addressing those challenges and transforming IT operations.

This issue focuses on three areas: developing service catalogs; a Part 2 expansion of an earlier topic, Building the Business Case for ITIL; and developing an asset management program. The sequel to the original Business Case for ITIL includes updated research results, new data points and complete metrics for developing the business case and ROI for ITIL projects. The service catalog white paper focuses on eight steps to developing a service catalog, and the new asset management white paper lays out seven steps to developing an asset management program.

Q3 Survey Results

Survey Results: Q3 2006 Developing the Business Value of ITIL
In Q3 2006 Evergreen conducted a survey on developing the business value of ITIL at the September itSMF National Conference. One hundred (100) IT managers, directors and executives from 90 companies, organizations and institutions participated in the survey. The objective was designed to gauge each organization's commitment to ITIL initiatives and assess whether these organizations had analyzed their processes to conform to these core initiatives and to determine whether they were quantifying the improvement that they expected.

The survey revealed that although the organizations are clearly focused on their ITIL priorities (service quality and delivery) and their top ITIL initiatives (CMDB, Incident and Problem Management, Service Catalog and Change and Release Management), most are still stumbling over the challenge of quantifying and articulating the value of these initiatives to the business. Recommendations from the survey include analysis and re-engineering of key workflows with concurrent calculations on value contribution, including efficiency and labor savings, as well as risk reduction. The survey also recommends the implementation of four to five reusable change models based on risk and materiality.

Final conclusions include the finding that although enterprises are more focused than ever on exactly which initiatives are being targeted, much work still needs to be done on workflow analysis and metrics with ROI calculation to prove the value of ITIL initiatives to the business.

Tools

Service Catalog Whitepaper

Evergreen Systems has just released a new white paper on how to develop a Service Catalog, leveraging ITIL and COBIT best practices.

The white paper lays out eight steps to the development of a service catalog:

Defining service families
Defining services within service families
Mapping services to existing customers
Mapping expectations and dependencies to services
Establishing operational level agreements
Establishing service level agreements
Establishing cost of services
Establishing a steady state

The paper addresses the basic definition of a service catalog and reasons why companies may want to develop one, scoping the effort, aligning with ITIL and COBIT best practices, utilizing templates and developing a corporate communications plan to ensure adoption.

Business Case for ITIL - Part 2

Developing the Business Case for ITIL Part 2 -- This comprehensive 'how-to' document is the sequel to Evergreen's original paper on Developing the Business Case for ITIL and includes updated research results, new data points and innovative new metrics being used by the industry's leading enterprises.

This cookbook approach to developing business case value and ROI for ITIL initiatives makes the point that even though less than half of today's businesses are developing business value and ROI to justify IT spending, that trend is changing quickly. Going forward, IT departments must develop business value justification and ROI to fund new projects. This is evidenced by increasing pressure on IT executives to not only justify investments via traditional internal metrics (such as numbers of servers per system administrator) but also to expand into metrics that quantify IT's value to the business, such as 'annual contribution' to the business, 'benefit per developer' and other types of metrics like increasing IT staff time on innovation versus operations.

Templates are offered for capturing specific metrics for Incident and Problem Management; Change, Release and Configuration Management; and Service Level and Financial Management. In general, efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction, applied to these practice areas, lead the way for the development of 'core' metrics, particularly for IT infrastructure projects. Although each of these areas will have its own specific metrics, prior to business case development these metrics must be merged to reflect results based on 'end-to-end' service delivery. These 'end-to-end' metrics should reflect values that reach across the lines of business, highlighting overall contribution to the business. This approach integrates traditional, internal IT performance metrics (servers per system administrator) with broader business value metrics (such as annual total benefit per project).

Finally, this practical guide asserts that the entire development of business value process should be linked to a broader ITIL strategy that involves creating consensus around the acceptance of ITIL projects and selling the business value using metrics, return on investment and overall value contributed to the business by 'end-to-end' service delivery.

Press

Catch Evergreen's Tony Iannetta's interview in Bank Systems and Technology December feature issue on banking and asset management. In the interview, Tony discusses everything from best practices for tracking, monitoring and managing assets, to risks and rewards of asset management, to striking the 'right balance' of tools, systems, policy, processes, people and training for efficient asset management. Click here to view the entire article.

You may also want to check out Evergreen's latest white paper, on how to develop an asset management system. This comprehensive white paper defines asset management, lays out the business case for developing an asset management program and defines seven steps to creating one. It also chronicles a banking case study for asset management.

Weblogs

Developing a Service Catalog -- This month, Evergreen consultants debate all aspects of service catalog development, including 10 top reasons to develop a service catalog, the relationship between service catalogs and CMDB and how 'unwritten' SLAs and service desk practices can be a great place to start when developing a service catalog. Check out Evergreen's exciting blog today.

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Evergreen Strategies is a periodic newsletter distributed to clients and associates of Evergreen.

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