The ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

What is ITIL?
Brief History of ITIL
ITIL Limitations
ITIL Ready Practical Tools
Configuration Management Database

What is it?

The IT Infrastructure Library has been adopted as a world wide de facto standard approach to align IT Strategy around the actual needs of the business or organisation. In this article our ITIL consultants provide an introduction to ITIL and discuss its merits within business IT.

ITIL is an attempt to make IT relevant to the objectives of an organisation and to ensure that IT investment adds demonstrable value. By focusing on the critical business processes and disciplines needed to deliver services around IT, the ITIL provides a maturity path for IT that is not based on technology. This accessibility allows senior management to sponsor and direct IT quality improvement efforts and provides a common framework that facilitates communication between Senior Management and IT Professionals.

Click here to download our free whitepaper ‘Successful ITIL Implementation’

ITIL is published as a series of books by the UK Government body OCG (Office of Government Commerce) and provides a detailed description of various important IT practices. It attempts to define best practice and provides guidance on how to develop effective IT Service Management from an organizational perspective. The ITIL is increasingly accepted world wide as the most important force in unifying IT practice and creating common standards and a common framework of best practice.

Each book provides checklists, tasks, procedures and responsibilities for each area of IT practice. Subjects currently include;

Service Delivery – Service Level Agreements, Financial Management of IT, Capacity, Resource and Continuity Management
Service Support – Help Desk, Incident, Configuration, Change and Release Management
Security Management
ICT Infrastructure Management
Application Management
Business Perspective
Planning to Implement Service Management

What It Is Not!

As a collection of evolving best practice it does not define compliant standards and there is no ITIL compliancy certification although the ISO20000 standard does draw heavily on the ITIL.

Furthermore it does not provide IT Professionals with practical advice on technology or even provide standards of technology that should be used. Like most attempts to document best practice ITIL is vague and while it is strong on defining organisation, methodology and process it is weak on defining practical solutions.

Brief History

The ITIL was developed in response to a UK government request in the 1980’s for a supplier independent approach that could define efficient and cost effective use of IT resources in the Public Sector. In 1991 the Information Technology Service Management Forum (ITSMF) was established by the UK Government to administer the ITIL, in 1993 the Dutch chapter was established followed by several further European and world wide chapters. Certification of ITIL consultants (but not of ITIL compliancy itself) was established by the ITMSF and the ITIL has been subsequently developed by input from consultants, IT suppliers and thousands of IT professionals. Today it is the de facto framework used to describe fundamental processes in IT Service Management.

Limitations

Like other attempts to define IT standards the ITIL is very vague when it comes to describing how its recommendations should be implemented. Like the growing list of standards and compliancy regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, the Turnbull Report, ISO20000, ISO27000 etc that attempt to define IT standards and practices, the ITIL does not help IT Professionals provide practical hardware and software solutions to ensure they are achieving best practice.

There is the potential for Senior Management to zealously embrace the ITIL approach in the mistaken belief that it will make them compliant and provide another ticked box to impress analysts, shareholders, customers and provide evidence of their due diligence. Such a pre-determined approach fails to take into consideration the details of actual implementation.

The ITIL approach does not completely and wholly describe processes. Not all elements of the ITIL can or should be implemented into every organisation. The ITIL is very clear that it is a set of "best practices," not a process definition. Most IT consultants who have been involved in adopting the ITIL practices also know that the tool sets and automation software required to make an ITIL strategy work are not yet available from the major IT suppliers. Either demand has not yet driven such development or suppliers have an interest in promoting their own “silo” solutions.

However, customisable software management tools developed to provide solutions to the challenges of ITIL “best practice” are available. IT Professionals can also “future proof” their investment by ensuring that current or planned purchases can be integrated into open standards, ITIL ready, management software. IT Professionals should be wary of suppliers trying to sell “silo”solutions that will not integrate with such open standards software tools.

AIT Partnership Group can provide customisable open standards management software that forms the basis of an ITIL strategy and interoperates with other systems and tools. We can also advise on how to implement practical hardware and software solutions today that will not become impenetrable silo’s of information and can be integrated into ITIL manageme

Contact us to discuss how we can help you implement practical solutions to the challenges presented in adopting an ITIL strategy.nt software at a later date when you have a budget and strategy available.

ITIL Ready Practical Tools

A common criticism of the ITIL approach is that it is vague in its description of its key component; The CMDB (configuration management database). ITIL publications use the CMDB as a catch all solution that will create a “nirvana” for IT Professionals. Like an elusive “theory of everything” the CMDB is used in the ITIL to answer difficult questions without ever being described in any detail.

In practice a CMBD will consist of numerous applications, including configuration management software and monitoring software. At AIT Partnership Group, our ITIL consultants have developed a practical approach to provide such a solution and we can help to get you started along the ITIL path. This approach includes a configuration management database, change management system, ticketing system and hardware database that will interoperate.

Imagine if you could search for all changes related to a particular service that resulted from a specific trouble ticket or if you could define allocation of tickets not by responsibility but by ability to resolve the issue. You may already have elements of this system in place or you may just be considering how you can achieve this. If so please Contact us to discuss how we can help you implement a practical CMDB solution.

What should a CMDB look like?

AIT Partnership Group is part of a consulting group that is developing open standards management software that provide integrated;

Automation
Asset Management
Configuration Management
Change management

Everything that is critical to your enterprise can be automatically discovered and tracked as a CI (configuration item): Assets, People, Locations, Configurations and Changes. Most importantly they can all be tied together in a federated CMDB.

By “federating” the information it is possible to automate data collection by the CMDB in such a way that the source of the data retains control and maintains the integrity of the data so that information is kept up to date. In this way a federated CMDB contains real “live data” and is capable of automatically aggregating environmental information from network management tools and pre-existing data sources to ensure that a detailed, usable, and accurate CMDB is maintained with minimal demand on resources.

The CMDB records the CI (configuration item) and details about the important attributes and relationships between CIs.

Critical CI’s that should be incorporated into a federated CMDB include;

critical power supplies for servers and data centre network devices
routers, switches and communications for main sites
executives' connections, computers and software applications
items that could affect regulatory compliance for the organisation
connections to secure areas and systems
security items
database feeds, e.g. payroll feeds
external interfaces to trading partners, suppliers, Customers and business partners
interfaces to branches with Customer systems
new technology items that need to be tracked initially