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The Business Case should articulate the reason for undertaking a service or process improvement initiative. As far as possible, data and evidence should be provided relating to the cost s and expected benefits of undertaking process improvement, noting that:
In developing a Business Case, the focus should not be limited to ROI but also on the business value that service improvement brings to the organization and its customers (VOI). That’s because ROI alone does not capture the real value of service improvement. Should an organization choose to focus solely on ROI, much of the potential benefit achievable will not be disclosed nor reviewed after the fact. This could in turn result in worthwhile initiatives not being approved, or a review of the initiative revealing apparent failure, when it was actually successful.
Not surprisingly, most business and IT executives expect a return on their investment. It is important to recognize that an investment in CSI, and realizing its benefits, can vary depending on the customer base, size of IT and the maturity of the ITIL process implemented. Also benefits will cross existing organizational boundaries and true benefits can only be captured in collaboration with the users/customers and ITIL process owner s. The focus is therefore to work with the stakeholder s to develop business and IT specific indicators that link business value measures with IT’s contributions. In other words, how does ITIL process improvement add value to the organization?
Examples of business value measures are:
IT’s contribution can be captured as follows:
IT should begin by defining the types of business values that each improvement will contribute to.
As an example, the US Sarbanes-Oxley legislation as well as other international laws require that the business process es be certified to produce financial reports in addition to certifying the reports themselves. Sarbanes-Oxley is about improving transparency and accountability in business processes and corporate accounting to restore confidence in public markets. It regulates processes and business practice s. Therefore having a higher level of ITIL maturity will enable regulatory compliance.
Without a mature process framework it is natural for organizations to take an ad hoc approach to compliance. They address requirement s as they emerge, through a series of one-offs, just-in-time project s. Since compliance affects a lot of ongoing business activity, this is disruptive, increases the required effort and becomes time-consuming and very expensive.
If an investment is well conceived, solid and delivers results, it can lead to cost savings in the long run. Therefore it is important to choose the right investment and make sure they deliver. When presenting a Business Case for an ITIL process improvement project, it is important to help executives understand the business value of the ITIL process framework. The tendency for most IT executives is to over-emphasize technology and tools. Technology is a means to an end. The benefits are realized from the business changes. It is really important to address how people and processes will change: i.e. ‘as is’ to the ‘to be’ state.
The ‘as is’ stage can be defined as a baseline. Capturing the baseline of the performance measurements affected by the proposed implementation is paramount to the Business Case. The careful preparation of the baseline will facilitate meaningful business information and level setting about relevant business issues; allowing strategic alignment to take place. Focus should be to develop cause-and-effect metric s to link the benefits against the measurements selected along with the impact on other areas of the enterprise. The metrics should be monitored before, during and after the ITIL implementation to determine how the projected values are being delivered.
Another aspect to consider in Business Case development is situations where value will be lost by not undertaking process improvement activities. There will be situations where failure to take action will severely impact the business and IT – the value of process improvement may, in fact, not be value added, but value retained.
As a final note, care should be taken in developing the Business Case to ensure that the success criteria are clearly defined, how they are to be measured, and also when they are going to be measured.
Expectations – What’s in it for me?
Business executives:
CFO:
IT:
Determine the current or anticipated concern of the organization with respect to IT. Estimate the cost if the status quo were to remain and subsequently estimate the savings that could be realized if the ITSM processes were put in place or improved upon. Examples include new lines of business overseas, poor response time or time taken to handle incidents/ problem s, or number of incident s in the organization.
| As is | To be | |
| People | Operating in silos, no common language, focus and no seamless handoffs between groups. | Common language, integrated matrix approach and common focus. |
| Process | Lacks common processes, not consistent and repeatable. | Seamless process framework, end-to-end service delivery, consistent and repeatable. |
| Technology | Multiple redundant tools, no tools, domain-based tools, not integrated with people and processes. | Integrated suite of tools which enable IT service modelling, process integration and shared data access. |
Table 4.15 A balanced focus – people, process and technology
Business cases in a data-poor environment
Organizations intending to undertake service improvement activities may find themselves in a situation where the lack of process means that there is no viable body of data or evidence to quantify expected benefits, ROI or VOI. How, then, does such an organization justify process improvement, or recognize how much expenditure is appropriate to achieve cost-effective improvements?
An approach that circumvents this situation is to gain approval to establish basic measurement capabilities, as a means of gathering consistent data. This may be as simple as ensuring that all IT staff record data in a consistent fashion, or start measuring activities or outcome s that are not currently captured. After an agreed period of data capture, some evidence will exist to support (or perhaps not support) a process improvement initiative.
Another approach is to undertake a process maturity assessment of current processes, to identify which processes are most divergent from ITIL practices. It should, however, be noted that this activity will only identify the absence of process and/or data. A process maturity assessment will not in itself provide the data to justify how much to spend on improving process.
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