ITIL 4 Foundation
Summary of the ITSM standard.
The ITSM model helps to group the business processes of an IT service into the following thematic blocks (like in the ITIL 4 Foundation https://itil.press/ framework):
• block of building relationships between IT department and business departments:
— the process of analyzing business needs, the main task of which is to agree on goals and priorities between the business units of the enterprise and the IT service;
— the process of managing clients, defining and coordinating the requirements for specific services required by departments;
– development of an information technology development strategy that organizes an integrated corporate process for the development of information technologies to ensure their compliance with the main goals and needs of the enterprise;
• service provision block:
— the process of managing the level of service (quality of service), coordinating the specifications for the composition and parameters of the service and the resources provided by the IT service;
— the cost management process, which calculates costs, user prices, and also searches for ways to reduce costs;
– availability management process (time of service provision, depends on IT infrastructure);
– capacity management (performance);
– continuity management (ability to maintain services in emergency situations);
• block of development and implementation of services:
– the process of development and testing, the main task of which is the implementation of the service in accordance with its specifications;
– the commissioning process, which provides the infrastructure for the functioning of the new service and prepares reference manuals, as well as training specialists for technical support of the service;
• service support block:
– user support function (Service Desk);
– an incident management process that ensures the restoration of a service by handling incidents — events that are not part of the normal functioning of the service, leading (potentially) to its failure or decrease in its quality;
– a problem management process designed to eliminate the causes of incidents;
— the change management process, whose tasks are the registration of changes, the resolution and screening of changes, the assessment of the impact of changes on the IT environment, etc.;
– a configuration management process that keeps information system configuration data up to date;
– release management process (introduction of new configuration items).
The main provisions of the standard:
• The IT department is as much a value-added department as the rest of the organization;
• The IT department does not provide equipment for use, but provides services required by end users, who in this context would be more appropriately referred to as “service consumers”;
• it is necessary to move from the relationship of the owner-user of equipment (applications) to the relationship of the buyer-seller of services;
• ways to measure the quality of services provided should be developed: it is impossible to evaluate what cannot be measured;
• the quality of the services provided is directly dependent on their cost: high-quality services cannot be cheap, and cheap ones cannot meet the inflated requirements of consumers;
• it is impossible to guarantee the quality of the services provided without its continuous monitoring and without the timely adoption of managerial decisions to ensure it;
• in modern complex IT infrastructures, effective quality control of the services provided cannot be carried out without the use of specialized automation tools;
• even the best automation tools are not able to function independently; a positive effect will be achieved only if an integrated management system is built, which provides not only for the use of automation tools, but also for the proper organization of interaction between IT personnel and with representatives of other departments;
• when building a unified integrated management system, best practices should be taken into account, creatively applying it to each specific situation;
• IT infrastructure management system is not free, its proper implementation requires certain costs. But the opportunities provided at the same time to control and manage the IT infrastructure can significantly cover these costs by improving the quality of IT services and improving the situation for the business as a whole.
