Every IT executive will tell you that delivery of quality IT services from a user point of view is their highest priority today. Much has been written recently about managing the quality of IT service delivery, yet little has addressed the practical approaches for achieving service quality. Two methods currently being employed to achieve quality service management are Six Sigma and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Six Sigma and ITIL have their own merits and can be used individually. However, many organizations are finding it beneficial to adopt both structures at the same time. ITIL essentially provides a clearly defined structure for delivering and supporting IT-based services. Six Sigma is a quality-management process based on statistical measurements used to drive quality improvement while reducing operational costs. Many service-level management (SLM) software vendors are beginning to support one or both of these methodologies.

ITIL was originally defined in the U.K. by a government agency. It has stronger adoption in Europe than in North America, but is beginning to gain traction here. The ITIL structure is a framework to deliver and support IT-based services. There are many components to the ITIL model. Service support includes incident management, problem management, change management, configuration management, and release management. Service delivery encompasses availability management, capacity management, service continuity management, financial management, and service level management. Each component has a set of recommended practices and procedures that can be adopted individually or in total. Staff certification is a key part of ITIL adoption. Customer satisfaction is critical to a successful ITIL-run organization.

Six Sigma was established many years ago and has been heavily used outside of IT management to improve operational processes. It’s a formal approach to evaluating which processes are important to your business, measuring the quality of outputs for those processes statistically, and using the methodology to improve the processes and hence the results. It is very oriented towards economic savings, lending itself particularly well to the concept of IT service management.

SLM, by definition, is the process of defining and then managing IT service delivery to a standard of quality. Six Sigma fits well with this because it creates a way to tangibly measure the service that can either formally be built into service-level agreements (SLA) or informally within the organizational structure.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.