ITIL V3 Overview

ITIL v3 is an extension of ITIL v2 and has fully replaced it following the completion of the withdrawal period on 30 June 2011. ITIL v3 provides a more holistic perspective on the full life cycle of services, covering the entire IT organisation and all supporting components needed to deliver services to the customer, whereas v2 focused on specific activities directly related to service delivery and support. Most of the v2 activities remained untouched in v3, but some significant changes in terminology were introduced in order to facilitate the expansion.

Five volumes comprise the ITIL v3, published in May 2007:

1. ITIL Service Strategy

2. ITIL Service Design

3. ITIL Service Transition

4. ITIL Service Operation

5. ITIL Continual Service Improvement

Service Strategy

As the center and origin point of the ITIL Service Lifecycle, the ITIL Service Strategy volume provides guidance on clarification and prioritisation of service-provider investments in services. More generally, Service Strategy focuses on helping IT organisations improve and develop over the long term. In both cases, Service Strategy relies largely upon a market-driven approach. The Service Strategy volume provides guidance on how to design, develop, and implement service management not only as an organizational capability but also as a strategic asset. Guidance is provided on the principles underpinning the practice of service management that are useful for developing service management policies, guidelines and processes across the ITIL Service Lifecycle. Service Strategy guidance is useful in the context of Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, and Continual Service Improvement. Key topics covered include service value definition, business-case development, service assets, market analysis, and service provider types. List of covered processes:

• Service Portfolio Management
• Demand Management
• IT Financial Management

Service Design

The primary objective of Service Management is to ensure that the IT services are aligned to the business needs and actively support them. It is imperative that the IT services underpin the business processes, but it is also increasingly important that IT acts as an agent for change to facilitate business transformation.

All organizations that use IT will depend on IT to be successful. If IT processes and IT services are implemented, managed and supported in the appropriate way, the business will be more successful, suffer less disruption and loss of productive hours, reduce costs, increase revenue, improve public relations and achieve its business objectives.

The ITIL Service Design volume provides good-practice guidance on the design of IT services, processes, and other aspects of the service management effort. Significantly, design within ITIL is understood to encompass all elements relevant to technology service delivery, rather than focusing solely on design of the technology itself. As such, Service Design addresses how a planned service solution interacts with the larger business and technical environments, service management systems required to support the service, processes which interact with the service, technology, and architecture required to support the service, and the supply chain required to support the planned service. Within ITIL v2, design work for an IT service is aggregated into a single Service Design Package (SDP). Service Design Packages, along with other information about services, are managed within the service catalogues. List of covered processes:

• Service Catalog Management
• Service Level Management
• Risk Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• IT Service Continuity Management
• Information Security Management
• Compliance Management
• IT Architecture Management
• Supplier Management

Service Transition

Service transition, as described by the ITIL Service Transition volume, relates to the delivery of services required by a business into live/operational use, and often encompasses the “project” side of IT rather than “BAU” (Business as usual). This area also covers topics such as managing changes to the “BAU” environment. The Service Transition publication is part of the ITIL Service Management Practices, which document industry best practice for the service lifecycle management of IT enabled services. Although this publication can be read in isolation, it is recommended that it be used in conjunction with the other ITIL publications. Service Management is a generic concept and the guidance in the new ITIL publications applies generically. The guidance is also scalable –applicable to small and large organizations. It applies to distributed and centralized systems, whether in-house or supplied by third parties. It is neither bureaucratic nor unwieldy if implemented wisely and in full recognition of the business needs of your organization. Adopting Service Transition best practices can enable improvements to services and Service Management capability by ensuring that the introduction, deployment, transfer and decommissioning of new or changed services is consistently well managed.

List of processes:

• Service Asset and Configuration Management
• Service Validation and Testing
• Evaluation
• Release Management
• Change Management
• Knowledge Management

Service Operation

Service Operation publication provides best-practice advice and guidance on all aspects of managing the day-to-day operation of an organization’s information technology (IT) services. It covers issues relating to the people, processes, infrastructure technology and relationships necessary to ensure the high-quality, cost-effective provision of IT service necessary to meet business needs.

The advent of new technology and the now blurred lines between the traditional technology silos of hardware, networks, telephony and software applications management mean that an updated approach to managing service operations is needed. Organizations are increasingly likely to consider different ways of providing their IT at optimum cost and flexibility, with the introduction of utility IT, pay-per-use IT Services, virtual IT provision, dynamic capacity and Adaptive Enterprise computing, as well as task-sourcing and outsourcing options.

These alternatives have led to a myriad of IT business relationships, both internally and externally, that have increased in complexity as much as the technologies being managed have. Business dependency on these complex relationships is increasingly critical to survival and prosperity.

This publication outlines best practice for achieving the delivery of agreed levels of services both to end-users and the customers (where “customers” refer to those individuals who pay for the service and negotiate the SLAs). Service operation, as described in the ITIL Service Operation volume, is the part of the lifecycle where the services and value is actually directly delivered. Also the monitoring of problems and balance between service reliability and cost etc. are considered. The functions include technical management, application management, operations management and Service Desk as well as, responsibilities for staff engaging in Service Operation.

List of processes:

• Event Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Request Fulfillment
• Access Management

Continual Service Improvement (CSI)

Aligning and realigning IT services to changing business needs (because standstill implies decline).

Continual Service Improvement, defined in the ITIL Continual Service Improvement volume, aims to align and realign IT Services to changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to the IT services that support the Business Processes. The perspective of CSI on improvement is the business perspective of service quality, even though CSI aims to improve process effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT processes through the whole lifecycle. To manage improvement, CSI should clearly define what should be controlled and measured.

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is not a new concept. Organizations have talked about it for many years but for
most the concept has not moved beyond the discussion stage. For many organizations, CSI becomes a project when something has failed and severely impacted the business. When the issue is resolved the concept is promptly forgotten until the next major failure occurs. Once an organization has gone through the process of identifying what its services are, as well as developing and implementing the IT service management (ITSM) processes to enable those services, many believe that the hard work is done. How wrong they are! The real work is only just beginning. How do organizations gain adoption of using the new processes? How do organizations measure, report and use the data to improve not only the new processes but to continually improve the services being provided? This requires a conscious decision that CSI will be adopted with clearly defined goals, documented procedures, inputs, outputs and identified roles and responsibilities. To be successful CSI must be embedded within each organization’s culture.

CSI needs to be treated just like any other service practice. There needs to be upfront planning, training and awareness, ongoing scheduling, roles created, ownership assigned,and activities identified to be successful. CSI must be planned and scheduled as process with defined activities, inputs, outputs, roles and reporting.

List of processes:

• Service Level Management
• Service Measurement and Reporting
• Continual Service Improvement