ITIL Implementation Background

The ITIL implementation is one of the hottest topics in IT today. In order to gain a good understanding of the value of configuration management, we must clearly understand what ITIL is and what it is not. Fundamentally, ITIL is exactly what its name implies—a collection of books. The common theme of the library is that all of the books provide guidelines that can help organizations implement the best practices that have been learned the hard way by the pioneering few. There is a volume about security, one about planning, one about software assets, and one about managing applications. The library continues to grow as more successful techniques are documented and guidelines established for what can make others successful.

The latest information on ITIL comes from the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) through its web site at http://www.best-management-practice.com/. Be sure to visit the “Terms and Conditions” link at the bottom of the page for the appropriate uses of that web site.

We focuses on two volumes of the library: “Service Support” and “Service Delivery,” the combination of which is called “IT Service Management.” Together these two volumes form the core of ITIL—the piece with which most enterprises begin their implementations. Collectively, the service support and service delivery volumes describe the collected best practices in these IT disciplines.

Five processes are described in service support:
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Release Management
• Configuration Management

Five additional processes are defined in service delivery:
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• Service Continuity Management
• Service Level Management
• Financial Management
[Implementing ITIL Configuration Management, Larry Klosterboer, IBM 2008]