ITIL® V3 Foundation

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ITIL, formerly an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a set of practices for IT Service Management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. In its current form (known as ITIL 2011 edition), ITIL is published as a series of five core volumes, each of which covers a different ITSM lifecycle stage. Although ITIL underpins ISO/IEC 20000 (previously BS15000), the International Service Management Standard for IT service management, there are some differences between the ISO 20000 standard and the ITIL framework.
ITIL describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists which are not organization-specific, but can be applied by an organization for establishing integration with the organization's strategy, delivering value, and maintaining a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.
The IT Infrastructure Library originated as a collection of books, each covering a specific practice within IT service management. ITIL was built around a process model-based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to W. Edwards Deming and his plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle.
Twenty-six processes are listed in ITIL 2011 edition and described below, along with which core publication provides the main content for each process.
ITIL 2007 has five volumes, published in May 2007, and updated in July 2011 as ITIL 2011 for consistency:
  1. ITIL Service Strategy: understands organizational objectives and customer needs.
  2. ITIL Service Design: turns the service strategy into a plan for delivering the business objectives.
  3. ITIL Service Transition: develops and improves capabilities for introducing new services into supported environments.
  4. ITIL Service Operation: manages services in supported environments.
  5. ITIL Continual Service Improvement: achieves services incremental and large-scale improvements.

Service strategy

The center and origin point of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, the ITIL Service Strategy (SS) volume, provides guidance on clarification and prioritization of service-provider investments in services. More generally, Service Strategy focuses on helping IT organizations improve and develop over the long term. In both cases, Service Strategy relies largely upon a market-driven approach. The Service Strategy lifecycle stage is often considered as the core of the service lifecycle. In Service Strategy stage, the strategic approach for the whole lifecycle is identified to provide values to the customers through IT service management. Key topics covered include service value definition, business-case development, service assets, market analysis, and service provider types. List of covered processes:

Service design

The Service Design (SD) volume provides good-practice guidance on the design of IT services, processes, and other aspects of the service management effort. Significantly, design within ITIL is understood to encompass all elements relevant to technology service delivery, rather than focusing solely on design of the technology itself. As such, service design addresses how a planned service solution interacts with the larger business and technical environments, service management systems required to support the service, processes which interact with the service, technology, and architecture required to support the service, and the supply chain required to support the planned service. Within ITIL, design work for an IT service is aggregated into a single Service Design Package (SDP). Service design packages, along with other information about services, are managed within the service catalogues.
List of covered processes:
  1. Design coordination
  2. Service catalogue management
  3. Service-level management
  4. Availability management
  5. Capacity management
  6. IT service continuity management
  7. Security management
  8. Supplier management

Service transition

Service transition (ST), as described by the ITIL service transition volume, relates to the delivery of services required by a business into live/operational use, and often encompasses the "project" side of IT rather than business as usual (BAU). This area also covers topics such as managing changes to the BAU environment.
List of ITIL processes in service transition:
  1. Transition planning and support
  2. Change management
  3. Service asset and configuration management
  4. Release and deployment management
  5. Service validation and testing
  6. Change evaluation
  7. Knowledge management

Service operation

Service Operation (SO) aims to provide best practice for achieving the delivery of agreed levels of services both to end-users and the customers (where "customers" refer to those individuals who pay for the service and negotiate the SLAs). Service operation, as described in the ITIL Service Operation volume, is the part of the lifecycle where the services and value is actually directly delivered. Also the monitoring of problems and balance between service reliability and cost etc. are considered. The functions include technical management, application management, operations management and service desk as well as, responsibilities for staff engaging in Service Operation.
List of processes:
  1. Event management
  2. Incident management
  3. Request fulfillment
  4. Problem management
  5. Identity management

Continual service improvement (CSI)

Continual service improvement, defined in the ITIL continual service improvement volume, aims to align and realign IT services to changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to the IT services that support the business processes. It incorporates many of the same concepts articulated in the Deming Cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act. The perspective of CSI on improvement is the business perspective of service quality, even though CSI aims to improve process effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT processes through the whole lifecycle. To manage improvement, CSI should clearly define what should be controlled and measured.
CSI needs upfront planning, training and awareness, ongoing scheduling, roles created, ownership assigned,and activities identified to be successful. CSI must be planned and scheduled as process with defined activities, inputs, outputs, roles and reporting. Continual Service Improvement and Application Performance Management (APM) are two sides of the same coin. They both focus on improvement with APM tying together service design, service transition, and service operation which in turn helps raise the bar of operational excellence for IT.
Improvement initiatives typically follow a seven-step process:
  1. Identify the strategy for improvement
  2. Define what you will measure
  3. Gather the data
  4. Process the data
  5. Analyse the information and data
  6. Present and use the information
  7. Implement improvement

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