Whether you’re unpacking a new LCD television that’s high-definition-ready out of the box or driving the latest model car off the lot, you want assurance that the product will perform as expected and confidence that your money was well spent. The television might be certified through Underwriters Laboratories, may have an independent rating of such features as picture and sound quality through an organization such as Consumer Reports, and will have a manufacturer’s warranty. The car also will have a manufacturer’s warranty and may also have some sort of independent safety rating through Consumer Reports.

A similar type of independent verification is now available for IT service management software. Until recently, IT organizations investing in IT service management software could hope that their purchases would deliver capabilities based on IT Infrastructure Library ® (ITIL®) processes, but with no real guarantee. Thanks to a new program licensed by the OGC (UK Office of Government Commerce), you now can buy service management software with the designation of “ITIL® Process Compliant” and be confident that the certified software is driving true IT process improvements and efficiency in accordance with ITIL best practices. But how is the ITIL Process Compliant certification achieved? And even more critical, what does it mean to you and your IT goals?

ITIL Process Compliant certification is a standards-based approach to IT service management. To earn the prestigious designation, the software must successfully complete rigorous testing for achieving ITIL fundamental processes in the areas it is designed to serve, such as incident and problem management.

The ITIL Process Compliant certification is a completely independent review and is far more extensive and unbiased than self-reporting by vendors. In this process, a licensed assessor looks at the submitted software tools, examines the user documentation to make sure the processes are consistent with the software, looks at a vendor’s process model, and evaluates what percentage of compliance the vendor has attained. A software tool can be certified as ITIL Process Compliant at one of three levels: Bronze, Silver, or Gold, with Gold being the highest level, indicating confirmation from at least three end customers using the tool in a production environment for the ITIL process or processes evaluated.

BMC Software is the first vendor to be awarded the new OGC-approved ITIL Process Compliant certification and trademark, and has achieved Gold level certification for incident and problem management.

So what does this mean to you and your IT organization? Service management software certified as ITIL Process Compliant delivers powerful solutions that allow your IT organization to do the following:

• Safeguard your investment
• Yield better results through faster implementations
• Ensure the ITIL education your people have is protect with ITIL compliant applications
• Achieve another critical element for ISO/IEC 20000 accreditation

Your Investment Can Boost Customer Satisfaction

The ITIL Process Compliant certification delivers the confidence that the software you purchase is based on a tested best-practice program. ITIL covers many different processes, some of which are interconnected, so most IT departments don’t typically attempt to implement all of them at once. To get started, they may choose a couple of key processes and a specific goal, such as increasing efficiency, reducing manual errors, or lowering costs by ensuring the same steps are followed over and over.

Because incident management directly impacts service quality, most IT organizations implement it first. It's also the most critical service or process that businesses deliver to their customers or end users. Technology that addresses incident management processes based on ITIL guidance can help your service desk become more proactive and business-driven.

Because a strong connection usually exists between the adoption of incident management and problem management, an ITIL process-compliant assessment allows for a joint certification of both processes using a single management tool. Both incident and problem management directly address customer satisfaction, quality of service, quality of response, and service availability, since they focus on quickly restoring service and ensuring that the service stays up by permanently fixing any problems that continue to arise.

Improve Productivity and Leverage Your Investment in Employee ITIL Education

It’s common for people to go into service desk and incident management jobs, such as Level 1 and Level 2 service desk positions, as a means to move to another position. As a result, support staff people responsible for incident management have the highest turnover rate of any of the IT functions, typically staying in that position for just six to nine months. So if you have to train an employee on a customized process along with a tool customized to match that process, that employee may not be fully effective for perhaps up to six months. And if the employee chooses to leave the job three months later, you have now wasted two-thirds of the employee’s time just getting that person up to speed.

Using software that is certified as ITIL process-compliant for incident management can significantly accelerate the time to productivity for new service desk employees. By adopting software that supports ITIL best practices out of the box, a service desk employee can become productive much more quickly, usually within the first month. Additionally, because the assessment covers the user documentation to ensure it is ITIL compliant, staff efficiency increases, ensuring that tasks are done the same way every time and reducing manual errors and ad hoc work.

Yield Better Results through a Faster Implementation

Depending on how customized and specialized your current processes are, you can implement them significantly faster by using ITIL Process Compliant software. For example, the first step in the incident management process is incident registration. One company reduced its registration time for new incidents by 70 percent, thanks to its adoption of ITIL and ITIL Process Compliant software. The company had an incident registration form that required fields for every possible situation and configuration, because the tools had to take into account all the different types of situations and unique data required.

By adopting ITIL and ITIL Process Compliant software, the company decreased its incident registration form from 46 fields to just 12. The service desk now collects only the minimum required data, so they can move the incident along based on best-practice processes and restore the service faster. The main goal for incident management is to restore the service as fast as possible, not to spend time managing the incident. Software that directly supports ITIL out of the box makes that possible.

Achieve Another Critical Element for ISO/IEC 20000 Accreditation

Your IT organization already trains and assesses your employees to determine their qualifications and their understanding of ITIL. The ISO/IEC 20000 standard, the first international standard for IT service management, is complementary to ITIL. This standard promotes adoption of an integrated process approach for effectively delivering managed services. So instead of validating software tools, the ISO/IEC 20000 certification is an assessment of your own IT organization as a means of showing that you’ve reached a level of maturity for delivery of your services.

Until recently, there has not been an officially sanctioned way to verify whether the vendors’ tools you purchased were ITIL-aligned or ITIL-compliant. ITIL Process Compliant certification changes that. Now your organization can train its employees with the confidence that the product that you’ve purchased is ITIL-aligned on a process-by-process basis. Next, you can strive for ISO/IEC 20000 accreditation of your service delivery to the business.

Independent Verification Delivers Value

When a product is labeled as ITIL Process Compliant for a specific process or processes, you can be confident that those ITIL processes are baked into that particular tool. This saves your organization time, helps reduce labor costs, and improves efficiency.

For example, in order to earn the designation of ITIL® Process Compliant, the BMC Remedy IT Service Management suite successfully completed rigorous testing for ITIL fundamentals in the areas of incident and problem management. This included an analysis of software capability, user documentation, and process flows to ensure customers receive an ITIL compliance solution out of the box.

This new ITIL® Process Compliant designation gives IT organizations the confidence they need that their investment in service management software will drive true IT process improvements and efficiency in accordance with ITIL best practices. For more information, visit www.bmc.com/itil.

About the Authors

Gerry Roy, director of Solutions Management for Service Support, BMC Software, is responsible for the solutions strategy for the BMC Remedy IT Service Management suite of applications. He is also responsible for the strategy of service support and how it interfaces with other disciplines. Prior to joining BMC, Roy worked as a senior architect for Aprisma, Inc., and also with Tivoli as a product manager.

Ken Turbitt is president and CEO, Service Management Consultancy (SMCG) Ltd., a worldwide services company based in the U.K. Turbitt was the creator and implementer of the first Office of Government Commerce (OGC)-approved ITIL Compliant Assessment Service, and SMCG is the first licensed assessor. Turbitt has more than 25 years of IT experience and is an accomplished speaker, author, and advisor on a worldwide basis. He has held an ISEB ITIL Manager qualification for more than 12 years and was an official reviewer of ITIL V3 Service Design book and ITIL Live.