ITIL® - Best Practice in IT Service Management
Melanie Franklin, Managing Director, Maven Training Limited
It is now widely recognised that organisations are increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This leads to an increased requirement for high quality management of IT services. IT Service Management as a discipline focuses on managing large-scale (IT) systems, centered on the customer's perspective of IT's contribution to the business as a whole.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a best practice framework that provides a set of procedures for IT Service Management and underpins the requirement to provide both high quality and value for money IT services. A set of professional qualifications is based on the ITIL® training framework and literature.
ITIL® has divided the management of IT systems into 11 different but interrelated disciplines:
- Service Desk
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Configuration Management
- Change Management
- Release Management
- Service Level Management
- Financial Management for IT Services
- Availability Management
- Capacity Management
- IT Services Continuity Management
A number of these disciplines contain a great deal of business management information, especially tracking and reporting costs (item 8) and managing suppliers and the quality of their delivery (item 7).
Implementing ITIL has a number of benefits for an organisation including the capability of an organisation to handle change, and the ability for different IT departments to talk to each other, using the same terminology.
For individuals, knowledge of ITIL service management has many career development benefits. By ensuring a professional approach to the management of IT, there is greater cross over between IT and more general management functions, reducing the ‘silo’ effect that IT staff sometimes suffer, and making it easier to make the leap into other management roles. Globally, thousands of organisations have adopted ITIL and ITIL qualifications are a valuable indicator of your ability and your willingness to learn.
