How To Successfully Implement ITIL For Your Business

ITIL (The Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a collection of best practices for IT operational processes. It's really nothing more than a formalized way of developing, defining and executing operational processes to stream line your IT executions.

In essence, it means to get some more discipline to what they're doing in IT, something which was badly needed, and is starting to happen. It was developed by the British government for that very purpose, to give some discipline into how they're doing their own IT operations. It has grown worldwide and is now implemented by governments, academics and commercial institutions all over the world, and they are executing some more discipline into how they are operating their IT organizations.

So, it's really a collection of processes and the definition of those processes, that's nothing really more than common sense if you really think about it. The main processes that we're addressing today are falling into both the Service Support and the Service Delivery process groups. Within each of these processes, you have a number of needs for technology solutions, to automate the executions of these processes.

So for example, in the Incident management process, one that's quite common and well understood. Incident management is used when something has happened, like some kind of failure has happened and you need to re-store services as quickly as possible. That's the greatly simplified version. A number of technology solutions are needed to fulfil that process, as is the case with all the other processes. At the centre of them all, there is something called, CMDB (configuration management database). CMDB is the definition of everything we need in the entire environment. All other processes will then take information from the CMDB and act upon it.

If you look at the various processes, there is no single vendor that can provide everything that's needed. Any of your ITEL execution efforts are going to require multiple tools from multiple vendors. But what they do is they focus on some key areas, where they are leveraging the technologies required, through building upon the processes to expand the capabilities for the process automation. Researches indicate that 80% of service incidents are caused by unauthorized chain. If we can detect that change, go back and do a great job of understanding what and why it changed, and how changes is impacting the service. All this material about ITIL implementation will give you better understanding about the topic.