Today, ITIL has become the de facto standard for IT service management. It is adopted by organizations across every industry because it helps them offer their services in an economical and quality-driven manner.
ITIL has a tie-up with ISO/IEC 2000 norms, and with the increasing number of organizations are striving to get this standardization, thereby increasing the demand for ITIL Certified Professionals. ITIL framework is adopted by many companies and top brands across all the industries including retail, finance, IT, entertainment, technology, manufacturing, medical, etc.
Some of the top companies that depend on ITIL are Toyota, Disney, Barclays, Citibank, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Honda, Microsoft, Boeing, Pfizer, Bank of America, etc. The ITSM industry is expected to reach USD 8.78 billion by 2021.
It is important to understand key terms and concepts of ITIL to decide on going with ITIL certification to give a nice boost to your career.
Table of Contents
Key Terms in ITIL
Capabilities
The specialized set of abilities or skills that an organization has to apply on resources so as to create value.
Functions
These are self-contained subsets of an organization that are meant to accomplish particular tasks. They typically take the form of tools they use or a group of people.
Processes
These are structured sets of activities specifically designed to achieve a defined goal. The primary characteristics of processes are:
- They are capable of transforming inputs into outputs
- They can be measured
- They can be triggered by specific events
- They typically deliver results to a particular customer or stakeholder
Resources
These are raw materials that contribute to service including equipment, money, time, and staff.
Roles
These are predefined collections of privileges and responsibilities. These roles may be played by teams or individuals.
Service Assets
Service assets or simply assets are referred to the capabilities and resources that a service provider should allocate to offer a particular service.
Service Management
These are specialized sets of capabilities intended to deliver value to customers, all this in the form of services.
Value, Utility, and Warranty
The value of the service comprises two components namely utility and warranty. Service should be so designed that it can offer both utility and warranty to provide value. The utility, also referred to as fitness for purpose, implies the ability of the service to eliminate constraints or improve the performance of the customer. Warranty is also called fitness for use and is referred to as the ability of service for reliable operation.
The key concepts of ITIL
The primary concepts of ITIL are:
- To deliver the maximal value to end-users/customers without bothering them for predicting costs and risks
- To deliver the maximal service value to clients
- Optimizing the usage of ‘capabilities’ and ‘resources’
- Services should be so curated that they offer trusted warranties and the best utility
- To plan all the processes such that they meet the specified objectives
- To define the roles clearly for the task-oriented approach
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The Framework of ITIL
The five broad categories or stages of the ITIL framework are:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
Let’s have a brief look at all of these stages.
- Service Strategy
As the term describes, the purpose of this stage is to provide a functional strategy of the service lifecycle. The service strategy defines the service as the assets, and then monitor and implement the defined strategy. The utility and warranty defined in this component are curated to make sure that the service is actually fir to purpose as well as fit to use. The service strategy should be properly aligned to meet business objectives.
The principles of this component of the ITIL lifecycle are intended to address the issues related to corporate governance and compliance, decision making, business processes and policies, corporate culture, and service improvement.
- Service Design
This phase is all about designing services and supporting elements to be introduced into the live environment. The areas to be considered while designing the service are represented by four P’s and are as following:
- People: organizational structures and human resources needed to support the service
- Processes: these are service management processes needed to support the service
- Products: technical requirements and other infrastructure requirements to support the service
- Partners: these are third parties that offer the support required for the service
- Service Transition
The main objective of this phase is to develop and deploy IT services while ensuring that the changes made to services and processes of Service Management are in perfect coordination.
In the Service Transition phase, the design is created, tested, and shifted to production to enable the customer to attain the required value. This step also addresses the activities related to change management, change evaluation, project management, release and deployment management, service validation, knowledge management, etc.
- Service Operations
This phase emphasizes meeting the expectations or requirements of customers while making sure that the costs are balanced and identifying potential problems. The Service Operations include resolving service issues, fixing problems, fulfilling user requests, and executing routine tasks.
- Continual Service Improvement
This phase aims at using methods listed in quality management to learn from previous successes and failures. The main objective of this step is to continually improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IT services and processes aligned with the concepts of continual improvement as mentioned in ISO 2000.
It has seven steps:
- Identify strategies for improvement
- Define the things to be measured
- Collect data
- Process data
- Analyze data
- Present and use the information extracted from the data
- Utilize the information for improving
Conclusion
The ITIL qualification is globally acknowledged to be the most preferred prerequisite for IT project management jobs. Now that you have had the basic introduction to the concepts of ITIL, you can conclude that they all work together towards maximizing the reliability and efficiency of services.
If you are looking forward to going with an ITIL certification, then search for an online training course that will offer self-paced learning, real-life projects, training conducted by industry experts, and a top-class learning management system along with round-the-clock teaching assistance.
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