what is itil?

ITIL
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The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations.

ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC).


History:
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Responding to growing dependence on IT, the UK Government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the 1980s developed a set of recommendations. It recognized that without standard practices, government agencies and private sector contracts were independently creating their own IT management practices.

The IT Infrastructure Library originated as a collection of books, each covering a specific practice within IT Service Management. ITIL was built around a process-model based view of controlling and managing operations often credited to W. Edwards Deming and his plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle .

After the initial publication in 1989-1996, the number of books quickly grew within ITIL v1 to over 30 volumes.

In 2000/2001, to make ITIL more accessible (and affordable), ITIL v2 consolidated the publications into 8 logical "sets" that grouped related process-guidelines to match different aspects of IT management, applications, and services. However, the main focus was known as the Service Management sets (Service Support and Service Delivery) which were by far the most widely used, circulated, and understood of ITIL v2 publications.

In April 2001 the CCTA was merged into the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an office of the UK Treasury.
In 2006, the ITIL v2 glossary was published.
In May 2007, this organization issued the version 3 of ITIL (also known as the ITIL Refresh Project) consisting of 26 processes and functions, now grouped under only 5 volumes, arranged around the concept of Service lifecycle structure.
In 2009, the OGC officially announced that ITIL v2 would be withdrawn and launched a major consultation as per how to proceed.
Overview of the ITIL v2 library
The eight ITIL version 2 books and their disciplines are:
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The IT Service Management sets

1. Service Support
2. Service Delivery
Other operational guidance

3. ICT Infrastructure Management
4. Security Management
5. The Business Perspective
6. Application Management
7. Software Asset Management
To assist with the implementation of ITIL practices a further book was published  providing guidance on implementation (mainly of Service Management):

8. Planning to Implement Service Management
And this has more recently been supplemented with guidelines for smaller IT units, not included in the original eight publications:

9. ITIL Small-Scale Implementation
 1. Service Support
The Service Support ITIL discipline focuses on the User of the ICT services and is primarily concerned with ensuring that they have access to the appropriate services to support the business functions.

To a business, customers and users are the entry point to the process model. They get involved in service support by:

Asking for changes
Needing communication, updates
Having difficulties, queries.
Real process delivery

The service desk functions as the single contact-point for end-users' incidents. Its first function is always to "create" an incident. If there is a direct solution, it attempts to resolve the incident at the first level. If the service desk cannot solve the incident then it is passed to a 2nd/3rd level group within the incident management system. Incidents can initiate a chain of processes: Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management and Configuration Management. This chain of processes is tracked using the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which records each process