One thing that very few IT organizations want to come to terms with is the fact that the components of an ITIL implementation, such as Processes, Entities, Attributes, Reference Data, etc. are all reusable and common across all IT organizations in any and all industries. What this means is that every organization that goes off an decides to implement ITIL, on its own, is reinventing the wheel. These organizations have taken on the challenge of defining the very same components of ITIL that every other IT organization in the world is struggling to define or already has defined. What's worse, is that because these IT organizations have never implemented ITIL before, their definition and implementation of such components will often yield results that are far from desirable for the executives that had an ITIL compliant organization, in mind.

Based on years of experience in implementing ITIL, TraverseIT has found that the components of ITIL are highly reusable and applicable for all IT organizations, across all industries. What this means is that the Processes, Entities, Attributes, Reference Data, etc. that are needed by your enterprise, have already been defined and implemented, multiple times over, by many other organizations, world-wide. TraverseIT has taken the applicable superset of all such information and built it all into the KnowIT platform, making it instantly ready to use and consistent, with the ITIL needs of any IT organization in any industry vertical. The end result is that your staff doesn't have to struggle with trying to figure things out, themselves, or make things up as they go along. They simply turn on the platform and start working. TraverseIT takes on the responsibility for ensuring that all common best practices are implemented within the KnowIT platform and provisioned to all our clients, in a clean and consistent manner. This means your staff doesn't waste valuable time reinventing the ITIL wheel and immediately gets back to focusing on your core business as quickly as possible.

ITIL is huge. Implementing ITIL takes the average enterprise many years and a very significant investment in time, money, and energy. As people are off implementing ITIL, they're not focusing on your core business and, to make matters worse, you're spending money on something that improves operations but that doesn't have anything to do with your core business.

Because ITIL is so big and requires a significant amount of expertise, time, money, and energy, many companies don't realize what they're getting themselves into. The end result is a highly fractured, inconsistent, and incomplete implementation... and this, after years of hard work and millions of dollars!

TraverseIT offers solutions for ITIL disciplines through the KnowIT platform, in such a way as to eliminate the scope problem. The reason is that by turning on KnowIT, your enterprise is instantly ramped up to have the most robust, elaborate, and mature ITIL infrastructure offering on the market. This means that you're ready to start implementing ITIL, even if it's only with lightweight processes. If your enterprise is larger and needs heavier weight processes, that's ok, too. KnowIT is geared to allow for ITIL to work in small, medium, and large scale organizations.

If you need assistance defining your ITIL processes around the KnowIT platform, our services group's experience can be leveraged for a very elaborate, thorough, and, yet, easy to use set of ITIL processes that can be tailored to suite your organization's size and needs.

Being that IT budgets are limited, organizations attempting to implement ITIL rarely have the luxury or the experience to implement more than one ITIL discipline at a time. As a result, they make the decision to pick one discipline, implement it, and then move on to the next. The end result is a significant investment in time (many years), money (usually in the millions of dollars), and energy to get to a state that is rarely, if ever, mature. What most IT organizations never stop to realize is that the implementation of a single ITIL discipline will be 6 to 18 months for a non-experienced organization. Since rolling out ITIL is not the core competency of the IT staff, it adds a very long term distraction to most enterprises and rarely gets to where it needs to be.

TraverseIT has proven that the implementation of the KnowIT ITIL platform will provide IT organizations with more ITIL infrastructure, in 30 to 60 days, than most "large" IT organizations can implement, themselves, in 3 to 6 years.

Since KnowIT was designed, from the beginning, to be ITIL compliant, it instantly provides an organization with access to a very large suite of highly elaborate and mature ITIL solutions. What this means is you simply turn them on and get to work. This translates to:

• You get to where you need to go in months, not many years.
• You save millions that you would, otherwise, spend over those years.
• You get a more mature and elaborate platform than you could ever provide, yourself, since you don't have the expertise.

