IT service management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process framework were envisioned to help organizations align IT capabilities with business requirements and provide a systematic approach to planning, developing, implementing, and supporting IT services. This shift from reactive mode to a proactive service orientation is critical for IT departments that seem to be constantly fighting fires. Indeed, ITIL helps establish a consistent level of process across the organization by creating a standard methodology to apply within IT. In doing so, IT becomes more of a business enabler and less of a back-office support organization. If ITIL is intended to help create operational consistency across multiple departments and locations, then what better place to start than with the silos of help desk and IT management? In fact, CIO magazine reports that of the eight books that composed Version 2 of ITIL (Version 3 of ITIL has since been released), most organizations have typically used just two-the Service Support and Service Delivery books-to improve in a tactical way their help desk operations through better incident and problem management, as well as to improve their change-management efforts.

1 The key to bridging these two silos lies in preventing problems from occurring in the first place and, when they do occur, providing rapid response and resolution and enabling as much self-service as possible. CIO magazine also reports that roughly 70 percent of incidents (problem reports) are caused by poorly configured change. A consistent level of process discipline across silos and looking for the root causes of issues helps create the necessary control.

2 The purpose of this white paper is to discuss how mid-size organizations that employ configuration management, service desk, asset management, and process automation technologies on a step-by-step basis can realize the change, configuration and release management improvements required for a true ITSM best-practice service desk.