What is ITIL?

What is ITIL?

It is hard to believe that the IT Infrastructure Library or ITIL® is 20 years old. On its third version now, ITIL is the most widely adopted framework for IT Service Management in the world. It is a practical, no-nonsense approach to the identification, planning, delivery and support of IT services to the business.

ITIL is typically used in conjunction with one or more other good practices to manage information technology such as:
•COBIT (a framework for IT Governance and Controls)
• Six Sigma ( a quality methodology)
• TOGAF (a framework for IT architecture)
• ISO 27000 (a standard for IT security)


What are the benefits of ITIL?

The main benefits of ITIL include:

Alignment with business needs. ITIL becomes an asset to the business when IT can proactively recommend solutions as a response to one or more business needs. The IT Strategy Group recommended in Service Strategy and the implementation of Service Portfolio Management gives IT the opportunity to understand the business' current and future needs and develop service offerings that can address them.

• Negotiated achievable service levels. Business and IT become true partners when they can agree upon realistic service levels that deliver the necessary value at an acceptable cost.

• Predictable, consistent processes. Customer expectations can be set and are easier to meet with through the use of predictable processes that are consistently used. As well, good practice processes are foundational and can assist in laying the groundwork to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

• Efficiency in service delivery. Well-defined processes with clearly documented accountability for each activity as
recommended through the use of a RACI matrix can significantly increase the efficiency of processes. In conjunction with the evaluation of efficiency metrics that indicate the time required to perform each activity, service delivery tasks can be optimized.

• Measurable, improvable services and processes. The adage that you can't manage what you cannot measure rings true here. Consistent, repeatable processes can be measured and therefore can be better tuned for accurate delivery and overall effectiveness. For example, presume that a critical success factor for incident management is to reduce the time to restore service. When predictable, consistent processes are used key performance indicators such as Mean Time To Restore Service can be captured to determine whether this KPI is trending in a positive or negative direction so that the appropriate adjustments can be made. Additionally, under ITIL guidelines, services are designed to be measurable. With the proper metrics and monitoring in place, IT organizations can monitor SLAs and make improvements as necessary.

• A common language – terms are defined.

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text extracted from www.best-management-practice.com