Emerging Technologies Magazine

Technology changes fast in the field of IT and the requirements to be met by the IT function are extremely varied under the huge range of environments where it is used. In such a situation, familiarity with the constantly changing best practices is the best guarantee for successful use of IT.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an approach to the identification, planning, delivery and support of IT services to businesses. Over the 20 years it has been in existence, it has become the most widely adopted framework for IT Service Management (ITSM) in the world.

ITIL was born in UK as a government initiative aimed at providing some consistency in the processes for technology delivery and support in a distributed computing environment. The distributed environment led to inconsistent practices that can not only affect the efficiency of the basic business services but also the predictability of the service levels, a serious problem in governance.

A business service can be defined as providing some value to a customer. The service delivery can benefit by carefully analyzing things like:

* Who is the customer?
* What specific services are needed to meet the customer’s needs?
* What technology resources are available to provide these services?
* How can the service delivery be designed in a cost-effective manner in the light of available technology?
* …

Read fuller details about the ITIL initiative, which is in its third version now, by downloading the ITIL Basics book.

Tags: information technology, it best practices, itsm

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 11:45 am and is filed under best practices, e-governance, information technology, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.