ITIL - IT Infrastructure Library

What is ITIL?

The ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) 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.

ITIL advocates that IT services must be aligned to the needs of the business and underpin the core business processes. It provides guidance to organizations on how to use IT as a tool to facilitate business change, transformation and growth.

The ITIL best practices are currently detailed within five core publications which provide a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT services, enabling organizations to deliver appropriate services and continually ensure they are meeting business goals and delivering benefits.

ITIL consists of 6 sets: Service Support; Service Delivery; Planning to Implement Service Management; ICT Infrastructure Management; Applications Management; The Business Perspective.
ITIL has had a long history of development, and many IT professionals believe that ITIL grew out of the yellow books, which were best practices and guidelines that were used in IBM during the 1980′s, however it wasn’t until the middle of the 1990′s that ITIL become a formal library of IT best practice frameworks. The newest version of ITIL (version 3) is set to be released in May of 2007. The ITIL v3 has been anticipated by many IT professionals all over the world for the last few years. It is expected that five core texts will be packaged in the publication, they include: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.Further updates were made in Summer 2011 to correct errors, respond to reviewer feedback, remove inconsistencies and improve clarity and structure.

Successful introduction of IT Service Management with ITIL should deliver the following benefits:

•     Improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
•     Improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
•     Improved ROI of  IT
•     Improved delivery of third party services through the specification of ITIL
•     Improved morale of service delivery and recipient staff
•     Increased competence, capability and productivity of IT staff
•     Increased staff retention
•     Reduced cost of training
•     Improved systems/ applications availability
•     Reduced cost/ incident
•     Reduced hidden costs that traditionally increases substantially the TCO
•     Better asset utilisation
•     A clear business differentiator from competitors
•     Closely aligned to commercial business services and products
•     Greater visibility of IT costs
•     Greater visibility of IT assets
•     A benchmark to measure performance against in IT projects or services
•     Reduced cost of recruitment and training - hiring ITIL qualified people is easier

ITIL gives an adaptive and flexible framework for managing IT services and encourages you to use common sense rather than follow a rigid set of rules. ITIL will create a common understanding between your IT staff, suppliers, contractors and users within the business by creating a common approach and language towards IT services.