Why does ITIL say that service requests and their fulfilment should be standardised and automated to the greatest degree possible?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
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The options
Not correct Because automation removes the need to agree fulfilment times with users
The opposite: expectations about fulfilment times should be clearly communicated and are made more achievable, not unnecessary, by automation.
Correct Because requests are pre-defined and repeatable, so a known workflow can deliver them consistently and quickly with minimal handling
Correct. Standardisation is possible precisely because the outcome and the steps are agreed in advance; automation then removes handling effort and variability from work that has no diagnostic content.
Not correct Because standardisation allows requests to be diagnosed faster when the root cause is unclear
Requests have no root cause to find. Diagnosis belongs to incidents and problems, which is why they cannot be automated in the same wholesale way.
Not correct Because every request must be individually authorised, and automation performs that authorisation
Approval policies are themselves pre-agreed for each request type; many requests need no individual authorisation at all. Automation applies the agreed policy rather than inventing an approval step.
Why
The economics of request handling are unlike incident handling. Because nothing is unknown, the whole workflow can be designed once and then repeated, so effort spent on each request is largely waste that standardisation and automation remove.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
- What it says
- Service requests and their fulfilment should be standardised and automated to the greatest degree possible.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.