Sterling, Va.- The popular best practice initiative called the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become even more popular among financial institutions driven by service quality and a need to align IT with larger business objectives, according to Evergreen Systems, an IT technology and process consulting firm. ITIL is non-proprietary approach for managing IT that helps make business sense of tools, standards and processes. Evergreen released the results of an assessment survey of IT managers and executives, conducted at the IT Service Management forum (itSMF) conference in late September.
Evergreen's survey results suggest that the ITIL methodology has reached critical mass in large organizations, and that of organizations that participated in the survey, ITIL implementation is clearly outpacing other technology process/compliance frameworks in the enterprise.
The company polled 167 attendees from 108 companies, organizations and institutions to gauge the degree of commitment and focus around adoption and use of ITIL best practices for enterprise IT management. The greatest percentage of survey participants came from the financial services (12%) and manufacturing (18%) sectors.
As ITIL gains traction in the U.S., says the Evergreen report, organizations are maturing in their ability to leverage it for business benefit. Of the 40% of respondents who reported having a published ITIL strategy, 94% say their strategy is multi-year and 85% indicate that their plan defines business goals and technical priorities
A notable number of organizations (63%) surveyed report a moderate to very rapid increase over the past 12 months in the pace of ITIL awareness among senior IT management. Further, organizations are getting better at implementing ITIL from the top down instead of around just service management at a grassroots level. More than 46% say that they're leveraging ITIL to re-engineer service delivery end-to-end, including change management and configuration management. The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a top priority for IT organizations in 2006 with 64% planning a CMDB activity.
"Our most recent survey supports our observations with 95% of respondents saying they have, or will have, budgeted and approved ITIL projects within the next 12 months," said Don Casson, president and CEO of Evergreen. "This is an astounding rate, even at an ITIL show, and a majority of the respondents come from Fortune 1000 companies with more than 10,000 employees."
Casson reports that U.S. companies are beginning to fully understand and support ITIL is that nearly 66%, evidenced by the number of respondents that are rationalizing their ITIL framework with other frameworks like the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard to drive efficiency throughout the enterprise.
"This is nearly double the amount [of companies] that indicated they were doing this in the February survey we conducted," he said.
Source: BUSINESS WIRE
