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.

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: