Case Studies and examples

The following are actual examples of how ITIL benefits IT organisations through the use of formal processes.

Problem: Service Desk costs high due to the number of repeat calls.

ITIL: £80k pa reduction in costs through a formal problem management process used to identify trends in hardware faults with one particular supplier.

Problem: No clear understanding of the number of systems and applications software licences, leading to concerns of either under or over funding and the threat of legal action from FAST.

ITIL: The use of the Configuration Management process with a Configuration Management Database resulted in over £800k of savings due to the accurate identification and monitoring of licences.

Problem: A company's UPS in one of their Data Centres needs parts replacing.

Pre-ITIL: The engineers would have changed the parts without informing IT or the business because it was considered urgent and had to be done straight away. This can result in embarrassment for IT if it fails as they are not aware of what is going on.

ITIL: An emergency change is raised and discussed in an Emergency Change Approval Board at 1900 that night. The engineers, Change Manager, Application Support Manager and the Service Managers discuss, by phone, the risks and the impact and agree to review it with the business before the change is carried out. The CMDB is reviewed to understand the IT systems provided by the Data Centre to allow the business to assess the impact from their perspective. The change was successfully made the following day with no outage or disruption to the business.