- Training
- Qualifications
- Consultancy
- Software tools
- User Groups (itSMF)
ITIL origins
The CCTA is the UK government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency and has been in existence for 25 years. In developing ITIL, it was fulfilling its role to document and promulgate best practice in the field of IT and encourage UK Government IT directorates to adopt that best practice. In 2001 the CCTA became part of the Office of Government Commerce or OGC.
ITIL was initially developed and is still owned by the CCTA. The primary objective was to publish a set of comprehensive, consistent and coherent codes of best practice for IT service management, promoting business effectiveness in the use of information systems. CCTA's customer base was central government, but it was soon clear that the requirements of central government for advice in this field were no different from general needs of organizations; public or private sector, large or small, centralized or distributed, local or international.
There was also, from the beginning, a declared secondary objective - to encourage the private sector to develop supporting services and products such as training, consulting and tools to support the guidance documented in the IT Infrastructure Library.
ITIL - Best Practice
ITIL was created in recognition of organizations ever-increasing dependency on IT. Without IT most business cannot function; without quality IT services they cannot function well. Organizations therefore need quality IT service provision.
Most organizations spend more on IT service provision, including maintenance of those services, than on IT development projects. It is imperative that users of those IT services obtain value for money. The services must, of course, be matched to business needs and customer requirement as they change; they must also be provided economically, making optimum use of scarce IT skills. There is continual pressure in many organizations to reduce cost while maintaining or improving the IT services.
When the ITIL project was initiated and scooped there was no comprehensive guidance available to advise on what needed to be done to provide efficient and effective IT services.
ITIL remains the only comprehensive, non-proprietary, publicly available set of guidance, making it a unique and valuable product.
ITIL documents best practice for IT service management, this being determined through the involvement of industry experts, consultants and practitioners. ITIL provides a systematic approach to help organizations deliver well-managed IT services in the face of many constraints such as lack of finance and time, more exacting and unpredictable business requirements and user demands, and the growing complexity of IT.
