ITIL
Framework Overview
What is ITIL Framework?
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework
is a set of best-practice procedures and processes for IT and digital
service management. It is a framework used by a huge range of organizations to
ensure IT services are fully aligned to an organization's key goals.
What are 5 Stages of ITIL?
There are five
stages of the ITIL service lifecycle:
Service Strategy.
Service Design.
Service Transition.
Service Operation.
Continual Service Improvement
26 processes which have been segregated into 5 service
lifecycle stages. These are:
1.
Service Strategy
2.
Service Design
3.
Service Transition
4.
Service Operations
5.
Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
Let’s now drill deeper into each of these stages of the ITIL
Service Strategy
This is the initial stage of the ITIL® service lifecycle. This stage helps
organizations in identifying their business mission and vision. This also helps
in developing strategies to meet customer requirements and priorities by
analyzing the current market needs and existing offerings. The Service Strategy
stage is composed of 5 ITIL® processes which I have discussed below in
detail:
1. Service Portfolio Management
This process mainly focuses on the management of the IT service’s
portfolios which are offered. Service Portfolio Management process guarantees
that the delivered services stay aligned with the goals of Service Strategy.
This process is made up of 4 sequential activities which are, defining the
services, analyzing services, approving and chartering services.
2. Financial Management
This process focuses on financial spending and various services in a
business such as budgeting, accounting, and charging activities and many more.
Financial Management also takes care of the costs that are required to provide
services while maximizing its value. This process is made up of three
sequential activities which are budgeting, accounting, and charging.
3. Strategy Management for IT
Services
This process performs an analysis of the IT services to know their
overall market position. Four sequential activities are performed in these
processes which are, performing a strategic assessment, generating a
strategy, executing strategy, measuring and evaluating.
4. Demand Management
This process is used to assesses the current customer demand
against the services which are being provided to them. Demand Management focuses
solely on understanding the customer’s demands and coordinating it with the
capacity, availability, and types of services that are provided. There are four
sequential activities that are performed in this process which
are identifying sources of demand and forecasting, analyzing the patterns
of business activity and user profiles, developing differentiated offerings and
managing operational demand.
5. Business Relationship Management
This is the final process in the ITIL Service Strategy stage.
Activities like creation and management of customer relationships,
comprehension of customer needs, and implementation of required services
to meet those needs are performed in Business Relationship Management process.
The three sequential activities that are performed in this process
are request and complaint handling, identifying opportunities, and
managing business relationships.
Service Design
This is the second stage of the ITIL® service lifecycle. This is the
stage of designing processes and functions. In this, service management
processes, technology, infrastructure, and products are planned and designed
thoroughly in order to meet both customers as well as business demands. This
stage is composed of 8 ITIL processes which I have discussed below in detail:
1. Service Level Management
This process basically involves planning for defining the targets for
the overall organizational service delivery and then measuring their
performance. For easier measurement and comparison of services against the
actual service performance the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used which
help in deciding the service level goals. In other words, this process is made
up of four sequential activities, which are understanding requirements and
drafting SLA’s, negotiating the SLA’s, defining and standardizing the SLA’s,
and monitoring and reporting service performance.
2. Service Catalog Management
This process mainly ensures that there is an updated service
catalog available with easy accessibility to the services that are required by
the customers to remain productive. There are four sequential activities
followed in this process, which are documenting service definition and
description, agreeing on service catalog contents, and producing and
maintaining the service catalog.
3. Capacity Management
This process helps a business to meet its requirements by ensuring that
the involved systems are operating their optimum capacity. There are five
sequential activities that complete this process. These activities are
monitoring capacity and performance data, analyzing the capacity data, investigating
capacity issues, defining and revising capacity plans, and reviewing and
optimizing capacity.
4. Availability Management
This process ensures that the required services are available to the
customer at any point in time. There are four sequential activities that are
performed in this process namely monitoring availability, analyzing
availability data, investigating service unavailability, availability planning,
and reviewing availability and testing.
5. IT Service Continuity Management
This process mainly focuses on risk management and business continuity.
This process is made up of three sequential activities, which are developing
requirements and continuity plans, implementing continuity plans, and invoking
the continuity plan.
6. Information Security Management
This process centres on providing protection to the system and data
along with people has access to them. Information Security Management includes
activities like intrusion detection, limitation, and prevention, as well as
minimizing the damage and fixing problems. There are five sequential activities
performed in this process which understand security requirements, producing
security policies, implementing security policies, assessing information assets
and risks, and reviewing security controls.
7. Supplier Management
This process mainly monitors all supplier relationships which also
include recording whether the involved parties are adhering to contracts and
agreements. This process is made up of five sequential activities that are,
defining requirements, evaluating suppliers, selection of suppliers, manage
performance, and renewing/ terminating contracts.
8. Design Coordination
This process takes care of the management of the service design phase by
monitoring the resource availability and various service needs in order to
determine whether the design is of optimum quality and effective enough to
deliver the needs. The four sequential activities that form this process are
defining policies and methods, planning resources and capabilities, managing
design risks, and improving service design.
