The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is a set of good practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. In its current form (known as ITILv3 and ITIL 2011 edition), ITIL is published in a series of five core publications, each of which covers an ITSM lifecycle stage. ITILv3 underpins ISO/IEC 20000 (previously BS15000), the International Service Management Standard for IT service management, although differences between the two frameworks do exist.
ITIL describes procedures, tasks and checklists that are not organization-specific, used by an organization for establishing a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.
The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC) – now part of the Cabinet Office. Following this move, the ownership is now listed as being with HM Government rather than OGC.
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Responding to growing dependence on IT, the UK Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations. It recognised that without standard practices, government agencies and private sector contracts had started 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.[1]
After the initial publication in 1989–96, the number of books quickly grew within ITIL v1 to more than 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. The Service Management sets (Service Support and Service Delivery) were by far the most widely used, circulated, and understood of ITIL v2 publications.
ITIL v3 is an extension of ITIL v2 and did fully replace it following the completion of the withdrawal period on 30 June 2011 [2]. ITIL v3 provides a more holistic perspective on the full life cycle of services, covering the entire IT organisation and all supporting components needed to deliver services to the customer, whereas v2 focused on specific activities directly related to service delivery and support. Most of the v2 activities remained untouched in v3, but some significant changes in terminology were introduced in order to facilitate the expansion.
A summary of changes has been published by HM Government [3]. In line with the 2007 edition, the 2011 edition consists of 5 core publications – Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement.
There are 26 processes listed in ITIL 2011 edition and described below that shows which core publication provides the main content for each process.
Five volumes comprise the ITIL v3, published in May 2007 (2007 edition) and updated in July 2011 (2011 edition) for consistency:
As the center and origin point of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, the ITIL Service Strategy (SS) volume[4] provides guidance on clarification and prioritisation of service-provider investments in services. More generally, Service Strategy focuses on helping IT organisations improve and develop over the long term. In both cases, Service Strategy relies largely upon a market-driven approach. Key topics covered include service value definition, business-case development, service assets, market analysis, and service provider types. List of covered processes:
For candidates in the ITIL Intermediate Capability stream, the Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA) Qualification course and exam are most closely aligned to the Service Strategy (SS) Qualification course and exam in the Lifecycle stream.
IT Financial Management comprises the discipline of ensuring that the IT infrastructure is obtained at the most effective price (which does not necessarily mean cheapest) and calculating the cost of providing IT services so that an organisation can understand the costs of its IT services. These costs may then be recovered from the customer of the service. This is the 2nd component of service delivery process.
The ITIL Service Design (SD) volume[5] provides good-practice guidance on the design of IT services, processes, and other aspects of the service management effort. Significantly, design within ITIL is understood to encompass all elements relevant to technology service delivery, rather than focusing solely on design of the technology itself. As such, service design addresses how a planned service solution interacts with the larger business and technical environments, service management systems required to support the service, processes which interact with the service, technology, and architecture required to support the service, and the supply chain required to support the planned service. Within ITIL, design work for an IT service is aggregated into a single service design package (SDP). Service design packages, along with other information about services, are managed within the service catalogues. List of covered processes:
Service-level management provides for continual identification, monitoring and review of the levels of IT services specified in the Service-level agreements (SLAs). Service-level management ensures that arrangements are in place with internal IT support-providers and external suppliers in the form of operational-contracts (UCs), respectively. The process involves assessing the impact of change upon service quality and SLAs. The service level management process is in close relation with the operational processes to control their activities. The central role of Service-level management makes it the natural place for metrics to be established and monitored against a benchmark.
Service level management is the primary interface with the customer (as opposed to the user serviced by the service desk). Service-level management is responsible for:
The service-level manager relies on the other areas of the service delivery process to provide the necessary support which ensures the agreed services are provided in a cost-effective, secure and efficient manner.
Availability management targets allowing organisations to sustain the IT service-availability to support the business at a justifiable cost. The high-level activities realise availability requirements, compile availability plan, monitor availability, and monitor maintenance obligations.
Availability management addresses the ability of an IT component to perform at an agreed level over a period of time.
Capacity management supports the optimum and cost-effective provision of IT services by helping organisations match their IT resources to business demands. The high-level activities include:
Capacity management is focused on strategic capacity, including capacity of personnel (e.g., human resources, staffing and training), system capacity, and component (or tactical) capacity.
IT service continuity management (ITSCM) covers the processes by which plans are put in place and managed to ensure that IT Services can recover and continue even after a serious incident occurs. It is not just about reactive measures, but also about proactive measures – reducing the risk of a disaster in the first instance.
