ITIL V3.0 guidance on addressing the inflationary pressures in the economy
What do rising gas prices, increasing food prices, rising sub-prime losses, lay offs and slow economic growth have to do with Industry best practices on Business-IT Service management? The trends mentioned above are monsters facing the US economy. These trends are shaking the senate, the US corporations and the consumer behavior. As a consequence, the consumers have started to look for cost effective products and purchase experience.
Amazon is one such experience that enables customers do shopping sitting in the comfort of their homes and get the best deals. A few days back there was an outage reported in Amazon site. It was followed by another outage. In the times of recessionary economic trends these outages can cost the company millions of dollars of potential revenue. Because people want to buy on-line but they are limited by the system availability.
Applying the best practices of ITIL can minimize such outages and possibly eliminate them. The key is not to fall into the hype of ITIL but adopt simple but effective processes. We are close to the first birthday of ITIL V3.0 and I am happy to say from my experience of being involved in the genesis of ITIL V3.0 that ITIL can help companies avoid business losses from system outages.
Using tight and light processes any company can benefit from the industry best practices developed by OGC. I call it risk proofing the business. A bit of Service Strategy, Active monitoring, systemic resolution and continuous improvement processes creates that shield to the business. The solution is not only about recovering the business loss from the site providers as a penalty to the outage which is the most common interpretation; it is much more than that. I am a part of a practice in Infosys that specializes in IT Service Management and following are a few steps that we recommend
- Creating an IT Business Alignment and for an online business, IT is the business so it is all the more critical to create that alignment.
- Creating a strong IT Governance structure and have control processes, structure and reporting that support the Business IT alignment
Another example of how ITIL V3.0 can help the end customers came when I was talking to a colleague of mine and esteemed fellow blogger, Ramshankar Ramdattan, and he had to say that applying ITIL V3.0 is like car pooling on a corporate level. When we ardently manage IT capacity we are ensuring that assets are used and reused to ensure overall containment of costs. This way the corporate spend is controlled and it results in better profits. This profit can give leeway to a company to pass the benefit to its customers who then pay less to buy more.
Coming back to the rising gas prices, I do not know where the stop is? $5 or more but we know that in these times applying industry best practices like ITIL can create a counter pressure on the burgeoning costs.
