* Introducing the IT Infrastructure Library
Are you ITIL-savvy? If not, perhaps it’s time to get up to speed on the new trend sweeping through enterprise IT departments worldwide.
ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. According to the U.K.’s Office of Government Commerce, ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practices, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualification scheme, accredited training organizations, and implementation and assessment tools.
The ITIL movement was founded in the U.K. but has rapidly reached around the world. It is based on the premise that all types of businesses are now highly dependent upon information technology services, and that IT practitioners have a responsibility to provide the highest QoS to their internal customers.
The “library” of ITIL is a series of books and CDs that provide “best practices” guidance on the provision of quality IT services, and on the accommodation and environmental facilities needed to support IT. In short, ITIL is a framework, leaving lots of flexibility to suit your specific needs. For instance, the books won’t dictate which security products you should implement; rather, they will point out the security framework you need to build into your IT infrastructure to ensure high availability.
Though ITIL has been around for a dozen or so years, it is garnering great attention by CIOs now because it is so closely related to the new and important trend of mapping IT services to business processes, sometimes called business service management. Following ITIL practices keeps you from building business processes on an IT infrastructure that is nothing more than a house of cards, prone to failures and limitations.
ITIL is organized into two main areas, service support and service delivery, which are further divided into supporting disciplines:
* Service support is the practice of those disciplines that enable IT services to be provided effectively. The six service support disciplines are: configuration management; incident management; problem management; change management; service/help desk; and release management.
* Service delivery covers the management of the IT services themselves. It involves a number of management practices to ensure that IT services are actually provided as agreed between the service provider and the customer. The five disciplines under service delivery are: service-level management; capacity management; continuity management; availability management; and IT financial management.
As you can see, the scope of ITIL is beyond the capabilities and capacity of just one person; it is meant to be embraced by your entire IT organization. There are books, tool kits, classes and other resources to help you get started on the path to best practices in the area of IT service management. A good source to purchase the books, CDs and ITIL tool kit is the ITIL & ITSM World Web site.
Yet for all these books and tools, an organization can still find it overwhelming and confusing as to where to start implementing the ITIL practices. Experts suggest that, rather than tackling a full ITIL implementation at once, you can start looking for IT service improvements in small chunks, such as change and configuration management. Just knowing what you have, how it’s configured and what changes you are making to it can help improve your IT infrastructure.
There are some very large organizations, such as Proctor and Gamble, which have been through the ITIL implementation process. There are even more that are undertaking the challenge now. Given that ITIL is all about best practices, many participants are willing to share their experiences through forums such as The IT Service Management Forum. It’s a good place to get your feet wet before diving into ITIL head first.
Linda Musthaler is vice president of Currid & Company. You can write to her at mailto:Linda.Musthaler@currid.com
