ITIL practices

Continual improvement

The purpose of this practice is to align the organization’s practices and services with changing business needs via the ongoing improvement of products, services and practices, or any element involved in the management of products and services.

Information security management

The purpose of this practice is to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business. The necessary security is established by means of policies, processes, behaviors, risk management, and controls, which must maintain a balance between:

a.       Prevention: ensuring that security incidents do not occur.

b.       Detection: rapidly and reliably detecting incidents that cannot be prevented.

c.       Correction: recovering from incidents after they are detected.

Relationship management

The purpose of this practice is to establish and nurture the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels. There is a need to establish/maintain relationships between the organization and its stakeholders. Service providers quite naturally focus most of their efforts on their relationships with service consumers (sponsors, customers, and users).

Supplier management

The purpose of this practice is to ensure that the organization’s suppliers and their performances are managed appropriately to support the seamless provision of quality products and services. Organizations should evaluate and select suppliers based on:

a.       Importance and impact: the value of the service to the business, provided by the supplier.

b.       Risk: the risks associated with using the service, as well as any risks associated with the supplier organization itself.

Costs: the cost of the service and its provision.

Change enablement

The purpose of this practice is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that the risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed and managing the change schedule.

Incident management

The purpose of this practice is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.

IT asset management

The purpose of this practice is to plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets to help the organization 1) maximize value 2) control costs 3) manage risks 4) support decision-making about purchase, reuse, retirement, and disposal of assets 5) meet regulatory and contractual requirements.

Monitoring and event management

The purpose of this practice is to systematically observe services and service components, and record and report selected changes of state identified as events. This practice manages events throughout their lifecycle to prevent, minimize, or eliminate their negative impact on the business.

Problem management

The purpose of this practice is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents, by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors.

Release management

The purpose of this practice is to make new and changed services and features available for use. A release may comprise of many different infrastructure and application components that collaborate to deliver new or changed functionality. It may also include documentation, training (for users or IT staff), updated processes or tools, and any other components that are required.

Service configuration management

The purpose of this practice is to ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services and the CIs that support them is available when and where it is needed. This practice collects and manages information about a wide variety of CIs, typically including hardware, software, networks, buildings, people, suppliers, and documentation. Services are also treated as CIs, and this practice helps the organization to understand how the many CIs that contribute to each service collaborate.

Service desk

The purpose of this practice is to capture demand for incident resolution and service requests. It should also be the entry point and single point of contact for the service provider with all its users.

Service level management

The purpose of this practice is to set clear business-based targets for service levels and to ensure that delivery of services is properly assessed, monitored, and managed against these targets.

Service request management

The purpose of this practice is to support the agreed quality of a service by handling all predefined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.

Deployment management

The purpose of this practice is to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments.

IT asset

is defined as any financially valuable component that can contribute to the delivery of an IT product or service.

Event

is any change of state that has significance for the management of a service or other Configuration Item (CI).

Configuration item

any component that needs to be managed to deliver an IT service.

Change

The addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services

Incident

an unplanned failure/interruption to a service or a reduction in the quality of a service

Problem

a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents

Known error

a problem that has been analyzed but has not been resolved.