Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Service Transition says it nicely

We often talk about the difference between IT Service Management and ITIL. My comments are bound to strike and accord with some and bound to be violently rejected by others. Anyway, I have an opinion and I'm entitled to it.

IT Service Management is the broader view of the elements that IT professionals need to be interested in. In the first pages of the new ITIL v3 Service Transition text the authors promote 4 types of IT assets that have to be managed: infrastructure, applications, information and people.

To me, the procurement and management of these assets can be considered as the focus area of interest for IT Service Management.

ITIL has a primary focus on one element: process management of the infrastructure. I will grant in that in ITIL v3 there is a strong recognition that all elements need to be considered together. However, if we assume that ITIL is part of the solution then we can start to understand the difference between IT Service Management and ITIL.

ITIL is not an application/software development methodology, nor is it a tool that has a speciality interest in knowledge (information) management. ITIL does not provide guidelines for people management; but it is an very useful set of guidelines that can assist IT people understand the things that have to be done when it comes to managing infrastructure.

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