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Tech Primer
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
 What
is ITIL?
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices
for the IT sector. It is divided into two main areas—service support and
service delivery. This in turn consists of a number of ITIL disciplines. ITIL
provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices for IT service
management, promoting a qualitative approach towards achieving business goals
and efficiency in the use of information systems. ITIL has taken off in India,driven
by offshore outsourcers targeting the infrastructure management business.
Who created it?
ITIL was created by the British government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications
Agency (CCTA). It is now widely used, and supported by a range of materials
and training courses. ITIL is being adopted across the world as the standard
for best practices in IT services.
Why ITIL and not Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is based on a manufacturing model of defects. This doesn’t translate
directly to an IT model. Imagine if you defined service calls as ‘defects’
and tried to drive them down to zero.
What are the key benefits of ITIL?
It gives you the benefit of hindsight over the last 20-plus years of the development
of IT technical support techniques. It contains tried-and-tested procedures,
and provides simplified and ready-to-use processes. It has templates, checklists
and downloads that can be used as they are or can be personalised. It has a
quick-start approach to help you make the best use of the time and resources
available, and see quick results. ITIL separates administrative and technical
tasks to help you assign the most appropriate resources and keep costs to a
minimum. It helps you prevent non-technical staff from having to get too involved
in technical support issues, and measure technical support performance.
What are the ITIL sets?
The ITIL consists of eight sets: service support, service delivery, service
management planning, ICT infrastructure management, applications management,
the business perspective, security management and software asset management.
What is ITIL service support?
Service support is the practice of disciplines that enable IT services to be
provided. Without these disciplines, at worst it would be almost impossible
to provide these IT services; at best they would be rendered in an unmanaged
and haphazard way. The service support disciplines are:
- ITIL configuration management. Configuration
management is the implementation of a database (Configuration Management Database—CMDB)
that contains details of an organisation's elements which are used in the
provisioning and management of IT services.
- Incident and problem management. It is the
resolution and prevention of incidents that affect the normal running of an
organisation's IT services. This includes ensuring that faults are corrected,
prevention of the recurrence of these faults, and the application of preventive
maintenance to reduce the likelihood of these faults occurring in the first
instance.
- ITIL change management. All changes to configuration
items must be carried out in a planned and authorised manner. This includes
ensuring that there is a business reason behind each change, identifying the
specific configuration items and IT services affected by the change, planning
the change, testing the change, and having a back-out plan should the change
result in an unexpected state of the configuration item.
- ITIL service desk. The service/help desk
plays an important part in IT services. It is often the first contact business
users have in their use of IT services when something does not work as expected.
The service desk is a single point of contact for end-users who need help.
Without this, an organisation could certainly face losses due to inefficiencies.
- Release management. The procedures surrounding
how software will be built, released and audited.
Which are the leading solution providers for ITIL best
practices in India?
HP Services, Wipro Global Command Centre, and IBM Global Services are some of
the leading ITIL best practice providers in India.
More information is available on:www.itilcommunity.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2
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