ITIL Best Practices
More Pragmatic ITIL Implementation
IT departments are striving to support new business initiatives, meet regulatory compliance requirements and operate under tough budget constraints. In order to provide new and better services to their users while at the same time reducing costs, many organizations are considering the implementation of ITIL best practices. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), represents a set of generally accepted information technology control objectives for day-to-day use by IT managers, business managers and auditors, to ensure the delivery of “best possible” information services to end users and improved IT efficiency and effectiveness. However, while the potential rewards of ITIL adoption are great, the effort to implement these best practices have often proven daunting. The result? Broad, unfocused programs which struggle to deliver incremental value or initiatives stopped dead in their tracks. Fortunately, there are more pragmatic ways to implement ITIL that reduce the complexity and can deliver measurable results quickly.
The Solution
The Dell KACE Family of Systems Management Appliances can support more practical, targeted implementations of ITIL best practices, helping to provide better service to IT users, while still maximizing IT efficiencies. The KACE approach can help offer greater return and tangible benefits:
- Rapid implementation of the ITIL Service Transition Module with more accurate, enforceable policy-based configuration management
- Enabling support for the ITIL Service Operations Module helping reduce problem resolution times and improved efficiencies through more accurate inventory and integrated service desk capabilities
- Driving Service Implementation Plans (SIPs) by moving from a reactive operations mode to a more pro-active delivery of IT services that are responsive to business change
KACE Appliances can help enable such ITIL functional areas as configuration management, incident and problem management, change management, release management, and service desk offerings to users, all supported by applications leveraging a single central database, a configuration management database (CMDB) for information relating to the whole of the IT framework. Organizations can adopt portions of the best practices framework, such as configuration management or service desk functionality, without having to embrace all of the components.
- The KACE K2000 Deployment Appliance helps standardize and simplify the process of deploying operating systems and applications customized for the business. In this way, ITIL processes can be implemented in new or expanding environments according to pre-defined configuration standards, helping to assure consistency across the infrastructure.
- The KACE K1000 Management Appliance assists to automate discovery of hardware and software inventory, helping consistency in the implementation of the ITIL Service Transition module for configuration management.
- Asset management acts as a configuration management database (CMDB), where hardware and software configurations are centrally tracked and the inventory dependencies incorporated into the K1000 database acts as a CMDB. This helps facilitate more rapid and efficient incident management across the IT support infrastructure.
- Policy enforcement using configuration and policy management, patch management and software distribution helps simplify and accelerate the ITIL Service Transition process (Change, Configuration and Release Management) by automating implementation based on pre-defined configurations. Reporting functionality provides the validation of success necessary to achieve closure on Service Implementation Plans (SIPs)
- K1000 service desk meets ITIL Service Desk requirements for ticket submission, tracking and management functionality as outlined in ITIL's Service Operation book. It can provide flexible incident and problem submission, tracking and management capabilities, all integrated with K1000 asset management to allow for a more rapid implementation of the ITIL Operations Module.
- A client side user portal is also included for issuing tickets, knowledge base access and performing software downloads. The unique KACE Appliance-based approach to systems management helps enable organizations to take more pragmatic steps toward implementation of ITIL best practices and assists multi-function IT support groups by providing a centralized common interface for all the applicable tools. With KACE Appliances, businesses are better prepared to implement ITIL more simply, effectively and inexpensively.
The unique KACE Appliance-based approach to systems management helps enable organizations to take more pragmatic steps toward implementation of ITIL best practices and assists multi-function IT support groups by providing a centralized common interface for all the applicable tools. With KACE Appliances, businesses are better prepared to implement ITIL more simply, effectively and inexpensively.