WHAT IS ITIL?

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for managing Information Technology (IT) services (ITSM), IT development and IT operations. ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. The names ITIL  and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC).

ITIL consists of a series of books giving guidance on the provision of quality IT services, and on the accommodation and environmental facilities needed to support IT. ITIL has been developed in recognition of organisations' growing dependency on IT and embodies best practices for IT Service Management.

The ethos behind the development of ITIL is the recognition that organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This leads to an increased requirement for high quality IT services.

ITIL: OVERVIEW AND BENEFITS

ITIL provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision. Adopting its guidance offers users a huge range of benefits that include:

• reduced costs
• improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
• improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
• standards and guidance
• improved productivity
• improved use of skills and experience
• Improved delivery of third party services through the specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery in services procurements.

HISTORY

Responding to growing dependence on IT, the UK Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations. It recognized that without standard practices, government agencies and private sector contracts were independently creating their own IT management practices.

The IT Infrastructure Library originated as a collection of books, each covering a specific practice within IT Service Management. ITIL was built around a process-model based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to W. Edwards Deming and his plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle

After the initial publication in 1989, the number of books quickly grew within ITIL v1 to over 30 volumes.

In 2000/2001, to make ITIL more accessible (and affordable), ITIL v2 consolidated the publications into 8 logical "sets" that grouped related process-guidelines to match different aspects of IT management, applications, and services. However, the main focus was known as the Service Management sets (Service Support and Service Delivery) which were by far the most widely used, circulated, and understood of ITIL v2 publications.

• In April 2001 the CCTA was merged into the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an office of the UK Treasury
• In 2006, the ITIL v2 glossary was published.
• In May 2007, this organization issued the version 3 of ITIL (also known as the ITIL Refresh Project) consisting of 26 processes and functions, now grouped under only 5 volumes, arranged around the concept of Service lifecycle structure.
• In 2009, the OGC officially announced that ITIL v2 would be withdrawn and launched a major consultation as per how to proceed.

References:

http://www.itil-officialsite.com

http://en.wikipedia.org