What is ITIL?

Definition

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It provides a comprehensive, consistent and coherent set of best practices focused on the management of IT service processes.

ITIL promotes a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems.

History

Since the mid 1990's ITIL has been promoted as a standard for IT Service Management. ITIL is built on a process-model view of controlling and managing operations.

The recommendations of ITIL were developed in the late 1980's by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), which merged into the OGC in April 2001 and disappeared as a distinct organisation. The CCTA created ITIL in response to the growing dependence on information technology to meet business needs and goals.

In December 2005 the OGC issued notice of an ITIL refresh, commonly known as ITIL v3, to be completed initially by April 2006.

Overview of the ITIL Frameworks

ITIL is defined by a collection of books that describe guidelines for different aspects of best-practice data centre management. Taken as a whole, ITIL presents a comprehensive view of the field. The subjects of the individual books are referred to as sets; currently there are eight. The sets are further divided into disciplines, each of which is focused on a specific subject.

The eight sets and their disciplines are:

1. Service Delivery. What services must the data center provide to the business to adequately support it.

1. IT Financial Management
2. Capacity Management
3. Availability Management
4. IT Continuity Management
5. Service Level Management

2. Service Support. How does the data center ensure that the customer has access to the appropriate services?

1. Change Management
2. Release Management
3. Problem Management
4. Incident Management
5. Configuration Management
6. Service Desk

3. Planning to Implement Service Management. How to start the changeover to ITIL. It explains the necessary steps to identify how an organisation might expect to benefit from ITIL and how to set about reaping those benefits.

4. Security Management.

5. ICT Infrastructure Management. What processes, organisation, and tools are needed to provide a stable IT and communications infrastructure. This is the foundation for ITIL service management processes.

1. Network Service Management
2. Operations Management
3. Management of Local Processors
4. Computer Installation and Acceptance
5. Systems Management

6. The Business Perspective. It explains the key principles and requirements of the business organisation and operation and how these relate to the development, delivery and support of IT services.

7. Application Management. How to manage the software development lifecycle, expanding the issues touched upon in Software development lifecycle and testing of IT services.

8. Software Asset Management.

Using ITIL

From the beginning, the ITIL Framework has been publicly available, however, it is copyright protected. This means that any organisation can use the framework described by the OGC in its numerous books. Because of this, ITIL guidance has been used by a wide range of organisations including local and central government, energy, public utilities, retail, finance and manufacturing. Very large organisations, very small organisations and everything in between have implemented the ITIL processes.