IT Top Ten Best Practices

In the early 1990s the UK set up a scheme where onsultants were hired, processes evaluated, and the result was the creation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which was later made available to the public. The IT Infrastructure Library originated as a collection of books each covering a specific practice within IT Service Management. In order to make ITIL more accessible (and affordable) to those wishing to explore it, one of the aims of ITIL v2 was to consolidate the publications into logical 'sets' that grouped related process guidelines into the different aspects of IT management, applications and services.

Operations should primarily work from documented processes and procedures and should be concerned with a number of specific sub-processes, such as: Output Management, Job Scheduling, Backup and Restore, Network Monitoring/Management, System Monitoring/Management, Database Monitoring/Management Storage Monitoring/Management. The Service Delivery discipline is primarily concerned with the proactive and forward-looking services that the business requires of its ICT provider in order to provide adequate support to the business users. IT Top Ten Best Practices Being a structured methodology widely recognised and understood, Prince2 provides a common language for all participants in the project.

To help maintain the process, a commitment to training, reviewing the process, and testing the process needs to occur. One way ITSC managers can make sure that ITSCM is effective is through continued communication with the other IT service management (ITSM) processes.

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.