What is
ITIL?
The Information Technology Infrastructure
Library (ITIL), is a set of practices for IT service
management (ITSM)
that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. In its current
form (known as ITILv3 and ITIL 2011 edition), ITIL is published in a series of
five core publications, each of which covers an ITSM lifecycle stage.
ITIL describes procedures, tasks and
checklists that are not organization-specific, used by an organization for
establishing a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to
establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used
to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.
The names ITIL and IT
Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United
Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) – now part of the
Cabinet Office.
ITIL is the most widely adopted approach for
IT Service Management in the world. It provides a practical,
no-nonsense framework for identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT
services to the business.
Briefly, ITIL
is a public framework that describes Best Practice in IT service management. It provides a framework for the governance of
IT, the ‘service wrap’, and focuses on the continual measurement and
improvement of the quality of IT service delivered, from both a business and a
customer perspective. This focus is a major factor in ITIL’s worldwide success
and has contributed to its prolific usage and to the key benefits obtained by
those
organizations
deploying the techniques and processes throughout their organizations.Some of
these benefits include:
■
increased user and customer satisfaction with IT services
■
improved service availability, directly leading to increased business profits
and
revenue
■
financial savings from reduced rework, lost time, improved resource
management
and usage
■
improved time to market for new products and services
■
improved decision making and optimized risk.
IT
Service Management
To understand what
service management is, we need to understand what services are, and how service
management can help service providers to deliver and manage these services.
A service is a means
of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to
achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.
A simple example of a
customer outcome that could be facilitated by an IT service might be: “Sales
people spending more time interacting with customers” facilitated by “a remote
access service that enables reliable Access to corporate sales systems from
sales people’s laptops”.
The outcomes that
customers want to achieve are the reason why they purchase or use the service.
The value of the service to the customer is directly dependent on how well it
facilitates these outcomes. Service management is what enables a service
provider to understand the services they are providing, to ensure that the
services really do facilitate the outcomes their customers want to achieve, to understand
the value of the services to their customers, and to understand and manage all
of the costs and risks associated with those services.
Service Management is
a set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to
customers in the form of services.
These “specialized
organizational capabilities” are described in this pocket guide. They include
all of the processes, methods, functions, roles and activities that a Service
Provider uses to enable them to deliver services to their customers.
Service management is
concerned with more than just delivering services. Each service, process or
infrastructure component has a lifecycle, and service management considers the
entire lifecycle from strategy through design and transition to operation and
continual improvement.
Adopting good
practice can help a service provider to create an effective service management
system. Good practice is simply doing things that have been shown to work and
to be effective. Good practice can come from many different sources, including
public frameworks such as ITIL standards and proprietary knowledge of people
and organizations.
