GAAP Standards There are a great many rules in accounting. You should not so much memorize them as you should become familiar with them enough to be able to communicate with a certified public accountant. Accounting rules set standards for comparison

Recently, in IT circles, you can often hear the term ITIL in relation to organizing the work of an IT department, providing services to a business, or a new way of organizing technical support. However, not all IT managers understand exactly what this is about. Here are 10 key facts that will make the definition of ITIL more understandable.

1. ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library (information technology infrastructure library)

The ITIL Library contains a comprehensive and detailed set of best practices that are used to design and implement IT service management. The implementation of these practices gives a business a number of advantages:

• Increasing competitive advantage through cost reduction and management flexibility.
• Increased efficiency by optimizing IT processes.
• Understanding IT for business and enhancing its relevance.
• Increased user and customer satisfaction.

2. The organization that develops and maintains ITIL is located in the UK

The ITIL library appeared in the 1980s at the request of the British government. Work on it was carried out from 1986 to 1989, and publications began in 1992. However, for a long time it was little known outside the UK until a large number of large companies announced the use of ITIL, and publications about implementation experience began to appear in the media. Throughout the library's existence, it continues to actively develop and the third version is now available (ITIL v. 3).

Today, more than 10,000 companies around the world use ITIL to manage IT.

3.ITIL

As the library evolved, ITIL changed the number of books and their organization.

Now the third edition of ITIL (ITIL v.3), which was released in May 2007, is relevant. It has been heavily redesigned from the second to support the new "service lifecycle format" approach.

ITIL v. 3 contains only 5 books, and not 7, as in the second edition:

• Service Strategy
• Service Design,
• Service Transition,
• Service Operation
• Continuous Service Improvement.

In addition, this edition includes two more books: ITIL Overview and Pocket Guide, as well as a set of additional industry recommendations.

4. To succeed with ITIL, you need a strong initiator

The introduction of ITIL practices is a change in corporate culture. In the first stages, users will be unhappy that they have to do everything differently than before, not the way they are used to. To overcome this skepticism, you need a strong initiator - a “locomotive” who can convince people and promote the project, as well as interest business in changing IT. Without such a person, implementation will not lead to the desired success.

5. ITIL is not a project management tool

ITIL practices focus on the provision of IT services to an organization and the process of continuous improvement of the services and processes that provide them, rather than on managing the company's projects.

6. ITIL libraries don't contain much information

The library contains advanced approaches and best practices for organizing an IT service delivery model. It describes some processes and patterns, but not a detailed methodology for implementing the process approach. A company that decides to use ITIL receives general principles, but must develop specific processes for its infrastructure independently. For a more practical study of building IT according to the ITIL methodology, you can take the new ITIL® Practitioner course, aimed specifically at people who have already mastered the IT service delivery model for business, but do not understand how best to implement their knowledge.

7. ITIL is not a tool

Many professional tools can be used to implement ITIL principles, but this is not at all necessary. If the company is small, simple document templates and spreadsheets will be sufficient, but larger organizations will require specialized software.

8. ITLI is not an all-or-nothing approach.

Since ITIL describes approaches from different areas, a company can apply all of them at once or only some of them - there are no strict regulations.

9. ITIL practices can be implemented in stages

Since there are no rules that all practices must be implemented at once, many companies choose a phased implementation over a certain period. This allows you to save resources and achieve sustainable success at each of the intermediate stages.

We have already written about the importance of the phased implementation of ITIL practices using the example of ITSM in the blog.

10. ITIL Certification

There are three main levels of ITIL certification:

• Foundation. This level means that you understand the basic terms and have a basic knowledge of the ITIL model.
• Practitioner – your knowledge of the ITIL model is sufficient to apply specific processes in practice.
• Intermediate – for specialists with in-depth knowledge of individual sections of ITIL.

There is also an ITIL Expert level, which confirms its owner’s ability to manage all ITSM processes as a single system, and an ITIL Master for heads of IT departments.

Knowing these 10 facts will allow you to understand the basic principles of ITIL, but to gain deeper knowledge, we recommend either taking certified courses that will allow you to decide whether to use these practices for your organization, or contacting a company that automates business processes and creates a service model according to the ITIL methodology.

Thank you for reading! Stay tuned for more articles that will help you achieve success implementing ServiceNow.

