Achieving organizational integration with ITIL 4
- Blog
- ITIL Practices
- ITIL
July 11, 2023 |
8 min read
- Blog
- ITIL Practices
- ITIL
For businesses and other organizations still trying to play catch up from the impact of Covid-19, there are several key areas of focus:
- Programme management
- Business management
- Customer/business relationship management
- Learning and growth
- Internal business process management
There are a variety of approaches to creating the knowledge, skills, practices and processes for each of these areas. However, I believe the only way to truly integrate them in an organization is via ITIL 4.
CEOs and company boards are under pressure to solidify their organizations by increasing profitability and stability. And there is also a greater push to think about employee experience and retaining valuable talent.
Training and development forms part of this picture and ITIL addresses both the organizational and individual demands: ITIL Foundation level helps professionals to understand how the various elements within an organization work together to create value and satisfy stakeholders. The knowledge contained at the higher ITIL levels – Managing Professional and Strategic Leader – will then help further people’s careers as well as their employers’ effectiveness.
But part of this is also about the changing nature of technical roles and the skills they require.
The move from technologist to business professional
Many so-called technical roles are now extending beyond technology.
To achieve the financial success and stability companies are seeking, it means getting a contract, growing a contract and keeping the contract. Plus, an increasing number of CIOs are coming from the business side of an organization rather than technology – and there are business considerations that drive them more.
Satisfying business demands needs the ability to communicate the value of your solution, delivering on that value and showing ROI. For technical people, this requires a transition to something more akin to sales and business relationship management; in effect, becoming a trusted advisor rather than only a technician.
Clearly, this is something new for most IT people and – indeed – practitioners in previous versions of ITIL.
This is why ITIL 4’s concepts place technology firmly in the context of business and therefore allows service managers to convey the importance of the framework to business stakeholders both within and beyond IT.
Pioneering the great integration
If, since the pandemic, your organizational processes have become lax and people have fallen behind on their training it’s probably time to address that.
Training people in different levels of ITIL 4 will help the service management team to understand the value of integration across departments that may, typically, be siloed. Make no mistake, silos still exist and it’s necessary at least to be able to communicate across them – and with the customer perspective perpetually in mind.
Doctors don’t become heart surgeons without going to medical school, understanding the whole anatomy and how each part of the body operates together. Similarly, in organizations, how can professionals be fully effective without understanding the integration across disciplines and departments?
If you want to be a professional who doesn’t get trapped by organizational silos and siloed thinking, ITIL 4 is the way you can show value and can communicate it. And does this help both the key audiences of customers and employees – yes it does.