ITIL - Overview

ITIL Processes & Best Practices

Most organizations consider their people, capabilities, processes, and technologies to be strategic assets. These assets help deliver and support the company’s vision and mission. Efficient and effective alignment of capabilities and resources of services and products can help create a strategic advantage in the markets that organizations serve. This is where ITIL^®, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, comes into play. ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. It helps individuals and organizations use IT to realize business change, transformation and growth.

The ultimate goal of ITIL is to improve how IT delivers and supports valued business services. ITIL is not just technology management or process management. It also focuses on improving the capabilities of people, processes, and technology. ITIL provides value for an organization, its resources and capabilities, including employees and customers.

Adoption of the ITIL framework can be the foundation for success of other initiatives such as DevOps, cybersecurity, cyber-resilience, Internet of Things (IoT), and other emerging trends and technologies.

What is ITIL?

ITIL is a set of IT Service Management practices that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business.

Every organization delivers a service or product. For every service or product, the ITIL framework helps manage delivery, industrialization, support, and consumerization from inception to retirement. The five stages of the ITIL framework include:

• Service Strategy 
• Service Design 
• Service Transition 
• Service Operation 
• Continual Service Improvement 

Each stage in this service lifecycle supports all the other stages.

ITIL does not tell any particular organization all the capabilities that it needs. But for any IT organization making roadmap decisions it gives practical guidance on strategy and services. 

ITIL also complements other industry best practices. For example, if an organization also needs guidance for project management, then that organization can augment the ITIL framework foundation with a project management best practice.

Who uses ITIL?

Large, medium, and small organizations all over the world use ITIL to help them improve the value of their services. ITIL helps organizations in all industries and sectors solve business issues as well as improving IT capability. Organizations use ITIL as a guide to improve or implement a capability that provides business value.

Since ITIL is a set of best practices and not a standard, organizations are free to adopt as much of the ITIL framework as they see fit.