IT Service Management ITIL

IT Service Management ITIL at a Glance: ITIL is the IT Infrastructure Library, the worldwide standard today for IT Service Management. This set of recognized Best Practices was standardized and documented for the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, and has become recognized worldwide as the process framework for best practices in IT Service Management ITIL. ITIL also provides guidance to develop Business and Management skills. ITIL/ITSM (IT Infrastructure Library/IT Service Management) offers a systematic, professional approach to the management of IT services. IT Service Management ITIL underscores the importance of providing IT services that satisfy business needs in a cost-effective manner.

What are ITIL and ITSM? The IT Service Management (ITSM) standards of the ITIL are the "de facto" best practice standards for IT service and support. These standards were created in the1980s in the United Kingdom and have been prevalent in Europe for years with adoption in North America increasing recently. It is anticipated ITSM will form the basis for an International Standards Organization (ISO) standard for IT in the next three years.

The cornerstone of ITIL is the concept of aligning IT operations with business objectives. This addresses the basic discourse that most organizations have difficulty assessing and managing the quality and effectiveness of IT service and support. Most IT service organizations spend the bulk of their time focusing on technology rather than the business objectives technology is attempting to solve or support.

The IT Service Management ITIL standards of ITIL are broken down into ten processes and one function under service delivery and service support:

• Service delivery - primarily focused on the strategic tasks of managing the delivery of new services. It is comprised of service level management, capacity management, availability management, IT service continuity management and financial management.
• Service support - focuses on supporting and improving the quality of existing services. This is comprised of incident management, problem management, change management, release management, configuration management and service desk.

The ITIL processes encourage an atmosphere where IT people understand the business objectives on three levels: strategic (where decisions are made), tactical (where decisions are implemented), and operational (ongoing support and maintenance of the decision). An example would be a company that decides to implement a Web-based customer relationship management tool: the firm would have varying expectations from each ITIL process at each level. The idea is to articulate technology requirements and its effects on business objectives, resulting in a greater understanding and appreciation of the costs by business stakeholders. Business people ultimately want to understand business impacts - not technology requirements.

What is ITSM? IT Service Management ITIL is the world’s leading best practice approach to managing IT in organizations across the world. IT Service Management ITIL is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of the organization. ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent and coherent set of best practices for IT Service Management processes, promoting a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems. ITIL processes are intended to be implemented so that they underpin but do not dictate the business processes of an organization. IT service providers are striving to improve the quality of the service, whilst at the same time they will be trying to reduce the costs or, at a minimum, maintain costs at the current level.

In essence, IT Service Management ITIL guides organizations in the best practices associated with delivering IT services to the business in accordance with service level agreements, underpinned by a set of support services matched to the requirements of the business. Fuelled by Y2k issues, embedded in broader initiatives like ISO9000 and COBIT, IT Service Management ITIL has rapidly been adopted by leading IT vendors, (e.g. HP, Tivoli, Remedy and Microsoft), outsourcing organizations (EDS and Perot Systems) and organizations with large in-house IT departments (e.g. Telkom, Sabre Systems, US Internal Revenue Service, Vodacom).