Survey: ITIL's ROI hard to measure

A survey released last week shows two-thirds of some 80 companies that have deployed an IT Infrastructure Library say they feel the process changes are delivering IT performance improvements, but most don’t have effective tools in place to measure the return on their investment.

ITIL is a customizable framework that provides guidelines to help IT departments coordinate their processes and deliver the best IT services possible. IT consultancy Compass conducted its survey to find how companies embarked on ITIL adoption and how they measured the success of their best practices implementation.

Eighty percent of those the research firm polled were ITIL adopters that had had the best practices in place for at least 18 months, but while a majority (67%) believed they were benefiting from the change, it was unclear how because only 4% reported having means to measure the success in place. The survey also found that 9% of respondents could link the process changes to performance improvements, while close to three-fourths could not tie process maturity to performance improvements.

“Organizations are rushing to implement ITIL if they have not already because there is a widespread confidence in its ability to improve IT performance. But now that managers and top executives are eager to see tangible benefits, most companies are ill-equipped to provide those measures,” said John Sansbury, Global Director of Service Management Practice of Compass, in a company press release.

Compass -- along with Evergreen Systems, ValCom, Oblicore and Siemens Business Services, and many others provide products and services to help companies quantify the benefits of process improvements. And industry watchers point out that IT organizations can actually use details within the ITIL processes and the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Capability Maturity Model to determine if there have been tangible improvements.

“Once ITIL has been used to map out where the process should be, CMM can be used to baseline the existing process,” writes Chip Gliedman, a vice president with Forrester Research in a June 2006 report called, “Assess The Maturity Of Your IT Support Processes: A Road Map For Assessment And Improvement.” “From this point, the organization can implement specific process improvement initiatives that will move the process from the current baseline toward a fully ITIL-compliant best practice.”

Other survey findings revealed how IT executives perceive the processes that comprise ITIL. For instance, respondents found incident management to be the most mature process and capacity management to be the least. While the underpinning process of ITIL, configuration management was also perceived as among the least mature processes.

Click to see: The measure of ITIL