What is ITIL?

Developed in the late 1980’s by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the IT Infrastructure Library has become the worldwide de facto standard in IT Service Management.  ITIL is a framework containing a comprehensive set of best practices and processes designed for the planning, provision and support of IT services.  The OGC initially collated information on how various organisations addressed their issues within Service Management, analysed the information and filtered those issues that would prove useful to the OGC and to its customers in the UK central government.  Soon other organisations found that the guidance was generally applicable to them and markets outside of the UKgovernment were created by the service industry. 

Being a framework, ITIL describes the contours of organising Service Management.  It shows goals, activities, and inputs and outputs of the various processes, which can be incorporated within any IT organisation.  ITIL is not prescriptive and does not cast in stone every action which should be taken on a day to day basis, because this differs from organisation to organisation.  Instead, it focuses on best practices which can be utilised in different ways according to the specific needs of the business.  ITIL is also very scalable, and is applicable to both small and large organisations.  These codes of practice are intended to assist organisations to provide quality IT service in the face of challenges such as budgetary constraints, skill shortages, system complexity, rapid change, current and future User requirements and increased User expectations. 

The goal of ITIL is to provide a proven method for planning common processes, roles and activities with appropriate references to each other, and how communication lines should flow between them.  By the mid-1990’s, ITIL was recognised as the world de-facto standard for IT Service Management.  The major advantage of a widely recognised method is the common language used, where a large number of terms, when used correctly, enable people to understand each other within IT organisations.

Many organisations are internally focused, and concentrate mainly on technical issues.  However, businesses now have high expectations towards the quality of services they are receiving, and these expectations change over time.  For IT organisations to meet these expectations, they need to concentrate on service quality, and a more customer-orientated approach.  ITIL focuses on providing high quality services with a specific focus on customer relationships, and this means that IT organisations should provide whatever is agreed with their customers.  This agreement then implies a strong relationship between the IT organisation and their customers and partners.