What is ITIL^®?

The IT Infrastructure Library came into being in the early 1990s as the result of an effort by the UK government to document the best IT practices within its own agencies. Consultants were hired, processes evaluated, and the result was the creation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL^®), which was later made available to the public. Since its inception, it has become a world-wide de facto standard for best practices in IT service management.

The ITIL Foundation processes are broken down into two major groupings. The IT Service Support group provides for the direct support of IT services and consists of the Service Desk function and the Incident, Problem, Configuration, Change and Release Management.processes. The IT Service Delivery group supports the planning and delivery of IT services and consists of Service Level, Availability, Capacity, IT Service Continuity and Financial Management processes.

What is ITSM?

IT Service Management is fundamentally a simple concept. It is about delivering information technology as a set of services to the business customer. It represents a structured approach to how an IT organization goes about planning for, developing, delivering and supporting IT services.

It is characterized by three things. First, is customer focus, or fusion of business and IT goals. Second, is a process orientation that enables repeatable process outcomes, and attainment of operational excellence. And third, is optimizing the cost/performance of IT services, thus ensuring IT dollars are spent on business needs.

IT Service Management provides a framework to manage IT processes in an efficient and effective manner and to deliver quality IT Services by deploying the right IT infrastructure, using the right technology, supported by the right tools.