How does ITIL benefit organizations?

ITIL is a comprehensive system that can be applied to all aspects of your call center. Since its inception, ITIL has been applied to many different organizations, from local governments to corporate call centers, with great success. Its approach is from top down and it concentrates on the business aspects of your help desk.

ITIL can be applied across technology and thus, does not suggest any one software package over another. Rather its system sets up the processes so that you can choose technology, like helpdesk software, that will best fit your needs.

The American Heritage defines professional as "characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession". With ITIL in use internationally, ITIL is the standard for IT management. By using ITIL, you set call center to a higher standard and thus a more professional approach to IT management.

When you improve how you manage an organization (such as a help desk,) you improve each aspect of that organization including the internal and external procedures. When those procedures improve, you establish better ways to deliver your services, answer calls, and solve trouble tickets.

ITIL sets explicit standards to which you can compare and raise your organization up to.

ITIL was established in 1992 by Great Britain's Office of Government Commerce (OGC). The OGC has tweaked the system over time to better accommodate real world situations. In the last revision, the OGC joined with the British Standard Institute (BSI) to integrate the ITIL with some of BSI's well established papers on beginning management. This new combination gives ITIL the benefit of BSI's one hundred years of experience in improving management practices.

Part of managing any organization is using your resources to the greatest advantage. This truism especially applies to help desks, where your best people may be sent out on trivial calls, leaving tougher issues to less skilled employees. ITIL will help you discover and use your workers' skills to the best advantage.

When you know and use your employee's skills and experience, you give your workers assignments that they are good at, which in turn encourages and motivates them. They then work harder and smarter and become (along with your call center as a whole) more productive.

Another benefit to better management is lower costs. Lower costs come when you better understand and use of your resources more effectively. You can then assign help desk personal to the trouble tickets that best fit their skills, which saves time and money. You can choose call tracking software that best matches your call centers needs which will eliminate unnecessary redundancy and, in turn, lower your costs.

ITIL recognizes that organizations are depending more and more on their IT departments and help desks to achieve their corporate goals. To that end, ITIL exists to help organizations and IT departments improve their return on investment by improving their management strategies. These strategies dictate the business processes. When you follow ITIL's guidelines, you replace and augment your old business processes with better business practices.

Better services come from innovation and good business practices. While ITIL won't create the technology for you, it will guide you to improve your business practices.

As stated above, professional is "characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession". With ITIL, you not only improve the delivery of services to your customers, but also improve how you deliver those services. When you bring your delivery up to ITIL's international standard, you make your delivery more professional.