Justification

As a practice, CSI must prove its worth to an organization to continue its existence. Like other practices, CSI must have a well-defined purpose within the organization with clear ongoing benefits that impact the entire organization. How CSI achieves this also needs to be easily understood, e.g. business efficiency, potential cost reduction when introducing service s, increased customer satisfaction with the provision of existing services, more agility when responding to requests for new services, or more reliable IT service s to support business critical services.

Organizations wishing to improve services also need to be aware of the impact of business and market developments on the IT area. Understanding these general trends in the context of the organization helps determine how ITIL can best be utilized for aligning the IT organization with ever-changing business demands.

To justify any improvement, the IT organization should compare the costs and revenue (savings). The difficulty in doing this, however, is that while the costs are relatively easy to measure (people, tools etc.) the increase in revenue as a direct result of the Service Improvement Plan (SIP) is more difficult to quantify.

Understanding the organization’s target and current situation should form the basis of the Business Case for a SIP. A stakeholder assessment and a goal-setting exercise will help focus on the results and aims.

Business drivers

Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of IT as a service provider, to not only support but also enable business operations. As a result the business leaders of today ask much more pointed and direct questions regarding the quality of IT services and the competency and efficiency of their provider. This higher level of scrutiny buttresses the expanding need for CSI, meaning that:

• IT does more than enable existing business operations, IT enables business change and is, therefore, an integral component of the business change programme.
• There is additional focus on the quality of IT in terms of reliability, availability, stability, capacity, security and, especially, risk.
• IT and IT governance is an integral component in corporate governance.
• IT performance becomes even more visible – technical outages and customer dissatisfaction increasingly become boardroom issues.
• IT organization s increasingly find themselves in a position where they have to not only realize but manage business-enabling technology and services that deliver the capability and quality demanded by the business.
• IT must demonstrate value for money.
• IT within e-business is not only supporting the primary business process es, but is the core of those processes.

Technology drivers

The rapid pace of technology developments, within which IT provides solutions, becomes a core component of almost every area of business operations. As a result, IT service s must:

• Understand business operations and advise about the short- and long-term opportunities (and limitations) of IT.
• Be designed for agility and nimbleness to allow for unpredictability in business needs.
• Accommodate more technological change, with a reduced cycle time, for realizing change to match a reduced window in the business cycle.
• Maintain or improve existing quality of services while adding or removing technology component s.
• Ensure that quality of delivery and support matches the business use of new technology.
• Bring escalating costs under control.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02