ITIL 4 — The main ITSM methodology gets agile and integrated with the most modern business practices

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Claiming that IT service management played a key role in building most business for the past few decades, while bold sounding, is still simply an understatement. From the moment companies realized that information technology was the cornerstone for optimizing their business processes, there was unprecedented growth in IT infrastructure. That generated complexity and, as always, complexity must be managed.

Once this Pandora’s box was opened, there would be no turning back: IT pros came out of their home labs and went into the corporate world. Today they’ve become executives, speaking the business language, understanding the strategic value of IT. And to be honest, none of this would be possible without the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL.

ITIL: A brief history

A thing you may not know about ITIL is that it originally belonged to Her Majesty the Queen. ITIL was created in the 80s by the UK government through its Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) to ensure better use of IT services and resources.

In fact, the initial version of ITIL was called GITIM, Governance Infrastructure Technology Management Information. Of course, it was something quite different from what we have today; in terms of concepts, however, it was already remarkably similar and focused on the support and delivery of IT services.

Even in its earliest versions, ITIL had a strong appeal. By the early 90s, it had already been disseminated and adopted by government agencies and large companies across Europe, and soon spread throughout the world. While IT itself evolved, ITIL advanced IT service management (ITSM) practices; by the year 2000, Microsoft used ITIL as the basis for creating its proprietary methodology, the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).

In 2001, ITIL v2 was released. It proved easier to adapt and use, resulting in ITIL (Read more...)