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The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has emerged as one of the more popular frameworks for improving IT services and helping organizations comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

Experts say the model helps ensure that IT is meeting standards in delivering service to all parts of the organization. “ITIL provides the processes, guidance, roles and responsibilities, and measurement activities to ensure that there are adequate controls associated with IT processes,” says Gary Case, executive consultant at Pink Elephant, a consultancy specializing in IT services.

Before taking the ITIL plunge, organizations would be wise to learn the basics of the model and build a business case. A big part of creating the business case is estimating how much it will cost to implement ITIL.

ITIL, developed by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the U.K., consists of a set of books containing best practices that are designed to help organizations improve the quality of the IT services they deliver and reduce costs. It includes rules describing how organizations can deliver services more efficiently through improvements in management processes across IT components such as systems, networks, applications and databases.

Earlier this year, the OGC released the latest version of the framework, with five core publications including Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

In developing a business case for implementing ITIL, organizations need to identify and budget for certain costs they will incur, Case says. “External costs can be for training and consulting, as well as any purchases of new software to support the ITIL implementation,” he says.

Internal costs include those associated with performing ITIL activities during the development and implementation phases, such as attending meetings, training, etc., Case says, adding that the internal costs are often hard to identify, but are critical if an organization wants to receive a return on investment.

An organization should be able to define the costs associated with training based on the type of training required and the amount of training needed, based on the number of people to be trained, Case says. “This means there needs to be some planning scheduled around the training,” he says, and should “take into consideration external ITIL training as well as internal process and tool training.”

Organizations can estimate consulting costs by having a plan on how and when to use consulting services. “This should be negotiated up front and be a budgeted item,” Case says.

Software costs can come from two sources, Case says. One consists of internal costs for modifying an existing software tool. Organizations will either have their own staff manage changes to their ITIL Service Management tool, or contract with a vendor to do the modification.

The other software cost is from purchasing a new Service Management tool. “If an organization wants to take this route, there will need to be some preliminary work to define the tool requirements and perform some due diligence on aligning what vendor products will support the business requirements,” Case says.

Armed with a clear understanding of all the costs of ITIL, an organization can then attempt to quantify the expected gains, such as improved processes.

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