Service Transition
This is the third stage of the ITIL® service lifecycle. This is the
stage of project management where it focuses on maintaining the current state
of service all while deploying the new organizational changes as well as
managing services via transitions/discontinuations. It also helps in risk
mitigation. The Service Transition stage is composed of 7 ITIL processes which
I have discussed below in detail:
1. Change Management
This process ensures that with the changes in the business needs, the
services remain scalable and reliable. This process is made up of five
sequential activities which are registration and categorization, risk and
impact analysis, approval, coordinate change build and test, authorize change
deployment, and finally review and close change record
2. Change Evaluation
This process includes anticipation and management of changes, as well as
evaluation of the changes that will help in moving forward. The three
sequential activities that form this process are planning evaluation,
evaluating predicted performance, and evaluating actual performance.
3. Release and Deployment Management
This process takes care of software deployment while ensuring that the
business changes have minimal impact on the presently active production
environment. There are five sequential activities that are performed in this
process which are release planning, build and test release, deploying,
early life support, and reviewing and closure.
4. Service Validation and Testing
This process provides details of the testing and measuring results as
well as helps in making decisions regarding service changes and continuation.
Five sequential activities are performed in this process which
are, planning and designing tests, verifying test plans and designs,
preparing test environments, performing tests, evaluating exit criteria, and
cleaning test environments and closure.
5. Service Asset and Configuration
Management
This process is mainly responsible for the management of the
configuration items (CIs) attributes, status, owner, relationships, and
change/activity history, etc. There are five sequential activities in this
process, namely management and planning, CI identification, CI control,
Status accounting and reporting, and verification and accounting.
6. Knowledge Management
This process involves gathering and assembling of useful knowledge
that will be further used in resolving the issues by technicians and customers.
This process is made up of five sequential activities which are defining
knowledge management strategy, identifying and gathering data sources, drafting
knowledge, technical reviews, editorial reviews, and lastly publishing.
7. Transition Planning and Support
This process is less common and is implemented to plan for the
transition of a new or updated service into production. There are five
sequential activities that are performed in this process,
namely, defining transition strategy, preparing for service transition,
planning and coordinating service transition, and monitoring and reporting
progress.
Service Operations
This is the fourth stage of the ITIL service lifecycle. This stage
offers various ways to manage the smooth delivery of the services on a regular
basis. The ultimate objective of this stage is to provide value to the
customers. This stage keeps tabs on the changes in the business needs based on
the ever-changing technologies in today’s market. The Service Operation stage
is composed of 5 ITIL processes which I have discussed below in detail:
1. Incident Management
This process takes immediate action to restore the interruptions in
service due to various incidents such as password resets, printer failures, or
an error message, etc. There are five sequential activities in this process,
namely, registering & categorizing the incident, prioritizing,
investigating and diagnosing, resolution, and finally closure.
2. Problem Management
This process focuses on pinpointing and preventing recurrence of
the problems and incidents. There are five sequential activities performed in
this process, which are problem detection and logging, categorizing,
investigating and diagnosing, and problem resolution and closure.
3. Event Management
This process checks and analyzes all the service events that may occur
from various applications, monitoring solutions, and other systems to take
necessary actions to ensure service continuity. Five sequential activities
performed in this process are event notification, detecting the event,
correlating and filtering events, categorizing events, and lastly reviewing
event and closure.
4. Access Management
This process prevents unauthorized system access by allowing access only
to legitimate users. This process is made up of five sequential activities that
are accessing requisition, verifying and validating, provision of rights,
monitoring the access, tracking the access and finally de-provisioning the
access.
5. Service Request Fulfilment
This process receives, logs, prioritizes and resolves various
service requests that are often received by the service desk. There are five
sequential activities in this process that are, requesting registration,
validating request, categorizing and prioritizing requests, reviewing and
authorizing requests, and request closure.
Continual Service Improvement
This is the final stage of the ITIL® service lifecycle. This stage
introduces the improvements and policy changes/ updates within the ITIL® process
framework for service growth and enhancement. This stage basically pinpoints
the areas of improvements and the effects of those improvements you have made
by analyzing the metrics. It thoroughly analyses the reasons for success as
well as the failure of each business which further helps in identifying the
market trends, bottlenecks, and flaws. This stage guides a business in making
changes that will improve its business processes. The Continual Service
Improvement stage is made up just one process which is discussed below:
1. Seven-Step Improvement
This process is made up of seven sequential steps which are identifying
the strategy for improvement, defining what you will measure, gathering data,
processing data, analyzing information and data, presenting and using
information, and implementing improvement.
The key components
of the ITIL 4 framework are the ITIL service value system (SVS) and the four
dimensions model.
ITIL Four Dimensions
·
Organizations and People.
·
Information and Technology.
·
Partners and Suppliers.
·
Value Streams and Processes
