ITIL and its Applicability to Tools

[thyagk]

Hi,

I am new to ITIL concept and to this forum.

I am coming from Software Configuration Management background and i am posting this question little bit early before i understand the full context of ITIL.

1. I basically lead the software tools team of a software company and i want to improve the way how we deal with the vendors, contracts, services etc along with finding better approaches to improve the tools support and services to the development department. In what ways i can use ITIL in the above situation?

2. What are the categories of ITIL that is applicable for software tools?

Rgds
Thyag

[rjp]

There is a book on application management. I haven't read it, but it may cover some of the stuff you are interested in.

But more generally with regard to ITIL - it is an IT Service Management framework. It describes a set of related processes (with objectives, costs, benefits, inter-process relationships, inputs, etc) which when applied together provide sound management of production IT.

By this I mean the ITIL processes will render your IT production activity, visible, recordable, measurable, cost-able and accountable - in short manageable.

The over-arching objective of ITIL is the alignment of IT production efforts to the needs of the business. One of the most central concepts of ITIL is that of a Service. Everything in it works through this concept. That is, IT does not deliver technology to the business, but manages technology to deliver operation capability to the business as defined services.

In the context of your issue: As a software company, the software development tools (and systems) provide business production capability, just as large financial applications do to banks or insurance companies.

From an ITIL perspective, you would define and maintain a separation between the management of those tools/systems, including the infrastructure required to support them, and the processes that use them as production input - ie., the company's software development teams.

ITIL will describe - in great detail, how you set up your own activities to achieve this.

It will not define or recommend supporting technologies or tools. There are Service Management systems out there (lots of them) that are more or less in tune with the ITIL framework. But they are not tools for managing other tools/technologies. They manage management processes - work requests, reports, service definition, incident logging and response tracking, workflow assignments, communication, etc. etc. [Some however, like HPs Service Desk, are integrated into suites of technologies that also work in the infrastructure / systems management space.]

Which brings me to the final point - ITIL is a management framework in the normal sense of the word 'management': It is about using resources, monitoring and controlling activities (mostly by staff), allocating responsibilities, and settting objectives.

Systems mangagement - implementing, administering and maintaining the technology itself is a different (but important) area of activity.