Since ITIL implementations will typically take an enterprise years and since the implementation of each ITIL discipline is commonly done sequentially, many organizations will pick what they believe to be a best of breed tool for each ITIL discipline. As a result, and only after having invested significant time and money in deploying such tools, these organizations almost always find that such tools have no answer for interoperability. What this means is that Incident Management tools don't interoperate with Problem Management tools, or Change Management tools, etc. This, invariably, will lead these organizations to undertake expensive and lengthy integration efforts that only drive their ITIL implementations even further into a spiral.

TraverseIT designs and builds all ITIL disciplines (such as Incident, Problem, and Change Management), within the KnowIT platform, to be highly interoperable and fully integrated. Each discipline easily interacts and shares data with each other relevant discipline. What this translates to is that your IT organization no longer needs to spend any time or effort on integration of such disciplines and can go back to focusing on your core business. An added bonus is that you no longer need to spend your critical funds on such interoperability and integration efforts, leaving you budget for far more business critical issues.

We've found that investing in an ITIL implementation is a very large financial commitment. Why? You will require dedicated people, dedicated tools, dedicated infrastructure, possible reorganizations, and an investment to migrate to it, where migration includes the migration of data from old solutions to new and of people to the new processes.

A very large investment also comes in vendor tool customization. Many enterprises that undertake ITIL implementations don't realize that you're not done paying for vendor tools, after you've paid for owning them. For many vendor tools, your enterprise will need to spend significant additional funds to customize these tools. For example, most enterprise Incident Management tools you purchase will require you to define your attributes and pre-populated reference data, in order to use them. This is a many month effort, even when you do have experienced staff on hand!

The KnowIT platform is a pre-populated and all-in-one implementation of ITIL. What this means is that everything you need for ITIL is being provisioned through one common platform so that you don't have to spend any significant time, money or energy rolling out ITIL.

Implementing KnowIT in medium to large scale enterprises translates to millions of dollars that your enterprise won't have to spend on a long term and costly ITIL implementation. For a small company, implementing KnowIT can save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on your size. In either case, this translates to money you're freeing up to use for other, more critical core business needs, like revenue generation.

Anyone that's ever taken on the implementation of a single ITIL discipline, such as Incident Management, knows that the work to define the appropriate attributes for tracking relevant data entities can go on for many months, requiring a very significant effort, from many stakeholders. The end result is a fragmented and incomplete data model that doesn't truly capture the appropriate information necessary for strategic optimizing your processes, data exchange, metrics gathering, reporting, and analysis. In other words, it translates to anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars being wasted, simply on the attribute definition effort, itself. Getting the attributes that define your entities wrong means that you will not be able to get what you need out of your ITIL implementation. And, changing such attributes, after you're in flight, will be very difficult and expensive to do. What's worse is that you're reinventing the wheel by spending time on defining attributes that many other companies, world-wide, have done thousands of times over. Why not just leverage what they've done?

When it comes to attributes, TraverseIT takes an "opposite" approach. Rather than forcing you to define and implement your own attributes, within our system, we provide you and your enterprise with the standard superset of all ITIL attributes, right out of the box. This means that the moment you turn on and start using the KnowIT platform, thousands of attributes will be available to you and your enterprise that you don't have to chase, down, understand, define, and implement in your own and other vendors' tools. It also means you spend absolutely no time reinventing the wheel and don't have to worry about getting things wrong. If the attributes we offer are too many or too complicated for your enterprise, no problem. We provide you with the ability to "quickly" (and by quickly we mean seconds) filter out and/or redefine attribute names through filters that you can keep for yourself or publish for public use. Your enterprise can instantly get to work, knowing that TraverseIT is responsible for defining, implementing, and managing any new and necessary attributes, as well as ensuring that they're fully integrated with other ITIL disciplines and tools, such as those for reporting and analytics.

