All About ITIL

What is ITIL?

ITIL is an acronym that stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and it is a set of best practices and concepts for managing information technology services, development and operations. Using these as a guide, an organization can construct the procedure protocols, task lists and everything necessary for deployment.

ITIL was created by the United Kingdom Government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s as a set of recommendations. Without a set of recommendations, government and business would create their own IT management practices and policies

The CCTA is now merged with the Office of Government Commerce, an office of the UK Treasury. OGC maintains the ITIL official website at:

www.itil-officialsite.com/home/home.asp.

What once began as a collection of books covering specific practices within IT service management and also based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle created by W. Edwards Deming – the father of Total Quality Management, ITIL has grown into an industry on its own. It was based on the process model based view of controlling and managing operations.

The below image is a simple explanation of the process that ITIL uses.

The below image illustrates the organization of ITIL v3 which includes the following volumes: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

Service Strategy focuses on helping an organization improve and develop their IT over the long term relying on a market driven approach

Service Design focuses on the systems and processes required to support the service and processes which interact with the rest of the enterprise environment.

Service Transition covers the delivery of services as required in an operational scenario and also looks at the project side as well as business as usual within the enterprise.

Service Operation involves the area where the services are actually delivered, problem solving and maintenance of the operation and service desk in particular.

Continual Service Improvement comes straight out of Deming's teachings where the processes are refined and adjusted to change the business moving forward and getting better every time.

The below image is the process model of the ITIL v3 Lifecycle. (source: OGC Best Management Practice official site)

In researching this post, I found that there is support for ITIL using Microsoft Visio 2007. Per Microsoft, Visio is an important tool for implementing ITIL. A sampling of ITIL-related diagram types supported by Visio includes basic and cross-functional flowcharts, workflows, fault trees, input-process-output models, and network diagrams. Visio 2007 also includes a new ITIL template specifically for diagramming ITIL help desk processes. Now that Visio 2010 is coming out, I would imagine there will be more support for ITIL v3. The below image shows the components of an ITIL v3 implementation. There is a PowerPoint presentation which covers the use of ITIL using Visio 2007. Follow this link to get the presentation:
http://visiotoolbox.com/downloads/Howtouse/Visio-2007-ITIL-Overview.ppt

Below is a Process diagram created with the ITIL template in Visio.

One of the companies who actively helps companies develop their IT using ITIL is IBM. Follow the below link and view a flash presentation about what IBM can offer using ITIL.

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/summary/its/a1007588?cntxt=a1000074

IBM
Take the first steps today:

1. Use the IBM Service Management Self Assessment to evaluate IT processes and their importance to the efficiency and effectiveness of your service management implementation.

2. Download the no charge IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool, which can help show you how to bring together best practices, controls and standards.

3. Read the white paper IBM Service Management: Practical solutions for today based on 25 years of continuous thought leadership (PDF, 1.32MB).

4. Read the white paper ITIL v3: What it means and how IBM can help (PDF, 54KB)

5. Attend an IT workshop.

Other things IBM can do for a client with ITIL:
1 - Can help the company align their IT services with current and future business and customer needs.
2 - Can improve the quality of the IT services delivered
3 - Claims to reduce the long term cost of IT services
4 - Has over 1400 consultants who are certified in ITIL best practives
Is accredited to deliver ITIL training globally.
5 - Helps incorporate ITIL best practices with software from Tivoli and Rational, ITIL aligned solutions, Outsourced or in- house solutions.

Testamonial for IBM's services:

Yves Vlamijnck of Belgacom and Gert van Werven of Achmea Active speak about how IBM Tivoli software helps make ITIL best practices actionable. See this website for a video supporting their testamonial: http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01003c/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/LWIS-7XWVA2?OpenDocument&Site=default&cty=en_us

Business need: IBM clients Belgacom and Achmea sought to implement IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices to help IT staff gain control of their IT infrastructures and manage internal processes as efficiently as possible.

Solution: Using IBM Tivoli software these companies were able to implement ITIL best practices for incident and change management and automate previously manual processes for greater efficiency.

Benefits: Drastically decreased workloads in contact center by automating up to 80 percent of incident management detection; Decreased downtime by 50 percent over a two year period; Better control of changes to reduce outages

ITIL Certification for Individuals

Individuals can also be certified in their abilities to use ITIL. The ITIL v3 certification levels are: Foundation, Intermediate, Expert and Master.

Pursure your own learning about ITIL as the web is full of sources to further your ITIL knowledge.

More later,

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