ITIL
Information Technology Infrastructure Library ITIL
In a nutshell, ITIL is a set of publications that describes best practices for IT service management. That is how to provide quality IT services, including the processes, functions and other capabilities needed. But ITIL is also a whole industry of training and consulting companies and there's a very popular set of certifications based on the publications. And ITIL concepts are baked into and are the model behind many if not most IT service management tools. While most people involved in ITIL will never have seen the source ITIL publications, they'll have taken an ITIL foundation course and exam and work in organizations that have adopted and adapted ITIL practices. And that use tools that leverage ITIL concepts principals, models and terminology. There are many approaches to service management so what's unique about ITIL's approach? First and foremost, ITIL is ubiquitous, meaning you can find it everywhere. There are over 2,000,000 ITIL certified IT professionals. That number far exceeds other IT soft skill certifications. And you'll find ITIL in use in all sorts of organizations. It's especially prevalent in large enterprise IT shops, but also in many small and medium sized shops. And it's written into all sorts of RFPs and embedded into all sorts of IT tools so it's vital to understand it so that you can understand where other professionals, customers and tools are coming from. Another thing that makes ITIL unique is that it's vendor-neutral. This means that it's not driven by or intertwined with any particular vendor's product and technologies. It's meant to be extracted from this and widely applicable on any platform or technology. This is important because without this individual IT professionals and organizations have to do the hard work of extrapolating common best practice for better guidance. With 100% assurance that what they come up with will not match the next person's or organization's model.
ITIL's intended to be non prescriptive. That means it's descriptive, describing what to do and why and giving you an example of how that may or may not work for your situation. And not as some people misinterpret to do prescribe precisely you must do it this way. Often when people in organizations get into trouble with adopting and adapting ITIL it's because they apply it dogmatically, treating the examples as prescriptions. Certainly, if you see an example of what to do cited that looks like it works for you it may make sense to leverage it, but the intended focus of ITIL is on getting the outcomes, the ends right and clear and not on prescribing 100% effective forever practices or the means. These instead are given as examples of what people do that works now that may or may not work for you. Lastly, ITIL's intended to represent best practices that means ITIL guidance captures in essence what people do now that works. This means it's commonly accepted and implemented practices not leading or leading edge practices. ITIL is presented as being written by practitioners for practitioners. So how does ITIL fit in with the other frameworks and practices that are out there? First, right now there are no alternative IT service manager frameworks that compete seriously with ITIL. The uptake of ITIL dwarfs what competitors have been able to achieve. As for complementary frameworks and practices as shown here there's lots of them. Developed by different stakeholders at different times for different reasons. Covering them all and how they relate to ITIL would fill a whole other course so we won't do that here. But you can find white papers that map ITIL to most any other framework or practice. Some like ISO-20000 fit ITIL very well for a particular purpose in this case providing the standard for organizational level certification and audit around service management practices. There are however emerging practices DevOps, Agile and Lean-IT in particular that ITIL4 has embraced. However, the communities driving these practices are or are not embracing ITIL in varying degrees. The key is to find what's useful to you from all these and leverage it. Here are the key differences between ITIL V3 and ITIL4 in a nutshell. ITIL V3 was introduced in 2007. There was an update in 2011 for clarity. Back in 2007 most IT was physical on premise, virtualization was just taking off and the Cloud was just starting. So the practices cited as examples in ITIL V3 are suited to what we now refer to as traditional IT. Now remember best practices are what people do now that works. So ITIL4 is circa 2019. While we aim for many of the same outcomes now as we did back then with ITIL V3 how we reach those outcomes the practices have changed because the typical target IT environment we manage has changed to be a hybrid of traditional IT and Cloud and mobile. So the real difference between ITIL V3 and ITIL4 is how outcomes are achieved. In ITIL V3 it's through 26 processes and four functions arranged in a lifecycle. In ITIL4 it's through 34 practices which you can think of as capabilities which include processes and functions including DevOps, agile and lean practices in a service value chain.
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