ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is one of the most effective ways to take your IT services to the next level.
Not only can ITIL implementation radically improve your IT infrastructure and make your organization more secure, effective, and in-demand, but it’s also linked with significant cost savings — up to 48% in some cases.
Wondering how it works? In this article, we’ll take a look at exactly what ITIL is, how it works, and some of the best practices you should be following in 2024.
What Is ITIL?
ITIL is a framework that helps companies manage their IT infrastructures.
It does this by laying out clear best practices, principles, guidelines, and processes to implement and follow over time, ensuring your IT activities and services are in alignment with your overall business goals.
7 ITIL Guiding Principles
There are 7 key ITIL principles. Let’s break them down.
- Focus on value. Everything you do as an organization should deliver value to the stakeholders in some way.
- Start where you are. You don’t need to start afresh with ITIL. Start with the infrastructure you already have and build on it.
- Progress iteratively with feedback. Progress should take place in steps, based on ongoing reviews and feedback.
- Collaborate and promote visibility. Be transparent and make sure everyone in your organization is aware of your ITIL goals and their individual roles.
- Think and work holistically. Remember that all parts of your organization are connected, and ensure everyone is aligned.
- Keep it simple and practical. Keep things as clear and straightforward as possible.
- Optimize and automate. Rely on automation to take care of monotonous tasks and save time wherever possible.
ITIL Best Practices
Success with ITIL involves understanding and implementing a range of best practices. Here are some of the most important and what they mean for your overall ITIL strategy.
Manage Your Knowledge
At its core, ITIL is all about knowledge. The better you can collect, document, and organize your knowledge, the more likely your ITIL strategy will be to succeed.
An effective way to do this is by establishing a central repository to store and catalog all relevant knowledge. This should include best practices, known errors, and key solutions, and should be easy to navigate and understand for everyone.
Understand Key Problems & Take a Proactive Approach
When it comes to your IT infrastructure, one of the most impactful things you can do is to prevent recurring issues.
This means taking time to identify the root causes of incidents that keep happening and taking steps to address them. By taking a preventative, proactive approach like this, you can make far more efficient use of your resources, maximize productivity, and minimize downtime. This is especially important in the realm of cybersecurity — the right ITIL strategy can identify risks and proactively respond before damage occurs.
Remember to document errors and their solutions in your central library so others can quickly find them when needed.
Be an Advocate for ITIL
If you want your ITIL efforts to be successful, you’ll need buy-in from everyone in your organization.
To make that happen, communicate the importance and value of ITIL to your teams — not just engineers and security staff, but everyone, especially decision-makers and executives. Make it clear how implementing ITIL principles will benefit the whole company.
Adopt New Technologies
Almost every day, new tools and technologies emerge that can play a powerful role in keeping your organization safe and furthering your ITIL strategy.
Automation is a key example here. It’s becoming increasingly possible and easy to automate many aspects of your cybersecurity to reduce human error, improve efficiency, save costs, and free up the time of your human staff.
Take a Data-Driven Approach
Your ITIL strategy should be built on data, with your actions and decisions guided by your observations.
To start, this means getting clear on the right KPIs and metrics to track. There are many potential KPIs to consider, and they can be grouped into different elements of your ITIL strategy — for example, KPIs related to capacity management, IT service management, supplier management, or change management. You can see a more comprehensive list of ITIL KPIs here.
The most important thing is to be consistent in your tracking and take action when needed. KPIs act as signposts to let you know if things are going well or if you need to make adjustments. Pay attention, and act accordingly.
Continually Improve Over Time
Implementing and maintaining ITIL best practices in your organization is an ongoing process. It requires constant monitoring, adjusting, and updating. New cyber threats will emerge, as will new technologies to defend against them.
When you have a solid ITIL strategy in place that’s built on the right KPIs, you’ll be well-placed to improve your organization’s performance over time, minimizing risk and continuously building on your security.
How DYOPATH Can Help
At DYOPATH, we can help you get started and succeed with your own ITIL strategy. We’ll help you outline and implement the right practices, choose the best metrics to focus on, and guide you through the process over time.
Get in touch to learn more.