In this article, let us go through some of the aspects involved in the ITIL Structure.

Business Perspective

The business perspective is meant to familiarize the Business Management with the supporting components and the architectural design of the Information and Technology (ICT), the infrastructure that is needed to support their business processes and help them to gain a better understanding of service management standards and better practices.

The business perspective helps the organization to better understand the advantages of best practice in IT Service Management, while at the same time serving the service provider to communicate level terms with the company, equally, the planning book of the volume helps service providers to plan their implementation of service management best practice while at the same time helping the organization to converse on level terms with the service provider.

ICT Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure Management covers all of the aspects of ICT, this can range from identification of an organizations business requirements through the tendering process to the testing, installation, deployment, and ongoing support and/or maintenance of the ICT components and Information Technology Services. This volume describes all of the major processes that are involved in the management of all sections and aspects of technology. It includes the following:

• Design and planning processes
• Deployment processes
• Operations processes
• Technical support processes

Application Management

The volume that explains Application Management embraces the Software Development Lifecycle, it opens up the issues that are touched on in software lifecycle support and testing of Information Technology Services. Application Management will bring into light issues of business change with prominence on clear requirement definitions and implementation of the solution to meet organizational needs.

Service Support and Delivery

The Service Support volume is designed to describe all five of the core ITIL processes we spoke of in an earlier article. It also serves to relate these to the provisions of support of services to the user, along with the service desk functions that draw on all of the other processes.

The service delivery volume’s main objective of Service Management is to guarantee that the Information Technology Services are aligned to the organization’s needs. It is important that the Information Technology Services underpin the Business Processes, but it is also important that Information Technology should act as an agent for change to facilitate Business Transformation.

It is important to understand that most organizations that use information technology will depend on if. If the IT processes are not implemented, managed, and supported correctly the organization will risk suffering unacceptable degradation in terms of loss of productive hours, increased costs, loss of revenue and even organizational failure, this all depends on the vitality of the IT service to the organization.

The provision of IT service, in all organizations, must be aligned with current and quickly changing organizational demands. The objective is the constantly improve the quality of service, matched to the other requirements, cost-efficiently. In order to satisfy this objective the following three areas need to be considered:

• People with the correct skills, adequate training, and the applicable service culture
• Efficient and effective service management processes
• A good IT infrastructure in terms of technology and tools.

Next we will take some time to look into other aspects that are not listed in the diagram above.

Next Page: ITIL Implementation Justification