Home

Customers

Search Site   

                             I Catalogue I    I Support I   I Downloads/Pricing I   I Customer Area I

ITIL Business Process's (IT Infrastructure Library)

The ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library Process) consists of 7 sets: Service Support; Service Delivery; Planning to Implement Service Management; ICT Infrastructure Management; Applications Management; Security Management; The Business Perspective.

Although the UK Government created the ITIL, it has rapidly been adopted across the world as the standard for best practice in the provision of IT Service.

Configuration Management is the implementation of a database (Configuration Management Database – CMDB) that contains details of the organisation’s elements that are used in the provision and management of its IT services. This is more than just an ‘asset register’, as it will contain information that relates to the maintenance, movement, and problems experienced with the Configuration Items.

The CMDB also holds a much wider range of information about items that the organisation’s IT Services are dependant upon. This range of information includes:

• Hardware

• Software

• Documentation

• Personnel

Configuration Management essentially consists of 4 tasks:

Identification – this is the specification, identification of all IT components and their inclusion in the CMDB.

Control – this is the management of each Configuration Item, specifying who is authorised to ‘change’ it.

Status – this task is the recording of the status of all Configuration Items in the CMDB, and the maintenance of this information.

Verification – this task involves reviews and audits to ensure the information contained in the CMDB is accurate

Incident/Problem Management is the resolution and prevention of incidents that affect the normal running of an organisation’s IT services.

This includes ensuring that faults are corrected, preventing any recurrence of these faults, and the application of preventative maintenance to reduce the likelihood of these faults occurring in the first instance.

The effective practice of both Incident and Problem Management will ensure that the availability of IT services is maximised, and could also protect the integrity and confidentiality of information by identifying the root cause of a problem.

Change Management is the practice of ensuring all changes to Configuration Items eg: PC's, Switches, Infrastructure Items, Software etc) are carried out in a planned and authorised manner.

This includes ensuring that there is a business reason behind each change, identifying the specific Configuration Items and IT Services affected by the change, planning the change, testing the change, and having a back out plan should the change result in an unexpected state of the Configuration

IT Security must be embedded into the change management process to ensure that all changes have been assessed for risks. This will include assessing the potential business impacts should the change produce undesired results.

If Change Management procedures are not effective, this may result in unauthorised changes to IT Services, which could have major impacts on the business, including financial loss, customer loss, market loss, litigation, and in the worse case scenario, even collapse of the business that the IT Services are there to support.

The Service/Help Desk plays an important part in the provision of IT Services. It is very often the first contact the business users have in their use of IT Services when something does not work as expected. The Service/Help Desk is a single point of contact for end users who need help.

Without this, an organisation could certainly face losses due to inefficiencies.

The two main focuses of the Service Desk are Incident Control and Communication.

There are different types of Help Desk, the selection of which is dependant upon what the business requires. Some Help Desks provide a simple call logging function, and escalate calls to more experienced and trained staff.

Others provide a high degree of business and technical knowledge with the ability to solve most incidents at the time that the business user reports them.

This discipline of IT Service Management is the management of all software configuration items within the organisation. It is responsible for the management of software development, installation and support of an organisation’s software products.

Software is often not regarded as a tangible asset because of its intangible nature, which results in it not being effectively controlled. There can be several versions of the same software within the organisation, and there can also be unlicensed and illegal copies of externally provided software.

The practice of effective Software Control & Distribution involves the creation of a Definitive Software Library (DSL), into which the master copies of all software is stored and from here its control and release is managed.

The DSL consists of a physical store and a logical store. The physical store is where the master copies of all software media are stored. This tends to be software that has been provided from an external source.

Privacy Policy                                                                                                                                                                                                          NetWorld UK All Rights Reserved. © 1998 - 2009 NetWorld UK