Availability Management coordinates, designs, measures, and manages IT infrastructure availability, taking into account all
aspects of the infrastructure and supporting organization. It coordinates and integrates loose-knit technology silos to ensure
that needed services can actually be delivered at required levels and cost. This process brings together key disciplines such
as reliability, serviceability, maintainability, security, and responsiveness for each service being delivered. It also assesses
service risk and identifies mitigations where necessary.
Capacity Management looks at IT capacity, performance, and throughput compared with business workloads and objectives. Historically,
the majority of IT organizations have focused on managing capacity based on how IT resources are being used. ITIL requires
IT to first identify business drivers of capacity, translating them into service workloads through modeling and development
of projections before applying them to the IT infrastructure. Other activities such as performance tuning and the sizing of
hardware and software for application projects are included in this process.
IT Service Continuity Management ensures that IT services can be recovered in the event of a major disaster. It turns on the
concept of Vital Business Functions and forces IT to look at how services -- rather than just technologies -- can be restored.
ITIL aligns IT continuity plans with the business continuity plan in order to coordinate, design, plan, and test disaster-recovery
policies to keep IT services running in the event of a major disruption to the business.
Finally, IT Financial Management provides budgeting, accounting, and charging services to manage IT costs and spending. In
today’s world, very few IT organizations can actually identify what services they deliver, let alone what costs are incurred
to deliver them, which is one reason IT has had little credibility in the boardroom. Developing the ability to articulate
costs and IT’s contribution to the bottom line brings market dynamics and modern business practices to the IT organization.
The Service Desk exists here, too. In a typical business organization, business users and customers will interface with the
Service Desk function on a daily basis as part of the Service Support workflow. At the same time, executives and management
will interface with the Service Level Management process to put new services into place and review service quality using the
Service Delivery workflow. This is how ITIL neatly divides the work that IT does, with emphasis on how it touches the business.
5. How about the other seven books? Are they chopped liver?
Not at all. After you have absorbed the basic concepts, you can learn a lot from the other seven volumes. For instance, as
you might imagine, Introduction to ITIL introduces the basic concepts that comprise the ITIL approach to service management.
Then, Planning to Implement Service Management explains the steps necessary to identify how an organization will benefit from
ITIL. ICT Infrastructure Management covers critical issues such as network service management, operations management, computer
installation and acceptance, and systems management. Applications Management focuses on software development and support lifecycles,
defining requirements, and testing of IT services.
The Business Perspective volume is actually two books -- one aimed at IT staffers, and the other intended for business managers.
Together, they discuss business continuity management, partnerships, outsourcing, surviving change, and transforming business
practices through radical change. Security Management discusses security practices and standards from an ITIL perspective.
Finally, Software Asset Management provides best practices for managing software and software licenses.
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