ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and consists of a series of documents and set of practices for aiding the administration of Information Technology, its services and operations. It gives descriptions and content writings of a number of critical IT practices, procedures and methods that an organization can adapt to its requirements. It is published in a series of books and the terms ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library have been registered as trademark items of OGC (Office of Government Commerce, United Kingdom).

The ITIL originated as a collection of books. The preliminary publication was in 1989. In 2006, the ITIL v2 glossary was made available. In May during the year 2007, the version 3 of ITIL known as ITIL Refresh Project was launched. The eight ITIL version 2 books constitute the IT Service Management sets, Operational Guidance sets and the guide for Implementation of ITIL Practices.

 

The Service Management sets consist of Service Support and Delivery. The Service Support ITIL discipline, targets on the user of services of IT and in making sure that they have access to the suitable services to provide adequate business support.

 

The Service Delivery discipline focuses on the pro active services that must be initiated to ensure satisfaction from business users. The services are initiated in the processes such as Service Level Management, IT Service Continuity Management, Capacity Management, Availability Management and Financial Management.

 

The operational guidance sets provides information on the disciplines ICT Infrastructure Management, Security Management, The Business Perspective, Application Management and Software Asset Management. The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Infrastructure Management processes proposes best practices in processes related to requirement analysis, planning, design, deployment , technical support etc.

 

The Security Management focuses on a practice code for managing information security and which is currently known as ISO/IEC 27002. Information security consists of protection of assets containing information, against risks and also to guarantee confidentiality, reliability, availability and integrity in the information maintained in the organization.

 

ITIL gives the term ‘The Business Perspective’ to the compilation of best practices that is recommended to address issues such as Business Continuity Management, Surviving Change, Partnership and outsourcing etc. In a similar manner ITIL Application Management covers a set of best practices aimed to improve the on the whole quality of IT software development by concentrating more on requirements analysis. Software Asset Management focuses on the practice of tracking and evaluating software licenses and use of assets with a goal of reducing overhead and expenditures.

 

The Guide for implementation of ITIL practices focuses mostly on Service management and is titled Planning to Implement Service management and Service Support and Service Delivery. This has been further supplemented by ITIL Small-Scale Implementation with guidelines on roles and responsibilities for small IT units and which is exclusive of the original eight publications.

 

ITIL v3 released in May 2007 has five volumes comprising of ITIL Service Strategy, ITIL Service Design, ITIL Service Operation, ITIL Service Transition and ITIL Continual Service Improvement.

 

Thus ITIL framework can be used to organize an efficient framework and implement a set of management procedures within which IT operations can be managed effectively. It provides comprehensive documented best practices and systematic and professional processes that add a huge range of benefits to service delivery.

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