History of ITIL

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ITIL was developed at the end of the 1980's by the Central Computing and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), a government agency in Great Britain. The reason for commissioning the CCTA was a lack of quality of the IT services procured by the British Government, so that a method had to be found to achieve better quality and simultaneously decrease their costs. The objective was to develop effective and efficient methods for the provision of IT Services - in other words a catalogue of best practices for the IT organisation, which today is known as ITIL.

The essence of the methods is to make IT services explicit and strictly focused on client needs. This is combined with clearly defined responsibilities for service provision within the IT organisation, and effectively designed IT processes. As a result, the IT organisation concentrates on the services required by the customer side, rather than being focused on technologies.

The recommendations thus compiled are very broadly valid. It was found that the requirements of the businesses and organisations examined by the CCTA were mostly similar, independent of their size or industry sector.

A series of books on ITIL has been issued since 1989 by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an administrative body of the Government of Great Britain: ITIL is a registered trademark of the OGC.

Recognition of ITIL as a De-Facto-Standard

In the past years, ITIL has become the de-facto standard for IT Service Management. Increasingly, IT managers developed an awareness for the service- and customer-driven approach championed by ITIL, and the ITIL terminology is widely understood and used.

The ITIL philosophy has found its way into a multitude of other models for IT Service Management, as for example:

• ISO 20000 (formerly BS 15000): Information Technology - Service Management
• HP ITSM Reference Model (Hewlett Packard)
• IT Process Model (IBM)
• Microsoft Operations Framework

New ITIL Version in 2007: The ITIL V3 Service Lifecycle

In 2007 the OGC published a completely revised version of ITIL, known as “ITIL Version 3 (ITIL V3)”. ITIL V3 reflects the experiences gained with the earlier versions and puts a greater emphasis on creating business value. In comparison to ITIL V2 - which consisted of nine books - it is more streamlined around a set of five new core publications which together form the “ITIL V3 Service Lifecycle”:

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement

The rationale for organizing the ITIL books in this way was to establish a Deming-like Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle focused on continual improvement.

Overall, ITIL V3 complements the processes known from ITIL V2 with a number of new processes and puts more emphasis on producing value for the business. The underlying principles of ITIL are largely unchanged.

ITIL 2011 Upgrade

Four years after the introduction of ITIL V3 the main guidance has been updated, taking into account feedback from the user and training community. The new ITIL 2011 edition was published at the end of July 2011.

As the official ITIL Update FAQs state, "ITIL 2011 is an update, not a new version". No entirely new concepts have been added, but the aim of the update is to "resolve errors and inconsistencies in the text and diagrams across the whole suite". As for ITIL examinations, no re-certifications are required, but updated syllabuses and examinations will be used to bring the certification scheme into line with the latest guidance.

There also seems to be a new naming convention. As "ITIL V3 (2011 Edition)" is somewhat unwieldy, and ITIL V2 will not be around for much longer, the latest edition is now referred to as "ITIL 2011" or simply "ITIL", while the term "ITIL 2007" is used for the first edition of ITIL V3.

We provided more insights on what is new in ITIL 2011 and aligned this ITIL Wiki with the new guidance as we looked at all the details while upgrading our ITIL Process Map.

 

→ Details: ITIL 2011