What is ITIL?
ITIL stands for the IT Infrastructure Library and is a collection of processes, roles, and functions for IT services and IT infrastructures. It offers ready-made standard procedures that have been tried and tested in practice for many years. ITIL is intended to ensure that organizations can work economically, quality-consciously, and efficiently with their IT.
What is ITIL?
ITIL (R) stands for IT Infrastructure Library and describes “Best Practices” to provide efficient and effective IT services.
ITIL was developed by the CCTA (Central Computing and Telecommunications Agency) in the 1980s. This is a government agency based in the UK. The background was the poor quality of IT services that the British government had purchased.
The CCTA was commissioned to find ways to reduce costs and improve the ways sustainably. The CCTA developed a catalog with proven best-practice methods. These are today, accepted worldwide, summarized under the generic term ITIL.
How does ITIL work? What are the main ideas?
Originally, IT companies focused primarily on technical aspects. So hardware and software. Specific customer requirements were secondary. And that’s where ITIL comes in. The core idea of ITIL is that IT services must adapt to customer requirements. Organizations should be able to explicitly agree on the service to be provided with the customer.
ITIL supports organizations that want to be based on recommendations to structure their extensive process descriptions, functions, competencies, and concepts. The most well-known ITIL processes today are Change Management, incident management, or problem management. Translated into concrete processes, organizations implement ITIL recommendations so that they can be used for each individual situation.
ITIL processes
Incident Management
Incident management stands for the process, the tools, and the appropriate concept for the rapid elimination of incidents. This process is responsible for regularly informing the user. A service desk is responsible for accepting, classifying, and handling incidents. If carried out successfully, negative effects on business processes can be minimized.
Change management
The Change Management processes all kinds of changes. Every incoming change is classified. This is usually done by assigning a priority. A person responsible then decides on acceptance or rejection. In change management, acceptance, classification, approval procedures, planning, testing, releases, and executions as well as other tests are carried out in the production environment. Larger changes are implemented as projects. To ensure the success of the change management, close cooperation with project management is necessary.
Problem management
Problem management is a constant solution to recurring faults. This goal can only be achieved through preventive and reactive measures.
- Reactive Problem Management analyzes the causes of disruptions and makes suggestions on how to circumvent them.
- Preventive problem management does everything it can to prevent disruptions in advance or to minimize them.
- The IT services checked for weaknesses and eliminated them.
- The development of a knowledge base is also useful and appropriate here.
- Structural errors can be quickly identified, recorded, and resolved.
- Problem management works closely with change management.
Configuration management
Configuration management provides data that is primarily required by ITSM processes. Such data are used for:
- Processing of incidents
- Assessment and evaluation of faults
- Identifying bugs
- Identify users who may be affected by a problem
- The information is stored in configuration management. This has an interface to all ITMS processes. The configuration management also stores which support group is responsible for the respective fault.
ITIL implementation
How does the ITIL implementation work? What must be taken into account when planning an ITIL-based project? Which resources do you need and how do you use them effectively?
Step 1 – Prepare the ITIL project
In order to prepare an ITIL project, all key people should be familiar with the ITIL basics. You should be able to explain the steps involved in introducing it to everyone else involved.
Step 2 – Define IT services
Next, IT services should be determined. Get an overview of the IT services and develop a service structure that includes the infrastructure as well as the business services.
Step 3 – Occupy roles
Determines the people who are to be responsible for the new processes in ITIL. Clarifies exactly which roles are needed and how they are best filled.
Step 4 – Determine the current state
First, analyze the current situation in order to be able to decide which processes will include future IT organizations. With this inventory, you can decide which existing processes can be retained and where you should act.
Step 5 – Should define the process
Then you can precisely define the focus of the project. Decide which ITIL processes you want to introduce. In this way, you determine how the structure of the processes and all subsequent sub-processes must look.
Step 6 – Define interfaces
The importance of the ITIL interfaces is indispensable and shows what an optimal workflow should look like. The weak points in the processes often occur in the interfaces. So exactly where a process ends and a new one begins.
Step 7 – Introduce controlling
All those responsible uses purely objective criteria (KPIs, i.e. key performance indicators) to be able to assess whether the processes are actually running smoothly. This enables you to quickly make decisions about process improvements.
Step 8 – Work out processes in detail
In the previous steps, you determined which processes you want to introduce. Now you define their relationships and the quality requirements are specified in detail.
Step 9 – Set up the technical infrastructure
If a new or changed technical infrastructure is required, you have to set it up.
Step 10 – Final implementation of processes and training of employees
Passing on information and changes to the process flows must be communicated and, if necessary, appropriate training.
How can I use ITIL in development?
ITIL offers certain processes, for example in the context of release or change management, which can be lived in the development processes in order to guarantee a structured and optimized development culture. And to handle projects in a structured manner and primarily to meet customer requirements.