ITSCM is regarded by the application owners as the recovery of the IT infrastructure used to deliver IT Services, but as of 2009[update] many businesses practice the much further-reaching process of business continuity planning (BCP), to ensure that the whole end-to-end business process can continue should a serious incident occur (at primary support level).
ITSCM involves the following basic steps:
The ITIL-process Security Management[9] describes the structured fitting of information security in the management organisation. ITIL security management is based on the code of practice for information security management system (ISMS) now known as ISO/IEC 27002.
A basic goal of security management is to ensure adequate information security. The primary goal of information security, in turn, is to protect information assets against risks, and thus to maintain their value to the organization. This is commonly expressed in terms of ensuring their confidentiality, integrity and availability, along with related properties or goals such as authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation and reliability.
Mounting pressure for many organisations to structure their information security management systems in accordance with ISO/IEC 27001 requires revision of the ITIL v2 security management volume, and indeed a v3 release is in the works.
Service transition, as described by the ITIL service transition volume,[6] relates to the delivery of services required by a business into live/operational use, and often encompasses the "project" side of IT rather than "BAU" (Business as usual). This area also covers topics such as managing changes to the "BAU" environment.
List of ITIL processes in Service Transition (ST):
Change Management aims to ensure that standardised methods and procedures are used for efficient handling of all changes. A change is an event that results in a new status of one or more Configuration items (CIs), and which is approved by management, cost-effective, enhances business process changes (fixes) – all with a minimum risk to IT infrastructure.
The main aims of change management include:
Common change management terminology includes:
Service asset and configuration management is primarily focused on maintaining information (i.e., configurations) about Configuration Items (i.e., assets) required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships. Configuration management is the management and traceability of every aspect of a configuration from beginning to end and it includes the following key process areas under its umbrella:
Release and deployment management is used by the software migration team for platform-independent and automated distribution of software and hardware, including license controls across the entire IT infrastructure. Proper software and hardware control ensures the availability of licensed, tested, and version-certified software and hardware, which functions as intended when introduced into existing infrastructure. Quality control during the development and implementation of new hardware and software is also the responsibility of Release Management. This guarantees that all software meets the demands of the business processes.
The goals of release management include:
Release management focuses on the protection of the live environment and its services through the use of formal procedures and checks.
A Release consists of the new or changed software and/or hardware required to implement approved changes. Release categories include:
Releases can be divided based on the release unit into:
Service Operation (SO) aims to provide best practice for achieving the delivery of agreed levels of services both to end-users and the customers (where "customers" refer to those individuals who pay for the service and negotiate the SLAs). Service operation, as described in the ITIL Service Operation volume,[7] is the part of the lifecycle where the services and value is actually directly delivered. Also the monitoring of problems and balance between service reliability and cost etc. are considered. The functions include technical management, application management, operations management and service desk as well as, responsibilities for staff engaging in Service Operation.
List of processes:
The service desk is one of four ITIL functions and is primarily associated with the Service Operation lifecycle stage. Tasks include handling incidents and requests, and providing an interface for other ITSM processes. Features include:
Primary purposes of a service desk include:
The service desk function can have various names, such as:
The three types of structure for consideration:
ITIL application management[10] encompasses a set of best practices proposed to improve the overall quality of IT software development and support through the life-cycle of software development projects, with particular attention to gathering and defining requirements that meet business objectives.
Software asset management (SAM) is a primary topic of ITILv2 and is closely associated with the ITILv3 Application Management function. SAM is the practice of integrating people, processes, and technology to allow software licenses and usage to be systematically tracked, evaluated, and managed. The goal of SAM is to reduce IT expenditures, human resource overhead and risks inherent in owning and managing software assets.
SAM practices include:
SAM represents the software component of IT asset management. This includes hardware asset management because effective hardware inventory controls are critical to efforts to control software. This means overseeing software and hardware that comprise an organization's computers and network.
Refer to #ICT infrastructure management for more details.
Refer to #ICT infrastructure management for more details.
Incident management aims to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimise the adverse effect on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. 'Normal service operation' is defined here as service operation within service-level agreement (SLA) limits.
Incident management can be defined as : An “Incident Definition as per V3” An unplanned interruption to an IT Service or a reduction in the Quality of an IT Service. Failure of a Configuration Item that has not yet impacted Service is also an Incident. For example, Failure of one disk from a mirror set.
An “Incident Definition as per V2” An event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes or may cause disruption to or a reduction in the quality of services and Customer productivity.
The objective of incident management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price.
Request fulfillment (or request management) focuses on fulfilling Service Requests, which are often minor (standard) changes (e.g., requests to change a password) or requests for information.
