The end goal of ITIL is to increase the earnings or reducing the costs of organizations. It does this by providing a framework where IT organizations can implement a repeatable, measurable and effective processes. The main idea of ITIL is everything is viewed from the customer perspective.
With this perspective, processes are geared toward satisfying customer requirements. The business becomes the driver of IT services rather than IT driving the business. IT is now viewed as a service provider. It is not only viewed as an organization that provides support to an application or infrastructure component. IT is viewed as a critical service within an organization.
ITIL also assists organizations to speak the same language. Terms are clearly defined in ITIL so organizations have a standard way of communicating.
The different processes of ITIL allow an IT organization to improve its value to their customers.
The IT Service Life cycle is divided into several stages:
- Service Strategy is the heart of the service life cycle. It looks at managing conflicting demands from customers. It also looks at providing a transparent financial information to customers. Lastly, customers are able to know the services available to them from their IT organization. All these provide better communication with customers and services are delivered based on agreed expectations.
- Service Design is concerned with tactical processes that ensure consistent provision of services. It involves agreeing with customers on the expected level of services, planning for the capacity, availability, security and continuity.
- Service Transition is concerned with the movement from design to implementation. This includes systems and application development to provide the required services. It involves keeping track of assets and critical resources, planning for the development, managing changes that are requested by the customer, testing, implementation and sharing of knowledge.
- Service Operation deals with the day-to-day activities in providing the service. It covers functions in terms of providing a single point of contact, application team management, IT operations management, IT Technical management. It also looks at managing incidents and ensuring that problems are resolved. It also handles security access resources.
- Continual Service Improvement is a key concept in ITIL. Since processes are measurable, it is now possible to review existing processes and develop plans to improve services. Once these plans are implemented, the results can be measured and these can be compared with expected results with actual results.
All these processes in ITIL aim to give value by providing services that can increase profit or reduce costs.