For many of the tracking attributes your enterprise defines, you will have to pre-populate these attributes with constrained data. This means that your enterprise will spend thousands of hours (at a minimum) defining and implementing such data. Again, this means reinventing the wheel, as thousands of organizations, world-wide, have already gone through this exercise. The end result is wasted time, money, and energy, only to have a very incomplete and highly fragmented implementation that falls far short of an enterprise's needs.

With KnowIT, your enterprise has all of this pre-population data in place and ready to use from the moment you turn it on. This means you don't waste any time, money, or energy doing what others with more experience have already done for you. It means you stop reinventing the wheel and retain the funds that you would have spent on such efforts, allowing you to redirect them to other, more critical, core business needs, such as revenue generation.

Enterprises that undertake ITIL implementations with the intent to start gathering metrics often focus on a limited data set that only meets their needs at the time of implementation. What this means is that they implement their solutions around their limited needs, thinking that they can expand their implementations at a later date, as they grow. However, the reality is that once an implementation is in place, it very rarely can be changed, even in the slightest way, to accommodate any new growth.

Another significant issue is that metrics that are important to one group are rarely, if ever, all that important to other groups and stakeholders. What we've found is that for ITIL to really work, it needs to be useful for everyone, across the entire enterprise. The problem is that the champions that typically are tasked with implementing ITIL rarely understand the needs of the entire enterprise, globally.

TraverseIT has designed the KnowIT platform with enterprise metrics gathering in mind. What this means is that we've taken the needs of the entire enterprise into account. There is no other platform in the world that offers more statistics and metrics for all enterprise stakeholders, from one place. This means that management, developers, engineers, support, sales, and marketing personnel can get and share metrics from one common platform.

Common enterprises that implement ITIL very rarely get the definition of statistics and metrics they need to capture and manage, correct. This trickles down into their implementations for reporting and analysis. Since they don't easily have the metrics and statistics they need available to them, they need to leverage extremely complicated and expensive reporting, analysis, and business intelligence tools to extract, manipulate, and format the data they believe they needs. The end result is that it costs thousands of dollars to implement a single report that has very limited and fragmented information. This means that the reports that most organizations generate are far from the levels that they need to be at, in order for them to be useful to all stakeholders, throughout the enterprise. What this also means is that these organizations commit to very expensive reporting, analysis, and business intelligence infrastructures that could, otherwise, have been totally avoided.

Since, with KnowIT, all your ITIL data is gathered and managed in one place, your enterprise can easily have access to what they need for advanced reporting, analytics, and business intelligence. You can query, access, dimensionalize, restructure views, and apply formats, such as charts, with minimal effort. It's all built into the platform. The intent is to eliminate your enterprise's needs for costly reporting, analysis, trending, and business intelligence tools. TraverseIT builds the reports you need as well as mechanism to create and format your own reports, right into the platform. This means you have access to thousands of reports, instantly, without spending a fortune or wasting time on development. It also means that your enterprise no longer has to perform development for or maintain developed reports in external business intelligence tools. TraverseIT does it for you so that your enterprise can go back to focusing on its core business.

Very few, if any, enterprise's that implement ITIL think of the long term and ongoing support and maintenance costs for ITIL. They use the excuse that implementing ITIL will actually save them money and hide the fact that they will have to pay money, year over year, to continue to support the effort. While keeping onsite ITIL experts makes sense, keeping onsite tools, infrastructure, and the people to support all of this onsite is not a good idea. Enterprises that implement ITIL rarely take the time to sum up the total cost for supporting ITIL. This cost can and often does run into the millions of dollars.

Since KnowIT is a fully hosted ITIL platform, your enterprise stops worrying about infrastructure, tools, and the headcount to support it all. TraverseIT does this for you and leverages economies of scale to ensure that you get the most for your money. Support is built into the utility cost an simply gets wiped off your books. This means that you can eliminate to pay for dedicated support and maintenance of ITIL and free up those funds for far more critical core business functions.