Although there are many models of IT service quality and service management, one of the most respected and commonly implemented is ITIL - the IT Infrastructure Library. The ITIL model provides a process-based view of all IT operational services and the terminology is very commonly used across a wide variety of industries.

Our IT service management offerings include benchmarking against ITIL guidelines and recommendations for improvement. In practice, this tends to be a multi-step process:
– Assessment of the current capabilities as the starting point for discussion
– Agree areas for prioritised improvement
– Develop specific improvement plans

ITIL is a sophisticated set of best-practices. In practice, it is not necessarily reasonable to aim to implement all ITIL processes in one go. What is achievable depends on the starting point of an organisation, so it is usually much more sensible to target certain areas of weakness, bring them up to an improved level of performance, then move to the next area. This approach leads to a more-or-less continual improvement cycle which, in itself, is also a key part of ITIL.

From a lifesciences industry perspective, while it is not essential to organise your IT operations around ITIL processes, what you must be able to prove is that you are in control of your regulated systems. ITIL provides a very strong and well-known framework for control and delivery quality that is familiar to regulators and auditors.