ITIL vs IT Service Management

minerp
Jul 7, 2022
3 min read

Background on ITIL

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) concept emerged in the 1980s, when the British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them was not sufficient. The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) was tasked with developing a framework for the efficient and financially responsible use of IT resources. Initially, it was intended to be used within the British government only, but many private sector companies have since adopted it.

Since the early 2000’s ITIL gained a significant following with IT service providers as a differentiating advantage over other market competitors. Its integration into the IT industry was clear when Microsoft used ITIL to develop their proprietary Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). The definitive version of ITIL, version 3, was released in 2007 with the most recent update being published in 2011. Continued development and improvement of ITIL indicates that ITIL provides tremendous value to many companies globally.

ITIL details the IT Service lifecycle, the phases of which are; Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. A significantly increased emphasis on business.

What is ITSM

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a strategic approach to designing, delivering, managing and improving the way information technology (IT) is used within an organization. The goal of ITSM is to ensure that the right processes, people and technology are in place so that the organization can meet its business goals.

An ITSM approach to IT management facilitates the following:

Definition of IT deliverables in terms of MineRP’s services, articulated in the customer’s and end user’s mining related terminology.
Definition MineRP service to the end users, with regards to functionality, availability, capacity, security, support, disaster recovery, change management and other dimensions of managing the service.
Understanding of the business impact when an App service failure occurs, as it relates to the mining industry.
Prioritisation of IT activities base on the impact to the business.

Service Management is a structured approach that delivers consistency, quality, accountability and efficiency.

ITSM in Practice

Service Management is a planned and conscious means of building and managing our support structure to meet the mining business and service objectives – moving from chaos to control, from fire-fighting to prevention. The service desk is the central point of contact for MineRP customers, which delivers high quality, speedy responses and resolution services.

What are the real benefits of ITSM

To implement consistent delivery - building a repeatable and predictable set of service processes to ensure quality service delivery to the mining business.

Improved efficiency and effectiveness – measure and control allows the identification of areas for improvement in terms of both quality and cost. MineRP ensures that all its processes are documented in detailed and regulates control with the implementation of strategically placed quality gates.
Reduced cost of failure - Incidents and downtime cost money, MineRP continually strives to improve the Mean Time to Service (MTTS).
Reduced risk to the business – To minimize and mitigate risk MineRP’s focuses on the recovery of service as quickly as possible to meet the business demand.
Greater availability of service – MineRP reviews and prioritizes all services on a weekly basis to ensure availability by managing project and resources requirements.
Communication – ITSM requires communication and collaboration between MineRP support services, Mining IT and end users.
To ensure “best practice” – MineRP adopted ITIL as an end-to-end service framework.
MineRP aligned to business – To agree service standards with clients, regarding the service MineRP provides to support MineRP applications and to introduce SOP’s for all client processes.

ITIL Process Implementation Roadmap

IT Service Management is built around processes and practices that gauge the end-to-end delivery of MineRP solutions rather than their development. ITSM measures the operational efficiency of a solution in meeting the service level expectations of the end-user and how technical IT manages these systems to deliver the desired service level.