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Seven Books to Success
No discussion of ITIL can begin without an explanation of what precisely it is. Some refer to it as a religion, but it isn't. The best analogy is that ITIL is a general roadmap of best practices that helps IT departments adopt more efficient service management yet gives them flexibility on how they get there.
ITIL's "Other" Books |
Just because service support and service delivery are the most popular titles in the seven-volume IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT executives shouldn't overlook the remaining five books.
The book on implementing service management, for example, suggests that CIOs establish a continuous service improvement program (CSIP) as the basis for implementing other ITIL disciplines. A second book on security management describes how CIOs should integrate information security into the management organization, with recommendations based on the international standard ISO/IEC 17799.
The IT process management book recommends best practices for analysis, planning, design, deployment and ongoing operations management of an IT infrastructure. A book on application management encompasses guidelines to improve the overall quality of IT software development and support, with a particular focus on gathering and defining requirements that meet business objectives.
Finally, the book on the business perspective discusses how to improve IT service provisioning and addresses such topics as business continuity management, surviving change, transformation of business practice through radical change, partnerships and outsourcing.
--M.V.
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The L in ITIL stands for library, and this library comprises seven books. Each book is about 200 pages long and costs about $115. The books cover seven distinct practice areas: service support, service delivery, planning to implement service management, security management, information and communications technology (ICT) -- the European equivalent of IT -- infrastructure management, application management, and the business perspective. (For more, see "ITIL's 'Other' Books," at right.)
Though IBM claims that its Yellow Books were precursors to ITIL, most experts agree that the framework was developed in the late 1980s by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), a branch of the British government. (The agency has since merged with the U.K.'s Office of Government Commerce, or OGC.) CCTA was charged with developing a catalog of best practices for government IT departments. The resulting catalog quickly grew to include more than 30 separate volumes.
Brian Johnson was a member of the six-person team that wrote the ITIL playbook. Johnson later went on to found the IT Service Management Forum, a professional organization focused on IT service management. Today, he is the ITIL worldwide practice manager at CA Inc. Johnson describes the greatest benefit of ITIL in two words: maximizing productivity. He says that with the rise of governance issues, having a way to automate IT services is appealing to companies of all sizes.
"It's all about IT aligning in such a way to deliver the best service possible," he says, noting that the business world's constant push to make IT more efficient and cut costs sparked mainstream interest in ITIL. Because every department is different, ITIL offers "best practices for everyone to follow."
During the 1990s, Johnson says, ITIL caught on in the U.S. The second iteration of the framework was released, offering a more accessible version that consolidated the publications into seven books and grouped process guidelines into different aspects of management, applications and services. Today many IT leaders use this version, though a new one is due out this spring.
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