Developing the Business Value for ITIL

This sequel to the original 'Developing the Business Case for ITIL' makes the point that even though less than half of today's businesses are developing business value and ROI to justify IT spending, that trend is changing quickly. Going forward, IT departments must develop business value justification and ROI to fund new projects. This is evidenced by increasing pressure on IT executives to not only justify investments via traditional internal metrics (such as numbers of servers per system administrator) but also to expand into metrics that quantify IT's value to the business, such as 'annual contribution' to the business, 'benefit per developer' and other types of metrics, such as increasing IT staff time on innovation versus operations.

Templates are offered for capturing specific metrics for Incident and Problem Management; Change, Release and Configuration Management; and Service Level and Financial Management. In general, efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction, applied to these practice areas, lead the way for the development of 'core' metrics, particularly for IT infrastructure projects. Although each of these areas will have their own specific metrics, prior to business case development these metrics must be merged to reflect results based on 'end-to-end' service delivery. This approach integrates traditional, internal IT performance metrics with broader business value metrics.