ITIL
ITIL, which original stood for Information Technology Infrastructure library, is a creation of the UK government. Current at version 3, ITIL is framework for IT service management best practice. It is vendor neutral, non-prescriptive and aligns with other standards and integrates other methodologies. ITIL is divided into five cores, these are Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.
A framework such as this provides common terminology across different businesses and sectors. This allows for skills and knowledge to be transferable, and gives confidence in individuals and organisations ability to deliver IT service management. Certification and exams are available and widely recognised.ITIL treats providing IT support as providing a service. Even for an internal IT department the approach regards those needing the support as a customer looking for and deserving a good experience.
Service Strategy
This core of ITIL is the initial stage in the overall process, which can be regarded as cyclical. Here the service provider identifies how in it is to create value for customer. This stage identifies the business case for the service. Financial Management of the service comes under the remit of service strategy.
Service Design
This stage transforms the strategy in to a plan. The 4 P's of service design are People, Process, Products and Partners. The service design seeks to makes best use of these. The Service design stage produces the service design package, service level agreements and the service catalogue. The service design stage also considers the management of availability, capacity and information security.
Service Transition
Following the service design stage the service transition puts service design packages into operation. Changes to established services are also covered by this stage. This stage introduces Change Management and service asset and configuration management for dealing with the large amount of configuration information IT service must deal with. This uses the Configuration management Database (CMDB).
Service Operation
The day-to-day realization of strategy and objections is covered by the Service operations stage. This covers the management of incidents and problems as well as business as usual activities which includes the management of service request and the management of applications. Service Operation includes functions such as the service desk, operations, technical and applications management. Service operation also handles processes for managing events, incidents, access, requests and problems.
Continual Service Improvement
The final and ongoing part of ITIL is the continual service improvement stage (CSI). This is based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. Continual service improvement is a way maximise service delivery through learning from experience. Metrics on performance is fed from the other stages. ITIL borrows from the knowledge management paradigm as well the PDCA cycle of continuous improvement.
Duncan Stonebridge. Back