ITIL

ITIL is a framework for IT Service Management, intended to help guide IT professionals and organizations by identifying processes that assist with providing services. ITIL is predicated on thinking about what IT does in terms of the services it provides and plans to provide. Therefore, ITIL's definition of a service is an important one:

A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks.

When IT provides a "service," it is buying and maintaining components (hardware, software, server room colocation, disk infrastructure, network, etc.) and packaging up all those things into one "service"--the stuff that one or more departments actually care about. Part of IT's "added value" is in doing a good job at insulating end users from these components and ensuring the service is available. ITIL's processes then focus on specific aspects of providing services, such as ensuring services are tested or ensuring that the impact of a change is known before a service is modified.

Videos, Photos, and Presentations

Contacts and Resources

EDUCAUSE Presentations

• Understanding and Applying ITIL in Higher Education
• ITIL in the Real World: NYU Leverages ITIL Best Practices to Enhance IT Organizational Processes

University ITIL Implementations

• University of Minnesota's ITIL implementation checklist
• "University of Pennsylvania builds ITIL from the ground up"
• Michigan State University's "Introducing ITIL" to their campus article

ITIL Official Materials

• The Official ITIL Site
• IT Service Management Forum: US chapter of the itSMF international organization
• IT Service Management Zone
• An Introductory Overview of ITIL V3, an itSMF publication published in association with Best Management Practice Partnership
• ITIL Glossaries and Acronyms from the Office of Government Commerce(OGC) - includes ITIL v2 and v3
• A vendor independent, interactive, user portal dedicated exclusively to ITIL
• Directory of software and services for ITIL, ITSM and Security: www.itil-itsm-world.com
• The ITIL v3 Lifecycle Suite
• The official Introduction to ITIL v3's lifecycle