IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

Once an organization has gone through the process of identifying what its Services are, as well as developing and implementing the IT Service Mangement (ITSM) processes to enable those services, many believe that the hard work is done. How wrong they are!! The real work is only just beginning. How do organizations get buy-in for using the new processes? How do organizations measure, report and use the data to improve not only the new processes but to continually improve the Services being provided? This requires a conscious decision to adopt CSI with clearly defined goals, documented procedures, inputs, outputs and identified roles and responsibilities. To be successful, CSI must be embedded within each organization's culture.

The service lifecycle is a comprehensive approach to Service Management: seeking to understand its structure, the interconnections between all its components,and how changes in any area will affect the whole system and its constituent parts over time. It is an organizing framework designed for sustainable performance.

The Service Lifecycle can be viewed in a graphical manner, where it is easy to demonstrate the value provided, both in terms of "business contribution" and "profit" The business contribution is the ability for an IT organzation to support a business process, managing the IT service at the requested performance. The profit is the ability to manage cost of service in realtions to the business revenue.

The service Lifecycle can be viewed as a phased lifecycle, where the phases are: - Defining strategy for the IT Service Management (Service Strategy or SS) - Designing the services to support the strategy (Service Delivery or SD) - Implement the services in order to meet the designed requirements (Service Transition or ST) - Support the servcies managing the operational activities (Service Operation or SO)

The interaction between phases are managed through the Continual Service Improvement approach, which is responsible for measuring and improving service and process maturity level. After Comparison of all phases, a service period is concluded and another service period begins.

The Continual Service Improvement phase is involved during all phases of the service Lifecycle. It is responsible for measuring the service and the processes, (Service Measurement), and to document the results (Service Reporting) in order to improve the services quality and the processes maturity (Service Improvement). These improvements will be implemented in the next period of Service Lifecycle, stating again with Service Strategy, and after with Service Design and Transition, the Service Operation phase of course continue to manages operations during all service periods.

With the evolution of service periods, the "effort" for each phase will be reduced concerning the strategic and tactical phases (SS,SD and ST), here the SO phase is optimized and takes the primary role. At each cycle of the service (service period) the service will be improved with results of increasing of the Value of business and maximizing of Profits.

In terms of Business Contribution, the IT Service begins to be valuable when in the first step the Service Transtion starts.

In terms of profits, the major investments are required with the big implementation projects (ST), when the transition is complete and the Operations start, the service begins to support business process and the new revenues balance the costs. After some periods of service optimization the "Profit & Loss" start to be profitable and reach the "break even point".

After a number of periods (depending on the complexity of the service and the complexity of the service and the flexibility of the business), thebusiness contribution and the profit will be stabilized, which means that the IT organization has reached the right level of maturity in managing processes and the service has reached the right level of performance in meeting the service level requirements.

Qualification Carl Evertz
  • attendance to a 3 days trainining in ITIL V3 foundation
    weekend training in May 2008
  • ITIL V3 foundation certification


ITIL © is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government in the United Kingdom and other countries


Download: Certificate



   © Carl Evertz 2000 - 2009latest update: 07.12.2009