A study undertaken in April and May 2011 by Forrester and the itSMF found ITIL has a positive impact on organizational productivity, service quality, IT department's reputation with the Business and operational costs.
Primarily focused in the USA, data was collected from four hundred and ninety one (491) qualified subjects heavily involved in ITSM efforts (69% have two or more years of ITSM experience and 95% hold some level of ITIL certification; 50% at an advanced level).
Although the report is still being edited, Glenn O'Donnell, the author, announced at the itSMF national conference in Washington DC, that ITSM offers significant benefits to both organizations and to individual professionals.
Glenn shared a few of the findings from the study as follows:
- 51% of ITSM efforts are driven primarily by IT or business executives
- ITIL has had an overwhelming positive impact on:
- Organizational productivity: 85% positive and 2% negative
- Service quality: 83% positive and 1% negative
- IT's reputation with the business: 65% positive and 3% negative
- Operational costs: 41% positive and 4% negative
- 70% received a positive salary increase in the past year with 31% over 5% (the general US population fell and general IT salaries were flat)
- 77% indicated a positive relationship between their Application Development and Operations teams. This indicates DevOps success is far stronger in ITSM-focused organizations than in the general enterprise. DevOps is a movement formed to foster better cooperation between App Development and Operations. This is fundamental to ITSM so the evidence tells us ITSM makes a difference favorable to DevOps.
Change Management was identified as an area still in need of improvement, notable how change management execution still causes too many incidents. 58% of the subjects say over 10% of their incidents are caused by change. 25% are excessive (over 40% of incidents) and a beleaguered 22% don't know. These numbers are not good, but convey a better scenario posited by the urban legend that about 70% of all incidents are the result of a change.
Forrester and itSMF shall be making the full report available to its members once complete. The exercise is hoping to be repeated again in 2012 but involve itSMF members from around the globe.