More Specific Information on ITIL

The actual library is constantly evolving, the third version known as ITILv3 is the most up-to-date release.

This is a compilation of five unique volumes,

1. ITIL Strategy
2. ITIL Service Design
3. ITIL Service Transition
4. ITIL Service Operation
5. ITIL Continual Service Improvement.

All of these volumes can be obtained from TSO books, or the publishers. Contained by these sets are the particular descriptions and definitions of the numerous ITIL practices and disciplines.

ITIL Framework

ITIL is basically a structure of interlinking processes which bind together the tasks of shaping how IT can better provide for the needs of organizations, preparation, creating, and delivering changes to IT services and processes, recording and managing the resources and communications, and ensuring the information of the organization remain easy to get to as well as protected.

The Disciplines of ITIL

ITIL recognizes that progress needs to be made on several fronts for the changes to be both positive and lasting. Here are those fronts:

Culture and People – If the idea for IT does not change in the eyes of the people who use it on a daily basis, the behavior will revert to older patterns as soon as such attention moves on.

Processes – The majority of services entail that the alliance of a number of separate organizational units do distribute. If these processes are not well-organized and well aligned the service is not to be expected to meet customer anticipation. Note that there are certain fundamentals of the conventional best practice for many IT services which can be easily applied to various scenarios.

Technology and Tools – A good process relies heavily on the continued support of underpinning systems and frameworks. IT service support tools require a rational method of planning and integrated execution.

ITIL Processes

ITIL is designed to recognize many key disciplines in IT Service Management. Some of these disciplines include the following:

• The IT operation must understand the business perspective so it can align the appropriate services with corresponding business needs.
• The services can then be constructed with an operational management component; this usually has very little direct contact with the clients and serves as a support function.
• The IT applications are created or implements and maintained.
• All of the processes run on the Infrastructure.
• The management of IT Security as well as the provision of appropriate systems access overlaps most of the other disciplines.

Furthermore each discipline relies on a set of interlinking processes to provide them support.

ITIL Common terminology

Here a list of common terms used within the ITIL area. It is important that you familiarize yourself with these terms and examine their meanings in full detail as they are used often with ITIL.

We will be using many of these terms through out our exploration of ITIL, knowing what they pertain to will help readers to understand the full functionality of ITIL as well as simplify what is being expressed in the articles following this short introduction. A useful exercise for beginners would be to research the meaning of each of them:

• Application Sizing
• Asset Management
• Availability Management
• IT Budgeting
• Business Process
• Capacity Database  (CDB)
• Capacity Management
• Capacity Planning
• CAB
• Change Advisory Board
• Change Management
• Chargeable Unit
• CI Level
• CMDB
• Asset Classification
• Configuration Baseline
• Configuration Item (CI)
• Configuration Management
• Configuration Management Database
• Customer Liaison
• Definitive Hardware Store (DHS)
• Definitive Software Library (DSL)
• Demand Management
• Elapsed Time
• Emergency Release
• Error Control
• Escalation Management
• IT Financial Management
• First Line Support
• Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC)
• Full Release
• Functional Escalation
• Help Desk
• Hierarchical Escalation
• Incident Life Cycle
• Incident Management
• IT Infrastructure
• IT Service Continuity Management
• IT Service Management (ITSM)
• Known Error
• Maintainability
• Mean Time between Failures (MTBF)
• Mean Time to Repair
• Proactive Problem Management
• Problem Control
• Problem Management
• Process Management
• Quality Assurance
• Quality Control
• Recoverability
• Release Management
• Release Policy
• Release Unit
• Request For Change (RFC)
• Resilience
• Resource Management
• Restoration of Service
• Rollout
• Second Line Support
• Security Level
• Security Management
• Service Catalogue
• Service Desk
• Service Improvement Program
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Service Level Management (SLM)
• Service Level Requirements (SLR)
• Service Request
• Service Window
• Software Release
• Underpinning Contract
• Work-around

First Page: ITIL Introduction