What is ITIL?Primarily, ITIL provides international best practice guidance in IT Service Management. However, ITIL offers more than just guidance; it underpins the foundations of ISO/IEC 20000 (Service Management Standard, previously BS15000). It also provides a framework for IT Service Management Practitioners to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of ITIL and to develop their professional expertise through trainingand qualifications.
The Evolution of ITILITIL V1 was initially developed in the 1980’s by the forerunner to the OGC (CCTA) and was used mainly by government agencies. From 1999 to 2001, ITIL became the cornerstone for Service Management by introducing the Service Support and Service Delivery disciplines and establishing Version 2. There then followed a natural progression of alignment between ITIL and BS15000, culminating in today’s ISO/IEC 20000 standard and more importantly, ITIL V3 – The Service Lifecycle.
ITIL V2ITIL V2 has prooved to be highly significant in the history of IT Service Management. Service Support focuses on the processes required to keep operations running on a day-to-day basis. It explains how the Service Desk owns and supports Incident Management and provides a foundation for supporting users issues and requests.Equally, understanding how Problem Management needs to be proactive as well as reactive and the significant benefits to be gained from effective root cause analysis, gives great insight into reducing the impact of service outages for the user.
Change Management provides a structured and controlled process to ensure effective impact assessment and scheduling for the introduction of change. Through consideration of both business and technical criteria, the Change Management process can significantly reduce risks and minimise the impact of change.
Release Management provides a framework for coordination, control and physical introduction of a change into the development and production environments. Elements include technical and non-technical aspects e.g. user training, to ensure that all the required support is in place.
Configuration Management provides the foundation to all the Service Support and delivery processes. By ensuring a comprehensive and accurate database of software, infrastructure and documentation, Configuration Management provides the collateral for all processes, e.g. providing component relationship information for impact assessment and incident / problem resolution and maintaining release baselines for both development andback-out purposes.
Service Delivery by contrast, concentrates on the underpinning processes required to ensure that the services are maintained and provisioned to meet the current and
future needs of the business. Service Level Management explains the relationship required with customers to ensure that business needs are understood and delivered, as well as acting as the overarching process for reporting on SLAs and managing internal and external provider relationships.
future needs of the business. Service Level Management explains the relationship required with customers to ensure that business needs are understood and delivered, as well as acting as the overarching process for reporting on SLAs and managing internal and external provider relationships.
Availability Management is concerned with understanding each component part of the service, how reliable it is and putting in place alternative provisions to ensure the service continues should a component fail.
Capacity Management ensures that there is sufficient resource, infrastructure and overall service capacity to meet the current and future business requirements. It demonstrates how important it is to have a clear understanding of where the business is going and how it is planning to achieve its objectives.
Financial Management for IT supports the company’s overall financial objectives by being able to demonstrate control and understanding of how much services, infrastructure and support costs, and enabling effective budgeting and accounting of the whole IT division. It also explains how you can introduce charging into your organization, along with some of the inherent issues.
Finally, IT Service Continuity explains how to assess business risk, the different types of continuity provision that can be considered and the importance of aligning IT service continuity to the business continuity requirements.V2 identified the key processes of its time, but the shape of Service Management now has many facets. It is therefore becoming more and more important to recognise that Service Management is not just about supporting the end product. Hence, ITIL V3 – The Service Lifecycle was born.
The Service Lifecycle
The Service Lifecycle bridges the 4 key stages of a service; Strategy, Design, Transition and Operations. Enabling improvement and providing a vehicle for recognising change, Continuous Service Improvement surrounds the core processes. Each Service Lifecycle core process recognises the strengths of V2 and uses it as a platform to consolidate the whole lifecycle. There are new processes introduced to give a more robust service profile, with models to support any organization size.
Service Strategy concentrates on ensuring that the Service Strategy is defined, maintained and implemented. It introduces new concepts such as value creation, market definition and solution space. It focuses on enabling practical decision making, based on understanding service assets, structures and service economics with the ultimate aim of increasing the economic life of the services.
Service Design focuses on setting pragmatic service blueprints which convert strategy into reality. Harnessing Availability, Capacity, Continuity and Service Level Management, Service Design also focusses on the new process of Supplier Management and the concepts of Service warranty and utility, which customers consider to be fundamental.Service Transition aims to bridge the gap between projects and operations more effectively. It provides clear accountabilities and responsibilities for more of the V2 key processes e.g. Change, Configuration and Release, but extends them into Service Asset and Configuration management, Build and Test with Release and Deployment management.
Service Transition is concerned with the quality and control of the delivery to operations and provides example organization models to support transition, and guidance on how to reduce variation of delivery.
Service Operations ensures that there are robust end-to-end practices which support responsive and stable services. It influences Strategy, Design, Transition and Continuous Service Improvement through its knowledge of actual Service Delivery.
