What Is ITIL Managed Services and Why Is It Important?

IT support teams never have enough time, enough people, enough expertise, enough resources…and so it goes. There comes a time when an IT executive has had enough of not having enough! That’s when outsourcing can be the best option to lighten the day-to-day load, improve operations, decrease costs and – most importantly – help you succeed.  When outsourcing, however, you want to make sure your provider follows ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices.

What is ITIL Managed Services?

It’s easy for frequently under-resourced IT departments to spend most of their time going from incident to incident, leaving little time for other initiatives. As a result, their internal customers may not be satisfied with what they get, especially when it doesn’t quite meet their business needs.

Enter ITIL, a set of process-oriented best practices that drive efficiency, quality and better ROI. Since its beginning in the 1980s, ITIL has helped countless IT departments optimize their processes and costs, provide better service quality and improve delivery of services. Another key advantage is that ITIL provides a common language and framework for better alignment between IT and its customers.

That’s not to say ITIL doesn’t have its detractors. One critique is that ITIL’s focus on “not failing” can dampen the spirit of innovation and efforts to anticipate issues before they become problems. Another is that its complexity makes it difficult to put into practice. However, the growth of ITIL, with its millions of adherents, is the best measures of its success.

Managed Services Providers in an ITIL World

Growing pressures on IT spurred the rise of managed service providers (MSPs). Much like following ITIL best practices, outsourcing to MSPs are a good way to optimize processes, decrease overall costs and enable IT to go beyond incident response.

It’s only logical that ITIL-focused companies would want ITIL managed services providers. It’s a powerful combination that magnifies the advantages that ITIL and MSP share in common. These companies have a lot to gain by outsourcing to a service provider that thoroughly understands ITIL, speaks the same language and aligns with how they do business. Your MSPs ability to collaborate with your other ITIL vendors also brings value. Even for companies that don’t use ITIL, MSPs bring a lot to the table:

• Greater consistency and predictability of IT operations
• Well-defined and transparent definition of costs and assets, with granular budget control.
• Detailed processes for creating, deploying and moving IT services, reducing total risk
• Increased stability, with techniques for making process adjustments as needed.

 

What to Look For in an ITIL Managed Services Provider

When looking for your ITIL managed services provider, look for experts with ITIL certification who can help you put together an approach and plan for overall IT development. Learn what you can about the company’s accountability and success in staying on task. Ask about their experience adjusting to changes in clients’ businesses. And see what they provide to clients, such as a service catalog outlining its framework, or a runbook.

OneNeck leverages an ITIL-based activation and delivery methodology that assures smooth transition into the managed services model and enables a productive partnership throughout the engagement. Contact us today to learn more!

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