TRIGGER: How can an IT leader use ITIL to measure IT service quality when ITIL has so many abstract concepts and to be useful?

SETTING: IT Operations (ITO) leaders who have invested in ITIL often struggle with abstract concepts like utility and warranty. ITIL describes utility and warranty as key factors in business value but not how to use or measure them. Here we explore how an ITO leader can use utility and warranty to guide operations and deliver increased business value.

SUMMARY: Service quality is what your customers say it is. Customers determine service quality based on attributes of its delivery called dimensions, and to measure service quality you have to measure customer perception across these dimensions. However, few actually know how to measure customer perceptions. SERVQUAL is one way to measure ITIL utility and warranty. Its five dimensions have detailed explanations, examples, causes, symptoms, and solutions. Using SERVQUAL you develop an understandable quality metric based on customer perception where a score of 100% means the service meets minimum quality requirements. A score higher than 100% means the ITO is exceeding expectations and perhaps wasting money, or represents an advantage to the ITO and your customers. Less than 100% means something in the utility or warranty are off. Use SERVQUAL to make ITIL concepts of utility and warranty real, and drive higher business value from your investments.

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KEYWORDS: ITIL, Utility, Warranty, customer perception, quality requirements, service quality, business value