Problem management aims to resolve the root causes of incidents and thus to minimise the adverse impact of incidents and problems on business that are caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors. A 'problem' is an unknown underlying cause of one or more incidents, and a 'known error' is a problem that is successfully diagnosed and for which either a work-around or a permanent resolution has been identified. The CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency) defines problems and known errors as follows
Problem management differs from incident management. The principal purpose of problem management is to find and resolve the root cause of a problem and thus prevent further incidents; the purpose of incident management is to return the service to normal level as soon as possible, with smallest possible business impact.
The problem-management process is intended to reduce the number and severity of incidents and problems on the business, and report it in documentation to be available for the first-line and second line of the help desk. The proactive process identifies and resolves problems before incidents occur. Such processes include:
The error control process iteratively diagnoses known errors until they are eliminated by the successful implementation of a change under the control of the Change Management process.
The problem control process aims to handle problems in an efficient way. Problem control identifies the root cause of incidents and reports it to the service desk. Other activities are:
A technique for identifying the root cause of a problem is to use an Ishikawa diagram, also referred to as a cause-and-effect diagram, tree diagram, or fishbone diagram. Alternatively, a formal Root Cause Analysis method such as Apollo Root Cause Analysis can be implemented and used to identify causes and solutions. An effective root cause analysis method and/or tool will provide the most effective/efficient solutions to address problems in the Problem Management process.
Access management (also known as rights management or identity management) as a process focuses on granting authorized users the right to use a service, while preventing access to non-authorized users. The access management processes executes policies defined in Information Security Management System.
Continual service improvement, defined in the ITIL continual service improvement volume,[8] aims to align and realign IT services to changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to the IT services that support the business processes. It incorporates many of the same concepts articulated in the Deming Cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act. The perspective of CSI on improvement is the business perspective of service quality, even though CSI aims to improve process effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT processes through the whole lifecycle. To manage improvement, CSI should clearly define what should be controlled and measured.
CSI needs to be treated just like any other service practice. There needs to be upfront planning, training and awareness, ongoing scheduling, roles created, ownership assigned,and activities identified to be successful. CSI must be planned and scheduled as process with defined activities, inputs, outputs, roles and reporting.
Improvement initiatives typically follow a seven-step process:
The eight ITIL version 2 books and their disciplines are:
The IT service management sets
Other operational guidance
To assist with the implementation of ITIL practices a further book was published (Apr 9, 2002) providing guidance on implementation (mainly of Service Management):
And this has more recently (Jan 26, 2006) been supplemented with guidelines for smaller IT units, not included in the original eight publications:
The Service Support[11] ITIL discipline focuses on the User of the IT services and is primarily concerned with ensuring that they have access to the appropriate services to support the business functions.
To a business, customers and users are the entry point to the process model. They get involved in service support by:
The service desk functions as the single contact-point for end-users' incidents. Its first function is always to "create" an incident. If there is a direct solution, it attempts to resolve the incident at the first level. If the service desk cannot solve the incident then it is passed to a 2nd/3rd level group within the incident management system. Incidents can initiate a chain of processes: incident management, problem management, change management, release management and configuration management. This chain of processes is tracked using the configuration management database (CMDB), which records each process, and creates output documents for traceability (quality management).
The Service Delivery[12] discipline concentrates on the proactive services the ICT must deliver to provide adequate support to business users. It focuses on the business as the customer of the ICT services (compare with: Service Support). The discipline consisted of the following processes:
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) management[13] processes recommend best practice for requirements analysis, planning, design, deployment and ongoing operations management and technical support of an ICT infrastructure.
The infrastructure management processes describe those processes within ITIL that directly relate to the ICT equipment and software that is involved in providing ICT services to customers.
These disciplines are less well understood than those of service management and therefore often some of their content is believed to be covered 'by implication' in service management disciplines.
ICT design and planning provides a framework and approach for the strategic and technical design and planning of ICT infrastructures. It includes the necessary combination of business (and overall IS) strategy, with technical design and architecture. ICT design and planning drives both the procurement of new ICT solutions through the production of statements of requirement ("SOR") and invitations to tender ("ITT") and is responsible for the initiation and management of ICT Programmes for strategic business change. Key outputs from design and planning are:
ICT deployment provides a framework for the successful management of design, build, test and roll-out (deploy) projects within an overall ICT programme. It includes many project management disciplines in common with PRINCE2, but has a broader focus to include the necessary integration of release management and both functional and non functional testing.
