Preface

The ethos behind the development of ITIL is the recognition that organization s are increasingly dependent upon IT to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This growing dependency leads to growing needs for quality IT services – quality that is matched to business needs and user requirements as they emerge.

This is true no matter what type or size of organization, be it national government, a multinational conglomerate, a decentralized office with either a local or centralized IT provision, an outsourced service provider or a single office environment with one person providing IT support. In each case there is the requirement to provide an economical service that is reliable, consistent and fit for purpose.

IT service management (ITSM) is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirement s of the organization. ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent and coherent set of best practice s for IT service management processes, promoting a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information system s. ITIL service management processes are intended to be implemented so that they underpin but do not dictate the business process es of an organization. IT service provider s will be striving to improve the quality of the service, but at the same time they will be trying to reduce the cost s or, at a minimum, maintain costs at the current level.

The best-practice processes promoted in this publication both support and are supported by the ISO Standard for IT Service Management (ISO/IEC 20000) and the ISO quality standard ISO 9000.

This is a volume of principles, practices and methods that can be collectively applied towards an approach to continual service improvement, both in industry and government. The guidance in this publication has been written for managers and practitioners at all levels, whether they be senior executives providing leadership and direction through objectives, policies and strategies; or consultants, experts and practitioners who carry out programme s and operation s that will ultimately realize the objectives. This publication is about effective continual service improvements. It is to be noted that the improvements will range in scope and scale. Depending on the nature of their business, readers may be interested in one or more of the above perspectives, either in sequence or combination.

The context of this publication is set by the ITIL® which today is the most popular framework worldwide among organizations seeking to develop and improve their capabilities in IT service management.

The drafts of this publication have been reviewed by consultants, experts, practitioners and business managers with tough criteria for what can be considered best practice. This includes customers and providers of IT service s facing some difficult problems that they hope would be easier to solve with right type of knowledge. A guiding principle has been that management decisions, practice s and methods should be based on hard evidence rather than untested opinions, popular notions and insufficient information. In other words, this publication provides evidence-based service management that can be useful and relevant for creating and delivering value to their customer s in the form of service s. Without being either too prescriptive or too generic, this publication aims to strike a balance by providing robust principles, practices and methods that can be applied under varying organizational contexts and business scenarios.

CSI is, as its name implies, an ongoing activity woven into the fabric of an organization as opposed to a reactive response to a specific situation or a temporary crisis. These quick-fix initiatives are heralded with laments of:

• ‘Oh my, the network keeps going down, then up, then down again. We need an instant stability programme.’
• ‘The server s just blew up! We need to start managing availability... this minute!’
• ‘Sadly, because the network keeps going up and down and the servers are blowing up, IT staff morale is in the toilet. We need a quick turnaround team-building programme.’

This approach is far too common in today’s organizations and has little to do with the discipline of CSI. Implementing CSI will force major change for many organizations. This change initiative as well as the full breadth of service improvement is the focus of this publication.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02