How Relevant is ITIL in Digital Transformation?

As business and technology merge more into the digital world, technology continues to evolve to produce better products and services for its customers. While organisations continue to undertake digital transformation in order to improve their operations, there’s a question that ITSM professionals get asked often: how relevant is ITIL in digital transformation?

What is ITIL?

ITIL, Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a selection of practices for IT Service Management (ITSM) that strives to bring IT services in line with the needs of the business. ITIL is important for improving the service output of a business.

ITIL, when it started back in the ‘80s, was all about ensuring that IT was providing a service to customers that met the requirements and needs of organisations. It was no longer enough to just offer hardware and software to support the new digital age that organisations were entering. The services and resources had to add value to the business, certainly at a time when IT entailed huge costs.

ITIL has now gone through 4 iterations but this is still very much the premise of ITIL, deriving value by using a set of ‘Guiding Principles’ to ensure customers' needs are continuously being met.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of adopting and adapting digital technologies to create or improve current business practices, culture and customer experiences to meet the latest market demands. The implementation of digital transformation initiatives is seen as the reimagining of business.

How IT serves customers, the business and end users has changed as requirements, demand and technology has evolved.

Organisations want to do things quicker and simpler while looking to reduce costs and waste as much as possible.

So as an ITSM vendor, it’s increasingly important that we can offer solutions that are flexible in deployment and simple in administration whilst providing continuous value as the needs of business change and they look at new ways to do things.

ITIL, Digital Transformation and Remote Working

The events of 2020 have forced a lot of businesses to change, adapt and review their delivery model of IT and other business areas. They’ve needed to examine how such services are provisioned, consumed, supported and maintained.

How can we still provide a service to our customers who are now remote, relying on their own infrastructure at home and far away from physical support and assistance?

The answer comes in two forms. The first is to evaluate current services and offerings. Are they still fit for purpose? Are they still providing the value they were designed to achieve? As organisations embark on continuous adoption of technologies, it is always good to evaluate current services as you could improve these and further leverage new technology investment.

The second is to ensure you have technology that allows the technical aspects of ensuring services are configured and performing while easily accessible for your customers. This is where digital transformation comes in.

However, when introducing digital transformation you need technologies that augment your Service Desk and other IT departments, not replace them.

Ivanti develops digital transformation solutions with this in mind. With Ivanti Service Manager you have the benefit of ITIL 3 certifications across 13 key Service Management Practices, supported by technology inherent in the platform that allows for workflows, automation, and a vast array of reporting capabilities to check and balance how your services and practices are performing.

And with Ivanti Neurons – a hyper-automation platform from cloud to the edge, designed to self-heal, self-secure and self-service – you are adding infinite resources and capabilities to  your Service Desk and wider Service Delivery teams that can align directly to your ITIL Practices, thereby ensuring that not only are you providing value to your customers but excelling in expectations.

Ivanti Neurons detects issues before users do, will raise an incident and where desired, can then enter the chain of Service Management events using automation, inherent in Ivanti Service Manager that enables end to end automated Service Management.

Ivanti Neurons will also Self-Heal, remediating issues for end users before they become aware of any issue.

Now is the time many organisations are evaluating their technology stack and validating whether they still meet the needs of an ever evolving digital transformation. Certainly, where ITIL Practices are deployed, focusing on providing business value, the Ivanti Platform is designed to optimise spend and resources, ensuring you can enhance the services that are supporting your customers and your business. Start your digital transformation today with Ivanti Neurons.