IT Service Management Toolkit

The ITIL recommendations were developed in the 1980s by the UK Government's CCTA in response to the growing dependence on IT and a recognition that without standard practices, government agencies and private sector contracts were independently creating their own IT management practices and duplicating effort within their Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects resulting in common mistakes and increased costs. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has developed the Framework for ICT Technical Support (FITS) and is based on ITIL, but it is slimmed down for UK primary and secondary schools (which often have very small IT departments). Although ITIL was originally defined in the UK, ITIL is becoming the defacto global standard for ITSM and has strong support in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.

ITSM is about delivering information technology as a set of services to the business customer. A major upgrade or release usually supersedes all preceding minor upgrades, releases and emergency fixes. IT Service Management Toolkit The high level activities are Risk Analysis, Contingency Plan Management, Contingency Plan Testing, and Risk Management.

A change is "an event that results in a new status of one or more configuration items (CI's)" approved by management, cost effective, enhances business process changes (fixes) - with a minimum risk to IT infrastructure. The discipline is not concerned with the details of how to use a particular vendor's product, or necessarily with the technical details of the systems under management.

ITIL Service Delivery Processes include Service Level Management, Financial Management for IT Services, Availability Management, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity Management, and Security Management.