ICT operations management provides the day-to-day technical supervision of the ICT infrastructure. Often confused with the role of incident management from service support, operations has a more technical bias and is concerned not solely with incidents reported by users, but with events generated by or recorded by the infrastructure. ICT operations may often work closely alongside incident management and the service desk, which are not-necessarily technical, to provide an 'operations bridge'. Operations, however should primarily work from documented processes and procedures and should be concerned with a number of specific sub-processes, such as: output management, job scheduling, backup and restore, network monitoring/management, system monitoring/management, database monitoring/management storage monitoring/management. Operations are responsible for the following:
ICT technical support is the specialist technical function for infrastructure within ICT. Primarily as a support to other processes, both in infrastructure management and service management, technical support provides a number of specialist functions: research and evaluation, market intelligence (particularly for design and planning and capacity management), proof of concept and pilot engineering, specialist technical expertise (particularly to operations and problem management), creation of documentation (perhaps for the operational documentation library or known error database). There are different levels of support under the ITIL structure, these being primary support level, secondary support level and tertiary support level, higher-level administrators being responsible for support at primary level.
The ITIL discipline – planning to implement service management[14] attempts to provide practitioners with a framework for the alignment of business needs and IT provision requirements. The processes and approaches incorporated within the guidelines suggest the development of a continuous service improvement program (CSIP) as the basis for implementing other ITIL disciplines as projects within a controlled program of work. Planning to implement service management focuses mainly on the service management processes, but also applies generically to other ITIL disciplines. Components include:
ITIL Small-scale implementation[15] provides an approach to ITIL framework implementation for smaller IT units or departments. It is primarily an auxiliary work that covers many of the same best practice guidelines as planning to implement service management, service support, and service delivery but provides additional guidance on the combination of roles and responsibilities, and avoiding conflict between ITIL priorities.
ITIL has been criticised on several fronts, including:
Rob England (also known as "IT Skeptic") has criticised the protected and proprietary nature of ITIL [16]. He urges the publisher, OGC, to release ITIL under the Open Government Licence (OGL).[17]
CIO Magazine columnist Dean Meyer has also presented some cautionary views of ITIL,[18] including five pitfalls such as "becoming a slave to outdated definitions" and "Letting ITIL become religion." As he notes, "...it doesn't describe the complete range of processes needed to be world class. It's focused on ... managing ongoing services."
In a 2004 survey designed by Noel Bruton (author of "How to Manage the IT Helpdesk" and "Managing the IT Services Process"), organisations adopting ITIL were asked to relate their actual experiences in having implemented ITIL. Seventy-seven percent of survey respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that "ITIL does not have all the answers". ITIL exponents accept this, citing ITIL's stated intention to be non-prescriptive, expecting organisations to engage ITIL processes with existing process models. Bruton notes that the claim to non-prescriptiveness must be, at best, one of scale rather than absolute intention, for the very description of a certain set of processes is in itself a form of prescription.[19]
While ITIL addresses in depth the various aspects of service management, it does not address enterprise architecture in such depth. Many of the shortcomings in the implementation of ITIL do not necessarily come about because of flaws in the design or implementation of the service management aspects of the business, but rather the wider architectural framework in which the business is situated. Because of its primary focus on service management, ITIL has limited utility in managing poorly designed enterprise architectures, or how to feed back into the design of the enterprise architecture.
Closely related to the architectural criticism, ITIL does not directly address the business applications which run on the IT infrastructure; nor does it facilitate a more collaborative working relationship between development and operations teams. The trend toward a closer working relationship between development and operations is termed: DevOps. This trend is related to increased application release rates and the adoption of agile software development methodologies. Traditional service management processes have struggled to support increased application release rates – due to lack of automation – and/or highly complex enterprise architecture.
Some researchers group ITIL with lean, Six Sigma and Agile software development operations management. Applying Six Sigma techniques to ITIL brings the engineering approach to ITIL's framework. Applying Lean techniques promotes continuous improvement of the ITIL's best practices. However, ITIL itself is not a transformation method, nor does it offer one. Readers are required to find and associate such a method. Some vendors have also included the term Lean when discussing ITIL implementations, for example "Lean-ITIL". The initial consequences of an ITIL initiative tend to add cost with benefits promised as a future deliverable. ITIL does not provide usable methods "out of the box" to identify and target waste, or document the customer value stream as required by Lean, and measure customer satisfaction.
A number of frameworks exist in the field of IT Service Management alongside ITIL.
The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is based on ITIL v2. While ITIL deliberately aims to be platform-agnostic, MOF is designed by Microsoft to provide a common management framework for its products. Microsoft has mapped MOF to ITIL as part of their documentation of the framework.[20]
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) used ITIL as the basis for their development of Framework for ICT Technical Support (FITS). Their aim was to develop a framework appropriate for British schools, which often have very small IT departments. FITS became independent from BECTA in 2009.
