Introduction to ITSM & ITIL®

What is Service Management?

ITSM address the need to align the delivery of IT services closely with the needs of the business. This involves a transformation of the traditional Business-IT paradigm into one that is process-oriented, proactive, and enterprise wide. This service provider paradigm encompasses IT best practices using the perspectives of people, process, technology, organization and integration. This transformation of a traditional “business – IT paradigm” can be depicted by some of the following attributes:

Traditional I/T	*becomes*	ITSM - IT
Technology focus	è	Process focus
"Fire-fighting"	è	Preventative
Reactive	è	Proactive
Users	è	Customers
Centralized, done in-house	è	Distributed, sourced
Isolated, silos	è	Integrated, enterprise-wide
"One off", adhoc	è	Repeatable, accountable
Informal processes	è	Formal best practices
IT internal perspective	è	Business perspective
Operational specific	è	Service orientation

The three key objectives of Service Management are:

§ To align IT services with the current and future needs of the business and its customers

§ To improve the quality of the IT services delivered

§ To reduce the long-term cost of service provision

ITIL is the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management (ITSM) in the world. ITIL provides a comprehensive set of best practices for IT service management, promoting a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems. ITIL is based on the collective experience of commercial and government practitioners worldwide. This has been distilled into one reliable, coherent approach, which is fast becoming the de facto standard of the world’s leading businesses. In fact, “IT executives are increasingly realizing that implementing formalized IT service management processes can help reduce the expense associated with delivering IT services by as much as 50%, enable more consistent service quality and help the enterprise deal with recently enacted regulatory compliance legislation (Sarbanes-Oxley).

“Best Practice Introduction to ITIL”

IT Service Lifecycle Management (ITSLM) Reference Model