ITIL Fundamentals

ITIL is the IT Infrastructure Library and ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark and a Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce.  Developed in the late 1980's by the CCTA (now the OGC), by the mid 1990's it had become the world-wide de facto standard in service management.  ITIL has become very popular as it is a public domain framework which is scaleable.  Very large organizations, very small organizations and everything in between have implemented ITIL processes.  ITIL focuses on best practice, and as such can be adapted and adopted in different ways according to each individual organizations needs.  So let’s see ITIL Fundamentals clearly.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices standards for Information Technology (IT) service management. The United Kingdom's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) created ITIL in response to the growing dependence on Information Technology to meet business needs and goals. ITIL provides businesses with a customizable framework of best practices to achieve quality service and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems.  ITIL is organized into sets of texts which are defined by related functions: service support, service delivery, managerial, software support, computer operations, security management, and environmental. In addition to texts, ITIL services and products include training, qualifications, software tools, and user groups such as the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF), all of which you can find details of on this website: http://www.itilsurvival.com/

Let’s now focus on various ITIL Fundamentals: ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is essentially a series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management. This customizable framework defines how Service Management is applied within an organization.  Although ITIL was originally created by the CCTA, a UK Government agency. It is now being adopted and used across the world as the de facto standard for best practice in the provision of IT Service. Although the ITIL covers a number of areas, its main focus is on IT Service Management.

ITIL is organized into a series of sets, which themselves are divided into two main areas: service support and service delivery. Service Support is the practice of those disciplines that enable IT Services to be provided effectively. Service Delivery covers the management of the IT services themselves.

What is the ITIL Toolkit? The ITIL Toolkit is a collection of resources brought together specifically to accompany ITIL. The materials included are intended to assist in both understanding and implementation.

Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices used to deliver high quality IT services. The best practices described in ITIL represent the consensus derived from over a decade of work by thousands of IT and data processing professionals’ world-wide, including hundreds of years of collective experience. Because of its depth and breadth, the ITIL has become the de facto world standard for IT best practices.

Now more information on ITIL Fundamentals. Why ITIL Can Help: Many executives express frustration as they attempt to reign in the chaos and expense associated with their IT investments but find little in the way of substantive guidance. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has emerged as the worlds most widely accepted approach to the management and delivery of IT Services.

Gartner measurements show that the overall results of moving from no adoption of IT Service Management to full adoption can reduce an organization’s Total Cost of Ownership by as much as 48%. ITIL currently has over 100,000 certified (trained) professionals and consultants, primarily in Europe, Australia and Canada, with only a small fraction of those certified professionals residing or practicing in the U.S.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) represents a drastically different approach to IT by framing all activity under two broad umbrellas named Service Support and Service Delivery respectively. By focusing on the critical business processes and disciplines needed to deliver services around IT, the ITIL provides a maturity path for IT that is not based on technology. This accessibility allows senior executives to both sponsor and shepherd IT quality improvement efforts. The ITIL has become the most widely accepted approach to IT service management.

ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent volume of best practices drawn from the collective experience and wisdom of thousands of IT practitioners around the world. By defining IT quality as the level of alignment between the actual services delivered and the actual needs of the business the library serves as a common point of engagement for IT and the other business units.

By adopting IT best practices, what type of advantage can an organization expect? Well, readers it is a nice question related to ITIL Fundamentals. Beyond the quantifiable benefits, delivered from the implementation of ITIL, there are also qualitative benefits. Successful introduction of IT Service Management with ITIL should deliver type of benefits to organizations:

• Improved Customer Satisfaction
• Improved ROI of IT
• Improved Morale of Service delivery and recipient staff
• Reduced staff turnover
• Lower costs of training, especially as the ITIL standard become widely adopted 
• Improved systems/apps availability 
• Improved IT employee productivity
• Reduced cost/incident
• Reduced hidden costs that traditionally increases substantially the TCO
• Better asset utilization

The economic impact of an organization adopting ITIL will be felt in all of the areas listed above. The benefits can also be viewed in terms of direct savings and indirect, the later being derived as a result of the strategy but not directly related to the actions being taken, such as minimizing the missed opportunity costs, the cost of not been able to operate. These indirect benefits as well as the direct benefits may vary greatly from one organization to another.

Many high-profile U.S. organizations have adopted the best practices described in ITIL. Companies such as Procter and Gamble, IBM, Caterpillar, Shell Oil, Boeing, and the Internal Revenue Service have all reported great success and significant operational cost savings as a direct result of ITIL adoption. Procter and Gamble publicly attributes nearly $125 million in IT cost savings per year to the adoption of ITIL, constituting nearly 10% of their annual IT budget. Similarly, Shell Oil utilized ITIL best practices when they overhauled their global desktop PC consolidation project, encompassing 80,000 desktops. After this project was completed, they can now do software upgrades in less than 72 hours, potentially saving 6000 man-days working days and 5 million dollars.