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What is ITIL?

ITIL is a set of guidelines that explain in detail how organizations can make better use of their IT resources to meet business needs. Applying the ITIL principles allows you to offer consistent and fully integrated IT Service Management operations to your internal and external customers. ITIL has long been accepted as a de-facto standard in the UK, and is now establishing itself as the definitive set of guidelines for ITSM globally.

Axios Systems was the first IT Service Management software vendor to adopt the ITIL philosophy and pioneered assyst as the original ITIL software solution.

View the Axios ITIL Training and Consulting Offerings.

History

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) emerged from an area within the UK Government, the Central Computer and Telecoms Agency (CCTA) with the main objectives being to reduce costs and increase the quality of IT services and supporting resources in the public sector.

ITIL V1 came under the guise of Government Infrastructure Management Method (GITMM) in 1988 with the initial focus on Service Level Management. The focus was expanded to other ITSM areas in the following 4 years. The uptake of these Best Practice guidelines took root in non-government organizations and hence the ‘Government’ label was dropped and the whole set of 45+ books was renamed ‘ITIL’.

With the widespread adoption in the 1990s of these guidelines, they were re-worked and modernized in 2000 into 11 books for Version 2 (V2). The two main books, Service Support and Service Delivery, covered:

Service Support:	Service Delivery:
Service Desk (Function)	Service Level Management
Incident Management	Availability Management
Problem Management	Capacity Management
Change Management	IT Service Continuity Management
Release Management	Financial Management for IT Services
Configuration Management

Although there were an additional 9 books within the library, people tend to equate V2 with these two core books, mainly because the V2 Foundation course only covers these two areas.

In 2004, the ITIL V3 Refresh Program was conceived taking into consideration both ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000, and a new lifecycle approach was created. Three years of work concluded in May 2007 with the launch of V3. V2 detailed the delivery of the process elements around the support and delivery aspects but lacked guidance in strategy, design and quality of service.

The basic processes from V2 have been carried through to V3:

New areas have been introduced in V3 to help support a service from inception to retirement:

ITIL FAQs

Organizations have varying degrees of requirements from their IT department and are at various levels of ITIL adoption. Axios Systems has compiled a list of FAQs on ITIL.

Benefits

ITIL provides the foundation for quality IT Service Management. IT actively supports corporate aims by offering services which are based on efficient principles and adequately fulfil business requirements. It can become a profit generator instead of being seen as an inevitable cost burden. Some of the key benefits are:

• Improved Service Quality - the introduction of a consistent set of processes will highlight potential weaknesses in the previous operations and encourages pro-active improvements. Shortened resolution times, better management control including SLA performance, more reliable IT services and the implementation of permanent solutions to formally acknowledged problems. In addition, customer care will be enhanced, customer satisfaction raised and the loss and inconsistent records of information, incidents and customer enquiries eradicated.
• Cost Reduction - a lower Total Cost of IT Ownership (TCO) including service cost will be achieved through increased efficiency and productivity, lower incident volumes, faster incident resolution and less business disruption because of service failures.
• Pro-active IT Management - today's IT managers are expected to support the success of the entire business by planning ahead and pro-actively shaping the business IT environment, rather than simply maintaining the IT infrastructure by adjusting and upgrading it. ITIL provides best-of-breed procedures to achieve an optimized IT infrastructure to provide for existing and anticipated business requirements. This results in improved team work and communication and better identification of areas for improvement.
• Process Definition - Axios Systems has supported the ITIL philosophy from the outset by designing the assyst ITSM suite along ITIL principles, thus offering unrivalled functionality for all ITIL disciplines and is an ideal companion for organizations wanting to adopt ITIL and/or achieve ISO/IEC 20000 accreditation.

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