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The IT industry has had tremendous amounts of money invested in it over the last few decades. Companies have sometimes appeared willing to spend almost unthinkingly on technology, without requiring the stringent financial controls that they would insist on for other business investments. The spending frenzy peaked in the lead-up to Y2K and the emergence of e-business. In spite of the resources invested in IT, many companies still haven’t seemed to gain the expected returns.

IT Service Delivery requires an understanding of what the business needs and wants from its IT organization and then ensuring that it is delivered. This article seeks to define and understand the factors that are vital to ensuring service delivery.

What are the critical success factors and the supporting key elements for IT service delivery, and how are they being applied in the real world?

Several critical success factors have been identified as the basis for developing criteria to describe and understand what needs to be done well to achieve the required levels of IT service delivery. These factors are:

• Strategic alignment of IT and the business
• IT management competency
• Standards and processes
• Infrastructure
• IT competency
• Partnership

Without focusing on these factors, no amount of spending on tools or tactical fixes will make up for inattention to the basics. This article will take a look at all the factors except infrastructure which will be discussed in a later article.

Strategic Alignment of IT and the Business
Many IT departments don't have the luxury of taking a step back from the day-to-day reactive battles to consider how things could be managed better. Incompatibility and integration challenges between "point solutions" systems and tools used to monitor and ensure delivery of service may threaten the IT organization’s ability to adopt a coherent service delivery strategy.

Alignment will take credibility and trust from the business along with flexible technology.

Unless the IT department understands what the business wants and needs, effective IT service delivery is impossible. Delivering services that aren’t required by the business is of no value.

In addition, adding more technology without addressing the underlying management issues is not the solution. Defining the critical success factors for achieving efficiency as well as effectiveness in IT service delivery is the solution.

According to a 2005 article in Computing, only 20 percent of CIOs believe that technology is giving their organization some kind of competitive advantage.

IT Management Competency
IT management competency includes how the organization manages its IT assets and capabilities, not simply with how the IT management team operates.

By gathering IT architecture into a series of domains IT and the business can learn how to work together.

This service-based technology cluster approach has improved infrastructure reliability and cut spending by up to 30 percent according to a 2003 McKinsey Quarterly article.

Standards and Processes
A Network World article showed that 60 percent of surveyed IT managers rely on practices developed to manage IT service processes.

Today's business world needs some form of standards and processes. Given the challenges of delivering day-to-day demands for system, network and application support standards and processes must remain as concerns for IT departments.

Ensure the standards and processes are also aligned with emerging needs.

Managing Infrastructure
Managing infrastructure costs is an ongoing struggle as IT strives to control the proliferation of hardware and software operating platforms and align itself with the business.

Planning and control also helps IT better align itself with the business. Only through enforcing standards and ensuring early consideration of infrastructure in new business projects can complexity be managed and reduced. More could be done by the business to help IT be in a more informed position and therefore, better able to support the agility of the business.

Partnerships Pay Off
When IT has a reasonable understanding of the business needs and is capable of improving business processes through its ideas, improved partnerships are not far away.

When Intel's IT department partnered with the business and ran its department like a business, they were successful. The IT department's $184 million in charges represented the business capability the IT department delivered to the internal customer.

The Big Payoff
These six critical success factors are meant to be used as a guideline for improving IT service to its customers - internal and external. By meeting the demands of your customers, both IT and the business are sure to deliver exceptional customer service.