What is ITIL?

ITIL means Information Technology Infrastructure Library and although the British government created it, it is rapidly being adopted all over the world as the best practices for IT service. The ITIL are a set of guidelines set up by IT-ers to improve the IT-infrastructure.

There are 6 basic groups formed in ITIL, these are;

-Servicedesk (Handels questions & complaints)
-Incident Management (Repairs incidents)
-Problem Management (Repairs incidents that happen more often [also called a problem])
-Change Management (Handle changes)
-Configuration Management (Document IT-sources)
-Distribution & control Management (Distribute hard/soft-ware)

I’ll get back on these later this article, because by now, you’re screaming.. WHY DO WE NEED THIS!? And I’ll tell you why.

Businesses that don’t have ITIL implemented into their company are one pack of chaos. ITIL is used to guide Changes, complaints, incidents and all other problems into an organised mill, which will do their best to solve all these problems. Coming back to the basic groups, I’ ll tell you how they are used.

Configuration Management is the implementation of a database which holds information like Hardware storage, who uses what software etc. Depends on how big your company is, because nobody needs an index about all the mouses they have.
Without CM you’d be lost. All information is retrieved from this database.
Without this information items can be moved, stolen or misplaced. Also unauthorised items can be used. This could result into conflicts with the OS, or security breaches.

Incidents Management is implemented to handle incidents and solve them, the incidents Management is either converged as Helpdesk/Incident Management, or as a stand-alone group.

Problem Management is implemented to handle incidents that happen more often, also called Problems.

Change Management is implemented to make usefull changes, guide these changes, and make sure there is a back up plan whenever needed. It’s very important to make a good plan of how to implement changes, large companies like banks can’t handle these in 1 day. Plans Change Management would makes would likely be like, first change small groups to test the software (I’m using a software example because this is often the case) and when things roll like they should, larger groups will be changed.

Servicedesks are often the first point of contact for users when they have a question or problem. There are 2 kinds of servicedesk; the ones that only log these incidents and escalate it to more experienced personnel, or servicedesks that have technical knowledge themself, and handle these incidents on their own. None-problem-solving helpdesks are called unprofessional servicedesks, while incident-solving Helpdesks are called professional servicedesks.

Distribution & Control Management make a Definitive Software Library (DSL) which holds the master copies of all software. From here out they are distributed.
D & C is very important, they keep track of how many licences they distribute and buy. This is so important because (especially in large companies) you could get a visit from someone who’s going to check if you have any illegal copies of software running in your business. If you don’t have a list of who uses what, but do have legal copies, they won’t take your word for it. They need hard facts, so make sure you have a list prepared.

So, to put 1 and 1 together, here’s the whole setup. CM has the whole database. When users report incidents to the Servicedesk, servicedesk logs these in the database, and escalates the incidents to the incidents Management. If the incidents keep coming, problem Management handles them. Change management uses the inventarisations from the database to put changes together. Distribution controls logs the soft/hard-ware they distribute to configuration Management and that’s all, nothing to it, now is there?

And remember, these are not rules, but guidelines.