The Definition of ITIL and ITSM

      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.