The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) – An Introduction for Practitioners and Researchers

Abstract

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a today widely-used collection of best practices in IT Service Management that has, of all standardization efforts, gained the biggest popularity. Since it combines the principles of service- and process-orientation in IT Management and is easily accessible, it has become increasingly attractive for IT organizations of almost any size, branch or organizational setup. The scope of ITIL is not limited to technical issues, but also covers the human and economic dimensions (business alignment) of IT Service Management.

In this tutorial we give a survey on the ITIL framework structure and its most important concepts and contents, including an outline of five of ITIL’s core reference processes. Furthermore, the tutorial discusses some important research topics related to ITIL, in particular Management Information Modelling and Tool Support. The five processes selected for presentation within the tutorial are Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Configuration Management and Service Level Management. Learn how theses processes are designed and how they can be implemented.

These topics include the exemplary consideration of an IT incident being recorded, classified and investigated, triggering Problem Management and passing Problem and Error Control before creating a Request for Change for the resolution of the incident and its underlying root cause. Learn how ITIL helps the IT organization to deal with unexpected events in a highly dynamic environment on the one hand, and how it supports the continuous improvement and strategic alignment of IT management. We show how the core processes correlate to each other and point out the central role of Configuration Management and the challenge of setting up a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Find out what makes a CMDB setup so difficult, which requirements a CMDB should fulfill and why the current commercial and scientific efforts address these challenges insufficiently.

Adequate tools are vital for a successful deployment of ITIL. But since ITIL is tool-independent and hardly formalized, sufficient and integrated tool support for ITIL is not available today. In the tutorial, we present a taxonomy for ITIL processes under tool support aspects by assessing each ITIL process as to its recurrence, lead time, organizational complexity, service level impact and structure.

Finally, we show how ITIL emerged to the ISO/IEC 20000 standard and give an overview of the innovations expected for the next official release “ITIL V.3”, scheduled for this year.