The IT executives of TTX, which provides railcars and freight car management services to the North American rail industry, decided to automate routine business functions, such as incident reporting and service request management. The goal was to reduce costs, improve service levels and gain efficiency—all part of a larger vision to use ITIL principles to guide the way TTX does business.

Tim Donohue, senior manager of service delivery, describes how the IT team defined the company’s requirements, evaluated five systems, determined the best vendor for the company’s needs and managed a rollout of the chosen ITIL-compliant service delivery system. Results include a more efficient service delivery process, a 50 percent reduction in the service desk staff and the elimination of many of the ticket-taking activities performed by help desk personnel.

We all aspire to run IT like a business, but that’s easier said than done. But a recent experience with a service-catalog implementation helped me realize that achieving this goal was closer than I thought.

At TTX, a provider of railcars and freight car management services to the North American rail industry, our job is to make sure there is a reliable pool of railcars available to our customers. Our IT operations are critical to delivering on that promise.

I manage the IT service delivery team for TTX. Like most IT shops these days, we run a tight ship and are always trying to do more with less.

In the summer of 2007, our IT executives decided we needed to automate routine business functions, such as incident reporting and service request management, in order to reduce costs, improve service levels and gain efficiency. This goal of automating service delivery was part of our larger vision to use ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) principles to guide the way we do business.

When I submitted the request for funding a service catalog, the cost justification was calculated for the IT department only, though we hoped to find a system that would benefit the entire enterprise. We began searching for a service catalog that could provide a foundation for automating routine service requests made by our approximately 1,200 employees for services offered by IT and other business units, such as Corporate Services and Accounting.