Best Practices

IT Infrastructure Library & IT Service Management

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally. It is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organizations, and implementation and assessment tools. The best practice processes promoted in ITIL both support and are supported by the British Standards Institution's Standard for IT Service Management (ITSM).

P4 has adopted ITIL best practices as its guideline for building a world class IT Service Management organization. Although managing the technology itself is a necessary component of most ITSM solutions, it is not a primary focus. Instead ITSM addresses the need to align the delivery of IT services closely with the needs of the business. This transformation of a traditional "business - IT paradigm" can be depicted by some of the following attributes:

Traditional IT	becomes	ITSM Process
Technology focus		Process focus
"Fire-fighting"		Preventative
Reactive		Proactive
Users		Customers
Centralized, done in-house		Distributed, sourced
Isolated, silos		Integrated, enterprise-wide
"One off", adhoc		Repeatable, accountable
Informal processes		Formal best practices
IT internal perspective		Business perspective
Operational specific		Service orientation

IT Service Support

• Configuration Management - physical and logical perspective of the IT infrastructure and the IT services being provided
• Change Management - standard methods and procedures for effective managing of all changes
• Release Management - testing, verification, and release of changes to the IT environment
• Incident Management - the day-to-day process that restores normal acceptable service with a minimal impact on business
• Problem Management - the diagnosis of the root causes of incidents in an effort to proactively eliminate and manage them
• Service Desk (Function) - a function not a process, this provides a central point of contact between users and IT

IT Service Delivery

• Availability Management - optimize IT infrastructure capabilities, services, and support to minimize service outages and provide sustained levels of service to meet business requirements
• IT Service Continuity - managing an organization's capability to provide the necessary level of service following an interruption of service
• Capacity Management - enables an organization to tactically manage resources and strategically plan for future resource requirements
• Service Level Management - maintain and improve the level of service to the organization
• Financial Management for IT Services - managing the costs associated with providing the organization with the resources needed to meet requirements

Within this framework, effectively managing IT as an enterprise wide, service-oriented entity typically comprises one or more of the following separate and distinct perspectives:

• People - quantity and quality of expertise and knowledge
• Process - IT and organization specific practices, procedures, guidelines, etc. and the level of complexity and sophistication of them
• Technology - total logical and physical technology infrastructure consisting of hardware, software, communication networks, applications, DBMS, etc.
• Organization - internal and external business factors that affect IT, how IT and the organization interface, what is the organizations "corporate culture", what are the organization's direction and how does that affect IT
• Integration - how is IT integrated within the business model, what services do IT provide, how are the services provided, and how are best practices employed within IT