Establishing a hard ROI for IT service management initiatives is a tough task. A number of experts told me so last spring when I interviewed them for a story on quantifying ITIL benefits. As IDC analyst Fred Broussard, who surveyed 600 global IT organizations for a whitepaper on IT service management needs and adoption trends, told me:
ITIL helps you manage services better and work across organizations more smoothly, so you make fewer errors. It's hard to think about that in a way that saves the company money. Money not spent in tracking down errors is much softer than reducing the number of servers or software licenses you are buying.
But that doesn't mean folks have given up on trying to illustrate clear returns from ITIL. (Nor should they.) Andrew Brummer, a sales executive for IT service management (ITSM) software and services provider ICCM Solutions, is recruiting folks willing to contribute examples of how they've derived value from ITSM, with the aim of creating a whitepaper filled with lessons learned that can help provide guidance to all organizations interested in ITIL. Wrote Brummer in an e-mail:
What I hope to get out of this is a set of information, documents and websites that people can use to try help find the ITSM ROI. I do not believe that any one size will fit all. I am after creating a library of information that I hope to maintain that we can help the market understand where it is seeing the ROI value of operational improvement programs.
Brummer plans to consolidate submissions, removing identifying information such as names and putting them into an easily accessible format. Participants will receive an invitation to access them and "the next step will be analyzing the information to see if there are trends and areas of particular depth," says Brummer. "Those areas identified will be further analyzed in hopes of compiling some examples of hard cost savings." Information will be available only to those who contribute examples.
Brummer provided a sample of the format he'd like participants to use:
Brummer would like to receive all submissions by Jan. 15, 2011. For more information, you can e-mail him: abrummer@ardunan.com.
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