Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL 4) Overview

Introduction: What is ITIL 4?

When did ITIL originate, and why is ITIL important?

1. Why does IT (Information Technology) cost so much, and
2. What am I getting out of it?

• No Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for anything
• No knowledge tools, increasing the cost of training and repeatedly making the same mistakes
• No standard or shared databases, making each IT department an island
• And not even a common vocabulary. For example, with problem events that occurred, some would use the term "incident", some "request", some "issue", and some "failure"

Out of the chaos, the path to IT best practices

What companies had visionary IT departments?

ITIL Continuous Improvement evolution

The Year 2000 - ITIL v2 - Continuous Improvement of best practices

The year 2011 - ITIL v3 - A merging with Service Lifecycle Management

The year 2019 - ITIL v4 - Running IT like a business

ITIL Concepts: What components does ITIL use for success?⁵

ITIL 4 Component	Purpose
The Four Dimensions	Encouraging holistic thinking
The Service Value System	Takes opportunities and demands and turns them into value in the form of products and services
Seven Guiding Principles	Guidance for IT behavior
Organization Governance	Business - IT alignment
Service Value Chain (SVC)	Project Management
34 Practices	A set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective
Continuous Improvement	Aligning the IT organization's practices and services with changing business needs
ITIL Practices	Organizational resources: 14 General management practices 17 Service management practices 3 Technical management practices

General Management Practices

Practice	Description	Dependencies
Service Desk	The Service Desk is the single point of contact for all IT. The Service Desk owns all incidents and service requests.	The IT organization must not allow any user to contact IT other than the Service Desk. The Service Desk's effectiveness depends on all IT departments providing training, tools, and knowledge articles to reduce the need for escalations.
Service Request Management	Supports the agreed quality of service by handling all pre-defined, user-initiated service requests.	All other departments must provide training, tools, and knowledge articles to reduce the need for escalations.
	Sets clear business-based targets for service performance and service delivery assessment, and monitors and manages against these targets.	Every practice performance, directly or indirectly, relates to service delivery and Service Level Management. All services must have a Service Level Agreement (SLA). All IT functional teams must have Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) defining roles and responsibilities between them.
Incident Management	Incidents are defects, and incident record accuracy is the first step in Continuous Improvement.	Every incident must link to problems by the service category. Incident Management is closely linked to Service Design because the root cause of all incidents is poor design.
Problem Management	Problem Management's role is to take incident input, find the root cause, and eliminate them from happening again.	PM relies on Incident Management's incident record accuracy.
Change Enablement	Sole responsibility is to maximize the number of successful IT changes by evaluating risks, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule. They do this by matching the three types of changes with the three change authorities.	Depends on all personnel to follow the cardinal rule that nothing can change in the live environment without an approved Request for Change (RFC). Actively supports the IT department's goal to maximize the number of "Standard" changes.
IT Asset Management	Supports and manages the full lifecycle of all IT assets to help the organization maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support decision making about the purchase, reuse, and retirement of assets, and meet regulatory and contractual requirements.	Works with all other IT departments that manage IT assets.
Service Catalog Management	Provides a single source of consistent information on all services and service offerings.	Works with all service owners, service level management, and practices to ensure greater efficiency in delivering and supporting service offerings.
Release Management	Makes new and changed services and features available for use, maintaining the Definitive Media Library (DML) and other places of storing these types of entities.	Works closely with Change, Service Validation and Testing (SVT), and Deployment Management, including service owners and project managers.
Availability Management	Ensures that services deliver the agreed levels of availability to meet customer and user needs.	As one of the warranty practices, it works closely with Service Design, Change, Problem, Incident, and Continuous Improvement.
Capacity & Performance Management	Ensures that all IT services achieve the agreed and expected performance levels cost effectively, satisfying current and future demand.	Works with all other IT departments ensuring they work together to maximize throughput.
Service Continuity Management	Ensures that services achieve agreed and expected performance cost effectively and satisfy current and future needs.	Works with all practices and service owners to provide IT services to support business requirements.
Monitoring & Event Management	Systematically observes services and service components, and records and reports selected changes of state identified as events.	All practices and organizational units should benefit through monitoring and event management
Service Configuration Management	Ensures that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services and the Configuration Items (CIs) that support them is available to all.	Depends on all practices adhering to Service Configurations requirements with 100% accuracy.
Business Analysts	The purpose is to analyze a business, define its associated needs, and recommend solutions to address these needs.	Works with all service owners, practice owners, and business units to ensure high business productivity and service value levels.
Service Design	Designs products and services that don't break (i.e., cause incidents) and support users' productivity.	SVT tests all releases to ensure no defects. Service Design works with all practices, particularly Project Management.
Service Validation & Testing	Ensures that new or changed products and services meet defined requirements.	Works closely with Project Management, Release, and Deployment to ensure zero deployment-related incidents.
Deployment Management	Moves new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or other components to live environments.	Service owners, IT departments, and all IT operational services such as the Service Desk, Incident, Request Fulfillment, Knowledge Management, Service Catalog, any other teams that support users, and transition teams.
Infrastructure & Platform Management	Oversees the infrastructure and platforms used by an organization. They deal with monitoring technology solutions available to the organization, including the technology of external service providers.	All support teams, Problem Management, Incident, Change Enablement, Service Desk, and practice owners.
Software Development & Management	Ensures that applications meet internal and external stakeholder needs in terms of functionality, reliability, maintainability, compliance, and auditability.	Requires inputs from all service owners, users, Incident Management, Continuous Improvement, Service Design, Knowledge Management, Capacity, Availability, Security, and others to ensure users receive the highest standards of reliability and performance.
Continual Improvement	Alignment of practices and services with changing business needs.	All other practices, SVC, and the 4 Dimensions.
Information Security	Protects the information needed by the business to conduct its business.	All other practices and Service Design.
Relationship Management	Formal links between IT and business leaders at strategic and tactical levels.	All other practices and SVC.
Supplier Management	Manage suppliers and their performance.	All other practices.
Architecture Management	Includes business, service, information, technology, and environmental architectures.	Every aspect of business and IT.
Knowledge Management	Maintains and improves the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across the organization to minimize the need to re-learn. KM manages storage, ensures knowledge integration, and is the keeper of KM templates.	All practices and individuals contribute to knowledge articles across the enterprise.
Measurement & Reporting	Supports good decision making and continual improvement by decreasing the levels of uncertainty.	All practices should utilize approved tools and shared results.
Organizational Change Management	Ensures that IT can implement organizational changes smoothly and successfully by managing the human aspects of the changes.	An essential part of all Project Management initiatives as part of the SVC.
Portfolio Management	Ensures the organization has the right mix of programs, projects, products, and services to execute its strategy within its funding and resource constraints.	Integrates with all services as an integral part of initiating retirement. Understands how the business uses services, by whom, why, and the consequences of unavailability.
Project Management	Ensures all projects are successfully delivered by following PM practices throughout the organization.	Project Management provides guidance, training, and improvement of PM use throughout the organization.
Risk Management	Ensures that the organization effectively handles risks and follows ISO 31000.	Part of all practices' SOPs.
Service Financial Management	Supports the organization's strategies and plans for service management by ensuring the effective use of resources.	Supports all practices and projects by requiring sound financial practices.
Strategy Management	Assists with the formulation of organization goals and adoption. Advises courses of action and resources necessary to achieve those goals.	Strategy management ensures continuous improvement projects in alignment with Strategy.
Workforce & Talent Management	Ensures that the organization has the right people, skills, knowledge, and correct roles in supporting business objectives.	Supports all practices and organizational units.

