What is ITIL?

ITIL is the short-form of Information Technology Infrastructure Library. The ITIL is meant to define the organizational structure and skill requirements of an Information Technology Business. It also defines a set of customary operation management measures and practices that enable the business to handle an IT operation and associated infrastructure.

These procedures and practices are dealer independent and relate to all of the aspects contained by the IT Infrastructure. ITIL is the only dependable and all-inclusive documentation of the finest practice for IT Service Management. It is used by hundreds of organizations world wide. An attitude of ITIL has developed around the guidance securely tucked within the ITIL books and the sustaining specialized qualification scheme.

ITIL is made up of a series of books that give direction on the terms of valuable IT services and the housing and environmental services considered necessary to sustain IT. ITIL had been developed in recognition of the growing need organizations have on IT and it embodies the best methods for IT Service Management.

The philosophy involved with the development of ITIL is the recognition that some organizations have become very dependent on IT in order to meet their corporate goals and their organizational needs. Understandably such a realization increases the need of more high quality IT Services.

ITIL Functions

ITIL is intended to offer a foundation for better value IT Service Management; the extensive embracing of the ITIL leadership had enticed organizations around the globe of both commercial and non-proprietary nature, to develop supportive products as a faction of a shared ITIL ethos. There is a wide range of products and services available through the library, at the core of ITIL there are:

• ITIL Publication
• The Qualification Scheme
• itSMF, the non-profit and independent group of users and vendors
• and The commercial companies that provide consultancy, software tools and training.

The mission of this “library” is to create a set of wide-ranging, dependable, and reasoned codes of best practice for quality IT Service Management, and promoting company efficiency in the use of IT. Another objective of ITIL is to persuade the private division to build up services and products that support ITIL, such as; training, consultancy, and tools.

Where did ITIL Technology begin?

We will get into more about the history of ITIL in a later article, for now it is important to not that ITIL was brought to life by the CCTA under patronage of the British government, ITIL is a registered brand of the United Kingdom’s government office of the government commerce also know as the OGC.

The OGC worked intimately with the BSI and the itSMF in revising the ITIL books in 2000 in order to ensure that the BSI Management Overview and the ITIL series were from part of the same logical structure.

The BSI Management Overview is used to serve as a management introduction to the detailed guidance in ITIL, and in the same way, the separate ITIL books offer an extended information and great guidance on the subjects addressed in some IT programs.

{qbapagebreak title=ITIL Framework}

More Specific Information on ITIL

The actual library is constantly evolving, the third version known as ITILv3 is the most up-to-date release.

This is a compilation of five unique volumes,

1. ITIL Strategy
2. ITIL Service Design
3. ITIL Service Transition
4. ITIL Service Operation
5. ITIL Continual Service Improvement.

All of these volumes can be obtained from TSO books, or the publishers. Contained by these sets are the particular descriptions and definitions of the numerous ITIL practices and disciplines.

ITIL Framework

ITIL is basically a structure of interlinking processes which bind together the tasks of shaping how IT can better provide for the needs of organizations, preparation, creating, and delivering changes to IT services and processes, recording and managing the resources and communications, and ensuring the information of the organization remain easy to get to as well as protected.

The Disciplines of ITIL

ITIL recognizes that progress needs to be made on several fronts for the changes to be both positive and lasting. Here are those fronts:

Culture and People – If the idea for IT does not change in the eyes of the people who use it on a daily basis, the behavior will revert to older patterns as soon as such attention moves on.

Processes – The majority of services entail that the alliance of a number of separate organizational units do distribute. If these processes are not well-organized and well aligned the service is not to be expected to meet customer anticipation. Note that there are certain fundamentals of the conventional best practice for many IT services which can be easily applied to various scenarios.

Technology and Tools – A good process relies heavily on the continued support of underpinning systems and frameworks. IT service support tools require a rational method of planning and integrated execution.

ITIL Processes

ITIL is designed to recognize many key disciplines in IT Service Management. Some of these disciplines include the following:

• The IT operation must understand the business perspective so it can align the appropriate services with corresponding business needs.
• The services can then be constructed with an operational management component; this usually has very little direct contact with the clients and serves as a support function.
• The IT applications are created or implements and maintained.
• All of the processes run on the Infrastructure.
• The management of IT Security as well as the provision of appropriate systems access overlaps most of the other disciplines.

Furthermore each discipline relies on a set of interlinking processes to provide them support.

ITIL Common terminology

Here a list of common terms used within the ITIL area. It is important that you familiarize yourself with these terms and examine their meanings in full detail as they are used often with ITIL.

We will be using many of these terms through out our exploration of ITIL, knowing what they pertain to will help readers to understand the full functionality of ITIL as well as simplify what is being expressed in the articles following this short introduction. A useful exercise for beginners would be to research the meaning of each of them:

• Application Sizing
• Asset Management
• Availability Management
• IT Budgeting
• Business Process
• Capacity Database  (CDB)
• Capacity Management
• Capacity Planning
• CAB
• Change Advisory Board
• Change Management
• Chargeable Unit
• CI Level
• CMDB
• Asset Classification
• Configuration Baseline
• Configuration Item (CI)
• Configuration Management
• Configuration Management Database
• Customer Liaison
• Definitive Hardware Store (DHS)
• Definitive Software Library (DSL)
• Demand Management
• Elapsed Time
• Emergency Release
• Error Control
• Escalation Management
• IT Financial Management
• First Line Support
• Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC)
• Full Release
• Functional Escalation
• Help Desk
• Hierarchical Escalation
• Incident Life Cycle
• Incident Management
• IT Infrastructure
• IT Service Continuity Management
• IT Service Management (ITSM)
• Known Error
• Maintainability
• Mean Time between Failures (MTBF)
• Mean Time to Repair
• Proactive Problem Management
• Problem Control
• Problem Management
• Process Management
• Quality Assurance
• Quality Control
• Recoverability
• Release Management
• Release Policy
• Release Unit
• Request For Change (RFC)
• Resilience
• Resource Management
• Restoration of Service
• Rollout
• Second Line Support
• Security Level
• Security Management
• Service Catalogue
• Service Desk
• Service Improvement Program
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Service Level Management (SLM)
• Service Level Requirements (SLR)
• Service Request
• Service Window
• Software Release
• Underpinning Contract
• Work-around