Information technology has entered all human life lines, including companies, organizations, and the public service sector. Utilization of this technology requires the organization to manage it properly because if it is ineffective, then the effect on the organization will not be optimal.
Therefore management is needed based on best practices and requires guidelines. One of the frameworks and a series of concepts that can be used for service management is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library or often referred to as ITIL.
What is ITIL Concept?
ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library (English, translated Information Technology Infrastructure Library), is a set of concepts and techniques for infrastructure management, development, and information technology (IT) operations. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which addresses a topic of IT management.
ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library have registered trademarks of the United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC). ITIL provides detailed descriptions of crucial IT practices with comprehensive checklists, tasks, and procedures that can be adapted to any IT organization.
Although it was developed in the 1980s, the use of ITIL only became widespread in the mid-1990s with its second version specification (ITIL v2), which is best known for its two sets of books related to ITSM (IT Service Management), namely Service Delivery (Inter-Services) and Service Support.
On June 30, 2007, OGC published the third version of ITIL (ITIL v3), which consists of five parts and emphasizes managing the life cycle of services provided by information technology. The five sections are:
- Service Strategy
- service design
- Service Transitions
- Service Operations
- Continual Service Improvement
ITIL, Since When?
According to the CIO, the information technology infrastructure library has undergone several revision processes during its development period.
In 2000, 30 original ITIL theory books were first condensed to just seven, along with the recently released ITIL V.2.
Each book is packed with aspects of modern IT management. Later, the ITIL Refresh Project in 2007 consolidated ITIL into only five volumes of 26 processes and functions.
This initiative is referred to as ITIL 2007 edition. Then, in 2011, another update, dubbed ITIL 2011, was published as a successor to the 2007 edition.
However, the previous five volumes remain, and ITIL 2007 and ITIL 2011 have yet to receive updates.
Furthermore, information technology infrastructure library four, released in 2019, is the latest edition considered more stable and effective.
These new technologies can maintain the same focus on data automation processes, improve service management, and integrate IT departments into business plans.
ITIL 4 also updates the framework to accommodate and adapt enterprise technology and software performance according to modern standards.
Since the last update of the information technology infrastructure library, enterprise IT departments have become integral to every business.
The new framework accommodates IT teamwork lines to be more agile, flexible, and collaborative.
ITIL Framework
The information technology infrastructure library includes several frameworks adapted from the five core publications.
This framework will be reviewed regularly and updated as technology develops.
Each framework provides best practices for each primary phase of the IT service management system life cycle.
So, according to TechTarget, the information technology infrastructure framework you need to know is as follows.
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operations.
- Continual Service Improvement
The adoption and maintenance of an information technology infrastructure library is a process that requires trained experts to guide companies and IT staff.
Giant IT companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) use ITIL as the basis for their internal operating guidelines.
Each ITIL iteration provides updated and customized documentation to prepare IT admins for modern IT services infrastructure.
1. Service Strategy
The purpose of Service Strategy is to provide a strategy for the service lifecycle. The system must be aligned with business objectives. The utility and warranty of these components are designed to ensure that the service is fit for purpose and use.
This component must be ensured. It is vital because these two components add value between services to customers.
As mentioned above, each main category has subcategories. In the Service Strategy category there are four subcategories, namely:
Service Portfolio Management
The service Portfolio is the entire range of services processed by the service provider’s management. This service consists of three main parts: Service Pipeline, Service Catalog, and Retired Service. Service Portfolio Management governs how services can be identified, described, evaluated, selected, and chartered.
Demand Management
The Demand Management process is concerned with understanding and influencing customer demand. This process involves User Profiles, which characterize different groups of users that are unique to a particular service, and Business Activity Patterns, which represent how users in other user profiles access the service over a certain period.
Financial Management
Process Financial Management provides a means of understanding and managing costs and opportunities associated with services.
2. Service Design
The Service Design lifecycle phase discusses service design and all supporting elements for the direct introduction to the environment. The “Four Ps of Service Design” represents the areas that should be considered when designing services. The areas include:
- People
- Product
- Process
- Partner
3. Service Transition
The Service Transition process aims to build and deploy IT services, ensuring that changes to services and Service Management processes are carried out in a coordinated manner.
In this lifecycle phase, designs are built, tested, and moved to production to enable business customers to achieve their desired value.
This phase addresses managing change: controlling assets and configuration items (underlying components, such as hardware and software) associated with new and changing systems, service validation, testing, and transition planning to ensure that users, support personnel, and production environments have been prepared for production release.
4. Service Operation
This stage focuses on meeting end-user expectations while balancing costs and spotting potential problems.
The Service Operations process includes fulfilling user requests, resolving service failures, fixing problems, and carrying out routine operational tasks. This stage is the only one of the five categories with a function and a process.
5. Continual Service Improvement
This stage aims to use methods from quality management to learn from past successes and failures. This aims to continuously improve the effectiveness and efficiency of IT processes and services in line with the concept of continuous improvement adopted in ISO 2000. There is only one process at this stage but it has seven steps, namely:
- Identify improvement strategies
- Define what will be measured
- Collecting data
- Process data
- Analyze data
- Presenting and using information extracted from data
- Use information for improvement
ITIL Concepts
ITIL has several key principles that are realized through five core components. Some key ITIL concepts and principles are:
1. Delivering maximum value to customers
2. Optimizing resources and capabilities
3. Offering services that are useful and reliable
4. Planning processes with specific goals in mind
5. Defining roles clearly for each task.
Before we get to the five core components of ITIL concepts, let’s define some important ITIL terms.
Benefits of ITIL
By using the basis of ITIL’s systematic approach to IT service management, ITIL offers improvements to an enterprise, including:
- Increasing Return on Investment in IT.
- Improved Capability and productivity.
- Increasing Customer/User Satisfaction.
- Improved Asset Utilization Results.
- It improved relationships and interaction between IT service providers and users/customers.
- Maintaining the organization to keep pace with the latest changes encourages the organization to continue to grow.
- IT Service Integration