ITIL is generally equivalent to the scope of the ISO/IEC 20000 standard (previously BS 15000).[21] While it is not possible for an organization to be certified as being ITIL compliant, certification of an organisation is available for ISO20000 [4].
COBIT is an IT governance framework and supporting toolset developed by ISACA. ISACA view ITIL as being complementary to COBIT. They see COBIT as providing a governance and assurance role while ITIL providing guidance for service management.[22]
The enhanced Telecom Operations Map eTOM published by the TeleManagement Forum offers a framework aimed at telecommunications service providers. In a joined effort, TM Forum and itSMF developed an Application Note to eTOM (GB921) that shows how the two frameworks can be mapped to each other. It addresses how eTom process elements and flows can be used to support the processes identified in ITIL.[23][24]
IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) is aligned with ITIL, but is presented as a complete, integrated process model compatible with IBM's products.
The certification scheme differs between ITIL v2 and ITIL v3 and bridge examinations let v2 certification owners transfer to the new program. ITIL v2 offers 3 certification levels: Foundation, Practitioner and Manager. These have been progressively discontinued in favor of the new ITIL v3 scheme. ITIL v3 certification levels are: Foundation, Intermediate, Expert and Master.
The ITIL v3 certification scheme offers a modular approach. Each qualification is assigned a credit value; so that upon successful completion of the module, the candidate is rewarded with both a certification and a number of credits. At the lowest level – Foundation – candidates are awarded a certification and 2 credits. At the Intermediate level, a total of 15 credits must be earned. These credits may be accumulated in either a "Lifecycle" stream or a "Capability" stream; or combination thereof. Each Lifecycle module and exam is 3 credits. Each Capability module and corresponding exam is 4 credits. A candidate wanting to achieve the Expert level will have, among other requirements, to gain the required number of credits (22). That is accomplished with two from Foundations, then 15 from Intermediate, and finally 5 credits from the "Managing Across the Lifecycle" exam. Together, the total of 22 earned credits designates one as ITIL v3 Expert.[25]
The ITIL Certification Management Board (ICMB) manages ITIL certification. The Board includes representatives from interested parties within the community around the world. Members of the Board include (though are not limited to) representatives from the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC), APM Group (APMG), The Stationery Office (TSO), V3 Examination Panel, Examination Institutes (EIs) and the IT Service Management Forum International (itSMF) as the recognised user group.[26]
Since the early 1990s, EXIN and ISEB have been setting up the ITIL based certification program, developing and providing ITIL exams at three different levels: Foundation, Practitioner and Manager. EXIN[27] and BCS/ISEB[28] (the British Computer Society) have from that time onwards been the only two examination providers in the world to develop formally acknowledged ITIL certifications, provide ITIL exams and accredit ITIL training providers worldwide. These rights were obtained from OGC, the British government institution and owner of the ITIL trademark. OGC signed over the management of the ITIL trademark and the accreditation of examination providers to APMG in 2006. Now, after signing a contract with EXIN,[27] BCS/ISEB, LOYALIST CERTIFICATION SERVICES [5],PEOPLECERT Group and other certification bodies, APMG is accrediting them as official examination bodies, to offer ITIL exams and accredit ITIL training providers.
On July 20, 2006, the OGC signed a contract with the APM Group to become its commercial partner for ITIL accreditation from January 1, 2007.[29] APMG manage the ITIL Version 3 exams.
APMG maintains a voluntary register of ITIL v2 and v3 certified practitioners at their Successful Candidate Register.[30]
Following the passing an APMG/EXIN exam in IT service management (based on ITIL), some people will wear a metal pin on their shirt or jacket. This badge with basic gold color is set in the form of the ITIL-logo. The ITIL pins consist of a small, diamond-like structure. The meaning and the shape of the diamond is meant to depict coherence in the IT industry (infrastructure as well). The four corners of the pin symbolise service support, service delivery, infrastructure management and IT management.
There are five colors of ITIL V3 pins - each corresponds to the color of the associated core publication:
There are three colors of ITIL V2 pins:
Exam candidates who have successfully passed the examinations for ITIL will receive their appropriate pin from APMG, EXIN or their certification provider regional office or agent.
Organisations and management systems cannot claim certification as "ITIL-compliant". An organisation that has implemented ITIL guidance in IT Service Management (ITSM), may however, be able to achieve compliance with and seek certification under ISO/IEC 20000. Note that there are some significant differences between ISO/IEC20000 and ITIL Version 3[31]