ITIL Software and IT Service Management Best Practices

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) refers to a set of best practices for IT service management (ITSM). The focus of ITIL is to make sure IT services can keep up with business needs. These best practices routinely evolve as digital needs change. ITIL is a guiding framework for how ITIL service management should be done. ITIL service management helps organizations of any size all around the world maximize and optimize business value using information technology. ITIL is based on a set of principles focused on value accumulation and constant improvement, which can take a variety of forms.

ITIL best practices cover the following areas of ITSM, including:

• Incident management
• Change management
• Problem management
• Service-level management
• Continuity management
• Configuration management
• Release management
• Capacity management
• Financial management
• Availability management
• Security management
• Help desk management
• Knowledge management

Most importantly, ITIL best practices have evolved beyond delivering a service in the most efficient way possible. Now ITIL service management emphasizes end-to-end value delivery through customer service. A key component of customer service includes using an effective ticketing solution to handle customer requests and responses.

ITIL 4 is an update to ITIL v3, or 2011 Edition, and accounts for the new service management challenges brought about with new technologies. The framework for ITIL 4 includes a four-dimensional model and service value system (SVS), helping describe a balanced and holistic approach to service management to help organizations create value as well as achieve the most desirable outcomes for all involved.

Like the four Ps of service management (People, Process, Product or technology, and Partners or suppliers) in ITIL 3, ITIL 4 refines these to be four dimensions organizations must consider when delivering a balanced service management approach:

1. Organizations and people
2. Information and technology
3. Partners and suppliers
4. Value streams and processes

The ITIL 4 SVS describes the different components as well as underlying activities required to better enable the co-creation of value:

• Guiding principles
• Governance
• Service value chain
• Best practices
• Continual improvement

ITIL service management covers and provides guidelines businesses can follow to optimize everything needed to manage a high-performing IT services department with a focus on service quality and creating value. ITIL service management is important to businesses because ITIL encompasses some of the most effective techniques for providing end users with optimal customer experiences. Customer service experience is the key differentiator between brands of businesses, and an effective ITIL service management strategy should aim to provide the most value to all stakeholders involved.

In a crowded market, users can and will take their business elsewhere if they receive inadequate performance or slow responses to requests. Oftentimes, the help desk is a customer’s first point of contact when having an issue. For help desk teams supporting internal employees, poor experiences can create negative perceptions of working with the help desk team as being more trouble than it’s worth. This can lead to employees not having the best equipment or tools to perform their roles, which could affect overall business performance. Following ITIL service management guiding principles can help ensure all stakeholders who reach out to IT services get the resolutions they need in a timely fashion.

In addition to team members benefiting from following ITIL practices, ITIL service management poses a lot of benefits to businesses. Adopting ITIL best practices can strengthen the alignment between IT services and the business, improve customer satisfaction, and support a more stable service environment in the face of constant change. ITIL service management can also reduce costs through better allocation of IT resources and increased IT service desk agent productivity. ITIL service management also reduces costs to the IT department through improved use of resources and greater visibility of existing IT costs and assets.

ITIL software equips an organization with everything it needs to follow and implement effective IT service management best practices in a scalable solution. For example, a help desk team who predominantly uses email to intake and respond to client issues may find this method sufficient when only handling a small amount of tickets. However, as an organization grows or the scope of issues flowing through a help desk increases, an email-based ticketing system may no longer be able to handle the sheer volume of requests.

By automating and following ITIL ticketing best practices using an ITIL-based software, IT teams can better track ticket lifecycles, make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and are better positioned to stay aligned with the most efficient ticket processes.

ITIL software has many different capabilities for ITIL solutions to scale along with organizational need. This adaptability to change. makes the process of ITIL service management much easier and much more manageable. The ITIL needs of every organization are unique, and a flexible ITIL platform allows a business to pick and choose what capabilities they need for optimal performance. ITIL software can also ease the strain by performing many ITIL best practices in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost of manual solutions.

ITIL software also helps foster a more strategic relationship between IT services and other stakeholders. Since ITIL tools standardize IT processes and lifecycles, executives can get a better look at the costs of specific service deployments and work on shifting the role of IT from back-end cost center to front-facing revenue partner.

Web Help Desk provides a pragmatic approach to applying ITIL best practices with the flexibility to make it work for your environment. SolarWinds WHD supports the core of IT service management processes and allows you to implement the ITIL framework quickly and easily.

Web Help Desk is built to:

• Streamline service request management from incident creation to resolution
• Automate software and hardware asset discovery and centralize IT asset management (ITAM)
• Centralize knowledge management with a built-in and extensible knowledge base. Compile past requests and responses after they’re resolved in an embedded knowledge base to save valuable time in the future since the IT help desk now only has to generate responses for unique questions—no more redundancies
• Manage change requests through automated change control and approval processes
• Integrate with IT operations management (ITOM) solutions, such as network management, server monitoring, and remote support software
• Provide a flexible and customizable platform businesses can configure to suit their preferred ITIL help desk configurations. Since IT capabilities must stay flexible, it helps to use a system that lets you customize features as needed, and Web Help Desk lets businesses choose what capabilities are right for them at the time