3 benefits of applying ITIL methodologies

ITIL® stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

So what does that mean, and why should you care? It means 20 years of best practices have been aggregated into a comprehensive framework that you can follow. 

Imagine if you had just started a new job and didn’t really know what you were in for or how to do things, and a seasoned veteran of the company handed you a detailed methodology explaining what you needed to do and how best to accomplish it. Suddenly, your worries and frustrations would dissipate.

That’s what ITIL does for IT companies like yours. It’s a library of IT best practices. And it’s backed by decades of research and the best minds in our industry.

ITIL isn’t localized to any particular region either. It’s used by IT organizations globally to grow efficiency, effectiveness, and timeliness of service. You could say it’s the world standard for IT service delivery.

And while it’s not a step-by-step guide, it gives you a globally accepted blueprint you can use to increase predictability, efficiency, and measurability within your IT operations. Because it’s best-practice based instead of a series of steps, the concepts can easily be adapted and scaled for environments of any size, in any location, and for any purpose.

Here are the 5 basic elements of ITIL:

• Strategic Needs
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operations
• Continual Service Improvement

By following the best practices ITIL outlines for these specific IT functions, you’ll reduce overhead, improve the quality of service, and grow:

1. Efficiency

Thanks to the well-defined processes in ITIL, your team will always know precisely what they need to do to accomplish certain tasks—leveraging the shortest path to issues resolution.

2. Predictability

With a rinse-and-repeat process for handling IT changes, challenges, and improvements, you’ll help your team find the shortest path to issues resolution.

3. Measurability

If you can’t track/evaluate outcomes, it’s hard to tell if you’re making progress. By setting standard operating procedures, you’ll be able to use defined key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level agreements (SLAs) to measure IT success.

With ITIL as the foundation of your IT operations, you’ll be setting your team up for scalable success. They’ll have repeatable best practices to follow, and you’ll have metrics you can use to measure outcomes and improve team performance.

ConnectWise knows how important it is for your business to run on ITIL methodologies. That’s why our business management platform is built on ITIL best practices. See how ConnectWise uses ITIL concepts to help thousands of technology service providers run and grow their businesses.