ITIL beyond IT

It's great to see most companies manage their IT infrastructure in a well structured way using a methodology like ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). According to the ITIL website ITIL® is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally.

When looking at ITIL it will bring you some great benefits

• reduced costs
• improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
• improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
  standards and guidance
• improved productivity
• improved use of skills and experience
• improved delivery of third party services through the specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery in services procurements.

In order to be able to use ITIL and get the full set of benefits there are a lot of great tools available on the market helping you in managing these processes.

When looking at the structure of the processes and the tools available it would make sense to use ITIL outside the IT as well. There are some examples of this but one of the most common is missing here. It is a great way to manage your Audio/Visual infrastructure.

Although most AV infrastructures are not that mature yet (although this will change rapidly in the near future since the AV equipment makes this more and more easy to do) it would still be wise to use ITIL to manage your AV infrastructure. This would help any team managing an enterprise AV infrastructure to manage this more pro-actively, improve availability, manage costs in a better way and supports the process of thinking in a strategic way about the future of your AV infrastructure.

ITIL can facilitate the process of getting more mature without huge investments since most enterprises already have the tools in place to manage the IT infrastructure (let's be honest, there is not a big difference between and IT and AV incident, nor much difference in managing IT or AV configuration items and both should have a Service Level Agreement with their internal customers on the support and services they can expect). When using these tools you automatically create an integrated approach to managing your IT and AV infrastructure.

The big challenge here however might be that in general IT and AV report into different groups in an enterprise (IT versus Facilities). If we can get passed this barrier we see many opportunities to save costs and at the same time improve quality of the infrastructure and services.