Why ITIL V3?
Throughout the last decade global organizations have become increasingly dependent on the help of IT services to enable the communication, coordination and control of business across a heterogeneous and increasingly virtualized environment. During this period, IT organizations have been reducing costs through consolidation, transformation, automation, standardization, shared services, managed services, outsourcing, global and multi-sourcing strategies, virtualization and service oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives. ITIL V3 reflects the way that ITSM needs to respond effectively and efficiently to keep up with changing business and technology environments.
Organizations today need to be ready for transformation and rapid change, as there are often mergers, acquisitions, legislation, sourcing decisions, competition, technology innovations and changes in customer needs. Business managers also want assurance that applications and the infrastructure will support new business initiatives and meet corporate governance requirements. ITIL V3 shows how applying service management principles can address these challenges.
Some organizations have implemented IT controls in order to comply with ISO/IEC 20000 and regulatory requirements, such as the Sarbanes- Oxley Act. Many of these organizations have demonstrated that implementing repeatable and auditable processes improves predictability and service performance. Whilst ITIL V2 focused on being proactive, ITIL V3 moves the IT industry toward being predictive. For example, it helps predict the impact of change.
The architecture of the core library combines the process-based view of ITIL with a service lifecycle approach, shown in Figure 1. This reflects the reality of most organizations where the objectives for those responsible for the design, development and improvement of service management processes are best achieved using a process view of the organization.
The ITIL V3 core books are:
- Introduction to the Service Lifecycle: As an introduction to ITSM, ITIL and why the service lifecycle approach is best practice, the book provides a general overview of the detail contained within each of the core books.
- Service Strategy: Covers service management strategy and value planning, linking IT service strategy to business needs; service economics; planning and implementing service strategy.
- Service Design: Takes new or changed business requirements and develops a solution designed to meet the current and future business requirements. It provides guidance on the production and maintenance of IT policies, architectures, and documents for the design of appropriate IT services solutions and processes.
- Service Transition: Covers the broader, long-term change, configuration, knowledge management, release and deployment practices, so that risks, benefits, delivery mechanisms and the ease of ongoing operations of service are considered. It provides guidance for the transition of services into the business environment.
- Service Operation: Details the business as usual activities to operate the services and infrastructure, including the Service Desk, IT Operations Management, Technical Management and Application Management and practices for operations, management, control and measurement.
- Continual Service Improvement: Provides an overall view of all the other elements and guidance on the business and technology drivers for improvement and the ways that the overall process and service provision can be improved.
The ITIL V3 core practices are supported by more detailed complementary content specific to industry, stakeholder and practice topics. This makes the library more practical, easier to use, and it provides guidance specific to various stakeholder viewpoints to help gain further traction in ITSM. For example, specific case studies on using change management processes and tools in the regulated financial sector can be added.
1. Increasing process compliance by avoiding overly bureaucratic processes. People are less likely to follow processes if there are many manual administrative steps, or if these steps are overly bureaucratic. The detection of unauthorized changes that have not followed defined change processes, as well as being able to back these out, is a critical success factor in establishing process compliance.
2. Providing accurate configuration information that is accessible and accurate. People need quick and easy access to accurate information on the IT configurations before, during and after a change. Decisions and actions are often delayed if the right information is not available at the right time and presented in an understandable format. In the worst case, a poor decision may be taken.
3. Simplifying the IT configurations to enable change. Detecting and eliminating poor quality assets and unnecessarily complex configurations that are non-standard or noncompliant standardizes the IT estate.
