What Is ITIL?

Answer:
ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library,

and it is a set of concepts and policies for managing Information Technology in an organization. ITIL gives a detailed description of many important IT practices and comprehensive checklists, tasks, and procedures that a company can tailor to their needs. ITIL can be found published in a series of books, each of which covers a different IT management topic.

Currently, this management method is on version three, and the library consists of the following five key volumes: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement.

The Service Strategy is the center and origin point of the ITIL Service Lifecycle. This gives guidance on clarifying and prioritizing the investment in service provider services. This method relies on a market driven approach. The processes that are covered in this section are the following: Service Portfolio Management, Demand Management, and IT Financial Management.

The Service Design volume gives guidance on the design of IT services, processes, and other aspects of the service management effort. Design within ITIL encompasses all elements which are relevant to all aspects of the delivery of the technology, rather than just the design of the technology itself. The processes that are covered under this section include: service level management, availability management, capacity management, IT service continuity management, information security management, supplier management, and service catalog management.

Service transition relates to delivering the services required by the business into operational use, and cover the project side of IT. The processes covered under this section are the following: Service Asset and Configuration Management, Validation and Testing, Release and Deployment Management, Change Management, and Knowledge Management.

Service operations cover achieving the delivery of the agreed levels of service to both end users and customers. This is the part of the lifecycle where the service and value is actually delivered. The processes included in this section are the following: Event Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Request Fulfillment, and Access Management.

The goal of Continual Service Improvement is to ensure that IT stays in steps with changing business needs, as well as implementing improvements to the IT services that support needed business processes. The processes covered under this section include the following: Service Level Management, Service Measurement and Reporting, and Continual Service Improvement.