Home | Help Desk Documents | Series 500: ITIL for the IT Support Industry

How can ITIL improve your help desk?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is based on this premise:

If an organization depends on technology, that organization must better manage its technology services to improve its business.

To help organizations like help desks and call centers better manage their IT services, Great Britain's Office of Government Commerce created the ITIL. This system advocates a top-down approach to business and management practices for IT service organizations. ITIL teaches you how to examine the value that your call center gains from IT services and how to build a framework to improve the quality of your IT services. As ITIL pushes you to identify the strengths and confront the weaknesses of your call center, it also guides you to develop your call center's strengths and surmount the weaknesses.

ITIL emphasizes business practices and management strategies to improve how your call center conducts its business. It provides a consistent and comprehensive set of standards for IT service management and covers a wide range of management topics. With ITIL, your call center will manage its IT services better, improve accommodations for those services, and create an environment that will produce the highest quality of service. ITIL focuses IT business practices on issues, people, and processes.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library consists of eight manuals which discuss different aspects of service management in help desks and other IT organization. While the ITIL does not recommend any specific IT service management software, call center software, or trouble ticket software, it does suggest mechanisms for choosing the best help desk software. And as anyone who has worked in a call center knows, it is essential to pick the right call center software.