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Service Delivery
This book is one of a series issued as part of the updated IT Infrastructure Library that documents industry best practice for the support and delivery of IT services. Although this book can be read in isolation it is recommended that it be used in conjunction with the other IT Infrastructure Library books. Service management is a generic concept and the guidance in the new IT Infrastructure Library books is applicable generically. The guidance is also applicable to both small and large organisations. It applies to distributed and centralized systems, whether in-house or supplied by third parties. It is neither bureaucratic nor unwieldy if implemented sensibly and in full recognition of the business needs of the organization.
378 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2001
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February 21, 2012
Information technology has become a key infrastructure for modern business and managing such an infrastructure in a timely, efficient and effective way has become critical. ITIL and COBIT provide two widely recognized and, more than one sense, complementary sets of ideas on how best to manage the IT services that underpin modern business operations. ITIL claims to provide “...a comprehensive, consistent and coherent set of best business practices for IT service management processes” whereas COBIT is more concerned with governance and control of IT operations.
There are important and major differences between ITIL version 2 (which is what is described in this book) and version 3. If you are new to ITIL, it is probably wiser for you to skip this 2001 version of ITIL (ITIL version 2) and go straight to the new 2011 version of ITIL (version 3). For example, such a jump will save you the wear and tear of trying to figure out the difference between service delivery and service support processes which needlessly scars version 2.
Be warned, this is a typical, but overly expensive, standards book written by many authors, and in spite of well-meant and careful attention to the writing, it does lapse into committee-speak, it is both denser than it seems at first sight and, sometimes, the definitions seem to fall maddeningly short. For example after admitting that it is not easy to define exactly what a service is and that “IT staff often confuse a ´service´ as perceived by the Customer with an IT system”, they offer a “possible definition”: “One or more IT systems which enable a business process”. After the authors explicitly state that systems are not to be confused with services, they do exactly what they had warned against.
Read chapter 4,Service Level Management, very, very carefully and before any of the other later chapters; it hold the key to understanding this service management framework. However, keep in mind that this is agreement-based approach to service runs radically counter to the service industry´s current approaches to providing customer-centered quality services. For example a hotel business or a waiter will not present its customers with written "service-level" agreement and ask them to sign them!
ITIL grew out of the attempts of a very sophisticated and technically savvy bureaucracy (British government) to deal with the problems of IT management. This has led to a complex, interlinking set of processes which, I believe, requires sophisticated teamwork to pull off successfully. You can see this more clearly if you try to list with whom any of the process managers has to keep in touch in order to do his job properly.
In spite of all the caveats, I believe that ITIL is an important IT management framework and this book was a key element in catapulting it upon a world stage. I certainly plan to keep this book until my poor third-world university library manages to scrape together funds to buy the version three collection of books so I can read them.
There are important and major differences between ITIL version 2 (which is what is described in this book) and version 3. If you are new to ITIL, it is probably wiser for you to skip this 2001 version of ITIL (ITIL version 2) and go straight to the new 2011 version of ITIL (version 3). For example, such a jump will save you the wear and tear of trying to figure out the difference between service delivery and service support processes which needlessly scars version 2.
Be warned, this is a typical, but overly expensive, standards book written by many authors, and in spite of well-meant and careful attention to the writing, it does lapse into committee-speak, it is both denser than it seems at first sight and, sometimes, the definitions seem to fall maddeningly short. For example after admitting that it is not easy to define exactly what a service is and that “IT staff often confuse a ´service´ as perceived by the Customer with an IT system”, they offer a “possible definition”: “One or more IT systems which enable a business process”. After the authors explicitly state that systems are not to be confused with services, they do exactly what they had warned against.
Read chapter 4,Service Level Management, very, very carefully and before any of the other later chapters; it hold the key to understanding this service management framework. However, keep in mind that this is agreement-based approach to service runs radically counter to the service industry´s current approaches to providing customer-centered quality services. For example a hotel business or a waiter will not present its customers with written "service-level" agreement and ask them to sign them!
ITIL grew out of the attempts of a very sophisticated and technically savvy bureaucracy (British government) to deal with the problems of IT management. This has led to a complex, interlinking set of processes which, I believe, requires sophisticated teamwork to pull off successfully. You can see this more clearly if you try to list with whom any of the process managers has to keep in touch in order to do his job properly.
In spite of all the caveats, I believe that ITIL is an important IT management framework and this book was a key element in catapulting it upon a world stage. I certainly plan to keep this book until my poor third-world university library manages to scrape together funds to buy the version three collection of books so I can read them.
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