Getting Started with ITIL

[Jamie]

I work for a company that develops system monitoring products and we would like to better support ITIL since many of our customers are adopting ITIL standards, however, we are bit confused about where to start.

There are a variety of companies and sites listing various ITIL books, PDFs, check lists, what is the best source for information? It there a definitive standard?

Thanks,

Jamie.

[Toshi]

Hello Jamie.

It maybe misunderstanding.
ITIL is not fixed reguration for IT service operation.
Actually, there is no practical method in official documents.
If you would support your customer with your tool, you should listen to the customer. And then you will consider what you should do that for your customer, I guess.

Thanks,
Toshi

[rjp]

The second half of your question first:

The authoritative source for ITIL references is the Birtish OGC (Office of Government Commerce). They developed the ITIL and hold the IP.

Another good source is the IT Service Management Forum, which is International and has braches in a large number of countries (each with it's own web site). In most countries the ITSMF also is a place where you can purchase parts of the ITIL.

Note, the L in ITIL stands for Library - hence my use of 'the' in fornt of it. It is a series of publications, outlining a framework - in is not a standard.

Bear in mind also, that organisations, services and software cannot be rated as ITIL compliant of certified - not by the owners of the ITIL. Though some third parties offer this as their own service, notably Pink Elephant. Only individuals can be ITIL certified.

Now for the first half:

If you are seeking to make your products more ITIL riendly to your customers, a couple of things to bear in mind might be:

Your key area of concern withing ITIL is going to be those processes where configuration status data is an input: Availablity Management, Capacity Management, Service Level Management, Incident Management and of course Configuration Management.

Also, be careful that you understand the different objectives for Systems Management and Service Management (Pink has some good stuff on this). If I understand you correctly you are selling into the Systems Management space - selling Systems Management capability as Configuration Management capability is not a good idea because expectations and outcomes will not match. If you want to sell Configuration Management capability you have to make sure you products don't simply report on the state of infrastructure, but provide ways of collecting, collating and relating that data to Services.

Also, bear in mind that really supporting ITIL in a Systems Management application may mean taking something out - well not really, but ITIL Configuration Management is about having monitoiring and management controls on the activites undertaken to maintain the infrastructure - so that someone can't for example disable a protocol on a switch without prior approval and sign off. It's not really about giving people additional means to do this - again, that's Systems Management capability.