A Comprehensive Guide to ITIL and the IT Infrastructure Library
ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It is a framework designed in order to standardize the process of planning, selection, maintenance, delivery and other branches in the field of business of IT field. It is a framework for delivering best IT services of best practices.
It works for the improvement of efficiency and achieve the service delivery as predicted. It enables to become business service partners instead of being a support from back-end. ITIL approach guides the IT administrators to align their actions and expenses as per the need of business and even change them if required so that the business can grow.
ITIL was started in 1980s when the data centres were decentralized. With the adoption of a diverse range of geographically architectures, ITIL flourished. But this procedure brought inconsistency in the respective field as it led to discrepancies in processing and deployment. The suboptimal IT service performance turned into organizations due to such inconsistency.
It prepares admins by delivering update documents and certificates for current infrastructure landscape and services they provide. Organizations implement after evaluating the aspects which are most important as per their needs. Thus, ITIL framework is not a rigid framework in order to implement the best practices.
ITIL help businesses to manage the risk associated within it, to strengthen the customer relations, build cost-effective practices and build an IT environment that fosters change, scale and growth.
ITIL reduces the operation cost of IT, enhance productivity, risk management, satisfaction of employees, failure management throughout the organization. It creates IT environment which is predictable and delivers the best services to customers and clients and in order to improve efficiency, it identifies opportunities.
ITIL focuses on assimilating IT into business. As technology has become an important aspect of every business, integration of IT into the field of business has become very important.
What lies in the ITIL?
There have been several changes in the history of ITIL. The original books that were 30 in numbers were reduced to seven books in the year 2000 (the same year in which ITIL V2 was launched). The books comprise the aspects related to the IT sector management.
In ITIL 2007 edition, the Refresh Project was consolidated into five volumes containing 26 functions and process. There was again an update in 2011 named Dubbed ITIL 2011, which was published under the Cabinet Office. Though the five volumes remained but ITIL 2007 and ITIL 2011 remained quite alike.
In 2019, ITIL 4 was released which focuses on improving the service management, automating processes and combining various IT departments to form a business. It also works on updating the substructure to accommodate and looking forward for the modern software, tools and technology. The IT sector has become more flexible and collaborative since the last update of ITIL.
Guiding principles of ITIL
There are seven guiding principles containing in ITIL 4 that were adopted from the latest exam held for practitioners. Here are some of the guiding principles of ITIL:
- Lay emphasis on value
- Begin your work
- Refine the progress along with feedback
- Foster and collaborate visibility
- Work aggregately and think comprehensively
- Try to keep the work simple yet practical
- Computerise and upgrade your work
ITIL helps in the collaboration of various ITs to form an overall business structure. It also lifts up the integration of IT with its various other departments as a business unit to rely on technology for the completion of work. Additionally, a strong emphasis is laid on the customer feedback so that they can understand the public reaction, their perception, satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
