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1. In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL provide?

ITIL® provides a deep foundation when it comes to IT Service Management. One of the reasons is because ITIL is a framework. It is a set of best practices that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of a business.

Secondly, ITIL can be tailor-made to suit an organization’s current needs which can also be scaled up when need arises. This is because ITIL is all about processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists that can be integrated with an organization's strategy and objectives to achieve bottom line results.

Thirdly, one of the key concepts of ITIL is continuous service improvement. This ensures that an organization is able to establish a baseline and then used to measure the benefits, value and improvement derived from the use of ITIL as a foundation.


Since ITIL acts as a guideline, it is very easy to measure the value and difference that it delivers to an organization. Some of them are:

  1. Improved customer satisfaction and low staff turnover
    When ITIL is adopted, it allows everyone to concentrate on the core business of an organization thereby improving customer satisfaction and reducing staff turnover.
  2. Availability of services
    ITIL standards are proven to work and by adopting them, services are easily delivered, are consistent and reliable. In case of any downtimes, services can be restored faster before they have a huge impact on the business as per the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
  3. Reduces business operating costs
    ITIL is known to increase efficiency and effectiveness of IT operations. This is due to several factors such as increased productivity with fewer resources, reduced incident resolution time due to problem management and less disruptions from service failures.


Based on all the benefits derived from adopting ITIL, it is very relevant to today’s businesses as well as in the future. It also complements other frameworks such as COBIT because it comprises all aspects of businesses from:

  1. Strategy which defines objectives, guidelines, and expectations for providing services
  2. Design which defines development of services and processes
  3. Transition which defines how to transition new or modified services into operation
  4. Operation which defines how to manage services at agreed upon levels to business users
  5. Continual Service Improvement which analyzes and makes recommendations for improvement opportunities in all phases of ITIL.

Read Gladys Maina's previous AXELOS Blog Post, How can we involve more women in IT?

More posts in our More than meets the I series

More than meets the I: How ITIL makes a difference in organizations


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