What is ITIL?

ITIL stands for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library

[ITIL stands for the Information Technology Infrastructure Library]

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations.

ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom‘s Office of Government Commerce (OGC). –Wikipedia

What does ITIL do?

[ITIL is a set of best practice areas for managing I.T. as a service. These best practice areas follow the lifecycle of a service. These practice areas are: Service Strategy, Service Design Service, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continuous Improvement]

Model of how service is performed (definition of components for service creation through delivery)
Model of the processes needed to service realization
Model of how service is measured and managed

Why should I care about ITIL?

[CxOs especially CIOs should care in the wake of rising I.T. costs, the strategic importance of I.T. as an enabler, and the growing chasm between business needs and I.T. provided capabilities]

Business Environment

I.T. has evolved from financial automation to strategic component
- Information Technology has moved from financial automation (DP) to management information (MIS) to productivity enablers
  (Desktop and Network) to Strategic infrastructure and embedded products during the past thirty years
- Production, Operation and Support productivity for I.T. has not kept in sync. While product creation has improved with various techniques, the legacy wake of support and operation continues to grow.
- End users en-mass are now experiencing brownouts and blackouts, more so as technology becomes more interconnected, and are questioning I.T. Management and I.T.s ability to manage the technology. –
  Business Skills are becoming critical to I.T. staff
- As technology becomes easier to use on the surface, end-users and executive management see less value and more impediment from I.T. organizations. (i.e., I.T. is just magic that anyone can do).
The delivery of I.T. has evolved from a product to a service orientation
- While I.T. always had a services component (operations and support) it was considered as the last and least important loop in the chain. Still today service portions of most I.T. organizations are thought of as a place for novices, low skilled and performing staff
- Service delivery and management has not kept pace technologically or through process maturity. A Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was only introduced less than a decade ago and its orientation was managing outsourcing rather than the service delivery itself

Consequences

I.T. is being asked to justify ROI on a regular basis.
Service interruptions effect company bottom lines more directly and on a larger scale (it will not be much longer before reason for a company failure is correlated directly to an I.T failure)
- Product/Service liability may materialize shortly after such
  - I.T. Executives could be exposed to financial liabilities for business damages as well as Business Executives
  - This has left I.T. organizations that recognize the need trying to cobble together or build from scratch their own model of a service delivery and management
  - While customers (internal and external) are judging them on their own performance criteria which may or may not match up to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) these organizations have stitched together often on criteria that customers do not see and therefore do not measure against [i.e., network or server availability vs. service availability –what good is either to measure if they are not in sync to allow me to utilize the service e.g., the server was up 20 hours a day and the network was up 21 hours a day, however combined the complete service that required utilization of both was up only 18 hours (only 1 hour of the network outage overlapped the hours of server outage). Server and Network availability where reported a poor 84% and 88% respectively, however the Service Availability the customer experienced was a dismal 75%. That’s a quarter of the time a customer cannot use the service. Think of it as one in four times you go to use your car it wouldn’t work or worse yet, 6 out of every 24 hours a plane flies it just stops –hope you’re not over the Rockies during that window.