ITIL case study: ITIL best practices at two financial services firms

Great article on two case studies on ITIL implementations. And two of them are newScale customers. Here's an excerpt.

Using a service catalog for improved efficiency and IT transparency

One of the key objectives Patel was hired to accomplish was to implement a service catalog that would allow both IT and the business to view all the services offered by IT, their costs and delivery times. "The objective was improving IT transparency," said Patel.

"We actually had a good handle on internal IT costs," he added. "but wanted a standard way to communicate the cost, deliver our services and deepen our understanding of the drivers of IT cost."

Part of that was because Barclay's Global Investors IT had been growing at a rapidly in the last few years in line with it's business.

Implementing a service catalog was also instrumental to improving IT efficiencies at Wachovia.

"When we started our service catalog, we had all different types of offerings that we had to break down to individual service tasks," said Ruppel. "We worked with the QA department to write test scenarios for each task and incorporate repeatable processes."

The most recent version of Wachovia's service catalog has nine categories of services broken down into at least 300 individual tasks. It provides customers who submit a request with end-to-end expectations of how long it will take to execute a task and what the costs are, as well as the ability to track the deliverables against promised SLAs.

via searchcio.techtarget.com