ITIL tools supporting best practices

Generic Requirements for all ITSM toolsets⁷

1. Self-help
2. Workflow or process engine
3. Integrated Configuration Management System (CMS)
4. Discovery/deployment/licensing technology
5. Remote control
6. Diagnostic utiliities
7. Reporting
8. Dashboards
9. Integration with business practices
10. Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies
11. Knowledge management support

Event Management

1. Direct interface into the organization's incident management processes
2. Each Practice will have its requirements for events and customized responses

Incident Management

1. Incident matching
   1. The most crucial feature of an incident management tool is the ease of creating or matching an incident to a problem!
   2. Problem Management must have these links to identify the root cause
   3. Problem Management is key to user productivity and getting out of firefighting
2. Integrated ITIL technology
   1. Logging
   2. Integral to CMS to determine priority and possible solution
   3. Process flow engine to allow processes to be predefined
   4. Automated alerting and escalation
   5. Interfacing with event management tools
3. Workflow and automated escalation
4. Integrated incident ticket audit for quality assurance
5. Incident reporting capability for lost user productivity costs

Request Fulfillment

1. Integrated to Incident Management
2. Integrated to Change Enablement for standard changes
3. Front-end self-help
4. Workflow engine with Service Catalog integration and authorization

Problem Management

1. Integrated service management technology linking to incident management for matching the incident to problems via the service desk
2. A Change Enablement link to get permission to fix the root cause once identified
3. Problem Management integrated into the CMS to shorten the investigation phase and increase productivity
4. Known Error Database (KEDB)
5. Links to stored workarounds
6. Integration with Problem Management analysis tools:
   1. Kepner and Tregoe
   2. Ishikawa diagrams

Knowledge Management

1. Interfaces with every other service management Practice
2. The Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) can only be effective if all practices use it to store and manage their information and data
3. The knowledge management tool selection will likely impact tool selections for all other service management practices
4. Links maintained and audited between Problem Management's KEDB and the CMS

Access Management

1. Linking to HR management technology
2. Directory services technology
3. Change Enablement integration
4. Request fulfillment linking
5. Linking to standard changes

Service Desk

1. Integration of Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system
2. Messaging integration
3. Remote access
4. Knowledge management and incident-solving technology
5. Complete telephony integration
6. Support tools integration
7. Known Error Database (KEDB)
8. Workaround access from the problem database
9. Diagnostic scripts to assist service desk staff
10. Self-help web interface:
    1. Password change capabilities
    2. Software fix downloads
    3. Software repairs
    4. Requests to remove the software
    5. A download of additional software packages
    6. Advance notice of any planned downtime
    7. FAQs
    8. "How to" search and integrated recordings, videos, documents, etc.

Project Management

1. Integration with service portfolio
2. Service Financial Management integration
3. Support different methodologies (e.g., Waterfall, Agile, Lean)
4. Links to value chain activities
5. Integration to progress reporting
6. Knowledge Management Practice
7. Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS)
8. Service portfolio
9. Configuration Management System (CMS)
10. Standard operating procedures
11. Improvement plans
12. Linking projects to Financial Management for better cost management
13. Business cases
14. Policies and plans
15. Service Design Packages (SDPs)
16. Release plans
17. Deployment plans
18. The ability to generate management reports
19. Service reports
20. Linked to the Definitive Media Library (DML)
21. Warranty (e.g., availability, capacity/performance, service continuity, and security management systems)
22. SLAs
23. IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) plans

Continual Improvement Register (CIR)

1. Ability to link each IT department's CIR to one another
2. Ability to prioritize suggestions
3. Links to monitoring and event management
4. Track and manage improvement ideas from identification through to final action

Relationship Management

1. CRM to address stakeholders' needs and drivers at the strategic and tactical level
2. Linked to Project Management for updates
3. Linked to Service Level Management for operational support

Conclusion: ITIL fundamentals and best-practices framework