The Central Office of Information (COI) is using an on-demand service management tool to meet best practice standards that come into effect this month.

Version three of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (Itil) – a best practice framework to encourage IT departments to deliver improved levels of customer service – will be published on 30 May.

‘The tool we were using for tasks such as logging incidents, and tracking down the cause of these incidents, was not sufficient,’ said COI’s IS service delivery manager Marc Guy.

‘We need to show we have the right processes in place to deliver IT service support, and we chose the Service-now.com on-demand service management tool.’

The technology has been integrated with an alert system to automatically inform staff if problems arise, and its on-demand nature means the COI only pays for what it uses.

‘The hosted service is also 60 per cent cheaper than managing our own tool and we can order and approve equipment electronically to cut paper use,’ said Guy.

It plans to cut costs further by adopting server virtualisation later this year.

The COI is more advanced than other public sector groups in meeting Itil 3 guidelines, says Anne Goddard, principal consultant at local government group the Society of IT Management.

‘Many local government authorities are only now looking at version three but the COI is ahead of the pack,’ she said.