What is ITIL? December 12, 2005
Posted by Gary Slinger in : ITIL, MindMapping, Process , comments closedWell, literally, it’s the “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”, but that’s not very helpful in and of itself, is it?
ITIL is a comprehensive collection of consistent and coherent best practices focused on the management of IT service processes. It’s intended to promote a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of business systems. It has a subsection known as IT Service Management, which is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of the organization.
It’s popular, it’s used worldwide, and it isn’t aimed specifically at large organizations – it works equally well for large, mid-size or smaller IT groups. It doesn’t tell you exactly what to do – it’s a set of best-practice guidelines that you customize as you implement them within your own organization, taking advantage of your local knowledge. You can use ITIL in part, or in whole, it’s up to you, and your individual requirements. ITIL originated in the United Kingdom, and the home page of the Office of Government Commerce, who “own” process definitions, can be found here.
There are a number of high-level sections to ITIL, and I spent a lot of time working within the IT Service Support and IT Service Delivery areas – the diagram below (created in MindManager) shows the top-level working areas addressed within these two sections. I’m expanding that MindMap currently, including definitions, goals, benefits, risks and KPI’s, as well as descriptive notes for each area, and I’ll publish specific sections of each of those over the next days & weeks. If you want a particular MindMap in full-form, just let me know in the comments.
technorati tags: Process, MindManager, ITIL
Edit/Update: A later post of mine, which can be found here, has the “complete” mindmap I have done on ITIL Service Support & Service Delivery. Help yourselves…
