Essay: ITIL (formerly Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

ITIL was formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library and it consists of a set of practices for IT service management also known as ITSM. ITIL focuses on aligning the IT services in a company to best fit with the necessities of the business.
The concept of ITIL first was developed in the 1980’s, by the British government when it was determined that it was not sufficient the level of the quality of the IT services provided. The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), nowadays named the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) it was nominated to create a framework, within the British government and the private sector, for an efficient use of the resources for IT. It was observed that without any standard practices, the private sector together with the government agencies, were starting to create their individual IT management practices.
The first version of ITIL it was originally named Government Information Technology Infrastructure Management (GITIM). This was very different from the ITIL from now, but they were following the same concepts, both being focused on delivery and service support. The standard was originally created as a collection of books and each of them was referring to a specific practice in the IT service management. It was developed on a process model-based principle of managing and controlling operations, usually credited to W. Edwards Deming and the cycle created by him plan-do-check-act (PDCA).
In the 1990’s the framework was adopted by government agencies in Europe and large companies from the private sector. The concept of ITIL was becoming much known and it was being used both in the private sector, by companies and also by the governments organizations. As the concept of IT became more popularly, both in UK and across the world, ITIL evolution was also influenced.
The CCTA merged into the Office for Government Commerce (OGC) in the year 2000, also in the same year ITIL was used by Microsoft for developing the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). The second version of ITIL appeared in 2001. This version had redeveloped the Service Support and the Service Delivery, into more concise volumes. In the next years, the ITIL framework became the most used IT service management best practice approach all over the world.
The third version of the ITIL framework was published in 2007. This version approached more the lifecycle section from the service management part, emphasizing especially on the IT business integration.
The current form of ITIL ‘ the 2011 edition, has been published as a series of five core volumes. Each volume covers a different lifecycle stage of ITSM. Even though ITIL strengthens and supports the standard ISO/IEC 20000 (formerly known as BS15000), the International Service Management Standard for IT service management, some differences exist between the two of them and they complete each other.
The ITIL framework describes non organization-specific procedures, processes, checklists and tasks that can be applied by any company or organization in order to establish the integration of its strategy. This delivers the value and maintains a minimum level of competency, also it allows to the company or organization to create a baseline which helps to plan, implement and measure. The framework is used as a guideline which demonstrates the compliance and measures the improvement.