What is ITIL?
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a volume library that provides best practices for the implementation of IT services. ITIL has undergone many changes in its history and currently consists of five books covering various IT service life cycle cycles and phases. Systematic IT services management approach by ITIL will allow companies to manage risk, improve customer relationships, establish cost-effective processes and build a stable IT ecosystem that facilitates growth, scale and change.
ITIL Infrastructure Library is a compilation of principles and policies that discuss best practice in the management, growth and operation of information technology services. This defines the number with checklists, activities and procedures for essential This practices. It provides a framework for IT services managers to demonstrate their ITIL knowledge and understanding and to improve their professional expertise through training and skills. IT companies should adapt to their needs.
To describe ITIL, you will continue to improve and orientate your customers.
ITIL is a collection of good practices organised into several communications processes. Each of them has its own role so that both of them can ultimately respond to the two problems: constantly improving and satisfying customers.
ITIL is not a standard because it does not provide globally specified standards or specifications for certification of the organisations.
ITIL is neither a method nor a method. It provides and uses methods to explore best practice better.
The good practices provide organisations with the structure that they can formalize their processes and manage their information through years of experience in large companies globally recognized by its professionalism and thoroughness. These good practices are primarily used as recommendations for businesses servicing clients who want to improve their service quality.
In 2006, a standard was created based on those good practices in order to use the strength of all good practices suggested by ITIL and to emphasize the robustness of its processes worldwide. The ISO20000 global standard was designed to meet the needs of companies wanting to show compliance with ITIL’s good practice.
Why Use ITIL ?
ITIL provides a pragmatic approach to deal with the situation in which CIOs are faced, namely, among others:
• The IT sector is receiving more and more investment budget. It represents important expenses especially for companies to whom; the main business isn’t focused on computing.
• Information systems are becoming more complex. As long as the IT workers are trying to meet the requirements and demands of their internal customers, they find themselves facing an infrastructure and a large arsenal application that must be managed and maintained while trying to be responsive.
•With the advent of new technologies of information and communication (social medias …) , users have become up ‐ to ‐ date with all high ‐ tech news. Especially since the editors have popularized their software’s (advent of open source) and telecommunications Infrastructure (mobile phone).
•As long as companies have spent enormous sums of money for the IT infrastructure (hardware and software), the leaders expect a return on investment and begin to tighten the b u d g e t s . Thus, the d iff icu lt situations the CIOs have to face.
• Globalization has played its part too. It introduced the practices of service between recharges its subsidiaries. This new situation has opened the eyes of CIOs who want to bill their servicesto their internal customers.
• All this was said, made the ambiguous role of the CIO. With the mode of outsourcing, the user begins to ask questions about the added value of CIOs as external suppliers support their claims with contracts and a better reactivity. • For companies specialized in IT, being certified or certifying their staff improve their reputation and trust of their internal or external customers. This certification is a label that the CIO can show to proof their professionalism with standards recognized worldwide.
ITIL 4 components
ITIL 4 consists of two key components:
- The four dimensions model
- The service value system (SVS).
Four dimensions model
ITIL 4 defines four dimensions that should be considered to ensure a holistic approach to service management:
- Organizations and people
- Information and technology
- Partners and suppliers
- Value streams and processes.
These dimensions are applicable to the service value system in general and to specific services.
Service value system
The service value System (SVS) represents “how all the components and activities of an organization work together to facilitate value creation”. The ITIL 4 SVS includes several elements:
- Guiding principles
- Governance
- Service value chain
- Continual improvement
- Practices.
ITIL 4 management practices
ITIL 4 includes 34 management practices as “sets of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective”. For each practice, ITIL 4 provides various types of guidance, such as key terms and concepts, success factors, key activities, information objects, etc.
The 34 ITIL 4 practices are grouped into three categories:
- General management practices
- Service management practices
- Technical management practices
General management practices
The ITIL 4 general management practices include:
- Strategy management
- Portfolio management
- Architecture management
- Service financial management
- Workforce and talent management
- Continual improvement
- Measurement and reporting
- Risk management
- Information security management
- Knowledge management
- Organizational change management
- Project management
- Relationship management
- Supplier management
Service management practices
The service management practices in ITIL 4 include:
- Business analysis
- Service catalogue management
- Service design
- Service level management
- Availability management
- Capacity and performance management
- Service continuity management
- Monitoring and event management
- Service desk
- Incident management
- Service request management
- Problem management
- Release management
- Change control
- Service validation and testing
- Service configuration management
- IT asset management
Technical management practices
The ITIL 4 technical management practices include:
- Deployment management
- Infrastructure and platform management
- Software development and management
ITIL 4 and ITIL V3: What’s the difference?
ITIL 4 does not attempt to introduce new basic ideas in service management and should be seen as an expansion, not a replacement, of the time-tested ITIL system. ITIL 4 and ITIL V3 essentially give guidance based on the same principles, but ITIL 4 adopts a new approach to this guideline.
ITIL V3 contains detailed descriptions of 26 ITIL processes, arranged along the service lifecycle:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
The service lifecycle has been dropped in ITIL 4 and the processes replaced with practices. But many of the ITIL 4 practices clearly correspond to the previous ITIL V3 processes.
Other than that, ITIL 4 introduces additional guidance, to ensure practitioners better understand the core principles and concepts such as “value” and “outcomes”.
ITIL 4 also provides advice for integrating ITIL with other frameworks and methodologies like DevOps, Lean and Agile.
SINHARA'S NMIT Blog 