In the 1980s, the British government commissioned the Central Computing and Communications Agency (CCTA) to develop general principles for the effective use of IT services in the UK. This is how the first document appeared, combining best practices in IT service management. Its main feature was the development of a unified approach that did not depend on the service provider. In the late 1980s and early 1990, a series of books were published on how to manage IT services and on the interaction of the IT field with the users of these services. This library of books was named Information Technology Infrastructure Library or ITIL(the IT Infrastructure Library). The CCTA was subsequently merged with the Government Chamber of Commerce, or OGC, which currently owns the ITIL library.

ITIL is essentially a set of publications that provide guidelines for delivering quality services and the processes and components needed to support them. The main goal of ITIL is to promote modern knowledge and exchange experience in the field. The main feature of ITIL is the organization of Service Management as a set of processes.

In 1991, after the IT community became interested in ITIL, a forum was created - IT Information Management Forum (ITIMF). Its goal was to unite IT specialists, exchange ideas and experience. Later the name changed to IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF). Now this forum brings together many IT specialists, and the number of forum users around the world is growing daily.

The next series of books, ITIL v2, appeared from the mid-1990s to 2004. If the first version contained more than 60 books, then the second - only 9, and the third - 5. The main goal of the second version was to describe the process of effectively transferring services to the consumer and reducing the gap between the IT area and business.

In 2004, the second update of ITIL was launched due to the fact that many new technologies and fundamental changes in the IT field appeared. The result was ITILv3, which will be discussed in this course.

ITIL currently represents the most well-known knowledge base in the field of Service Management throughout the world and reflects the fundamental foundations of the world's leading IT practices. In Europe, there are two ITIL certification centers - EXIN (Dutch Examination Institute) and ISEB (The Information Systems Examination Board - a division of the British Computer Society). A number of consulting companies provide ITIL process implementation and training. In Russia, the leading companies are Hewlett-Packard Consulting, I-Teco, and IT-Expert.

ITIL considers Service Management in the context of the service provider-service customer relationship.

Customer is the buyer of goods or services. The customer for an IT service provider is a person (group of people) who enters into agreements with the supplier for the provision of IT services and is responsible for ensuring that the services provided are paid for.

Service provider is an organization that provides services to one or more internal or external customers.

Service users are also identified. User is an employee of an organization who uses an IT service to perform daily work.

The central and key term of ITIL is service, which in Russian-language literature is often called a service. Here is a definition from the ITIL v3 Glossary:

IT service (service)- a way of delivering value to customers by helping them achieve the output results that customers want to achieve without owning specific costs and risks.

Let's give another definition of IT service. An IT service is one or more technical or professional capabilities that make a business process possible. In the future, we will call an “IT service” a “service”, and the terms “service” and “service” will be considered equivalent. The service has the following characteristics:

• satisfies one or more customer needs;
• supports the customer's business goals;
• is perceived by the customer as a single whole and a product ready for use.

It should be noted that all ITIL literature is presented in English. As a result, some terms have no analogues in Russian (for example, business case) or can be translated into several words at once (as in the case of service-service). In the definition of service we see the word value - in the original “value”. This refers to the potential benefit for the Customer from using the IT service (for example, saving time, money and other resources).

Let's take a closer look at the basic concepts in the definition of a service.

Outputs- what the customer receives in the end. It is necessary to understand that in practice they differ from what the customer initially wants to receive due to the presence of certain limiting factors. By simplifying the purpose of services, they can be said to help improve output by increasing productivity and reducing existing constraints. The result of using services is to increase the likelihood of obtaining the desired output results. The service models that ITIL offers help manage complexity, cost, flexibility and diversity in the IT domain. Each model has many options for use depending on the specific case, which makes the idea of ​​its application universal, flexible and effective. The IT service model can be considered using the example of an information storage system. The system is designed to store, organize and protect information in the context of some work or activity. If the supplier provides the customer with more than just Memory device, and the information storage service, he must answer the questions “what to store” and “how to store” (Fig. 1.1). In this case, the delineation of duties and responsibilities between the supplier and the customer is of fundamental importance.

Rice. 1.1.

Customers want the results they want but, for various reasons, don't want the associated responsibilities, costs and risks. For example, an organization wants to have a secure storage system of several terabytes to support online trading. In order to create such a system from scratch, the organization in question would have to go a long way from understanding how to do it to purchasing equipment and hiring qualified personnel. All this costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. In this case, it is much easier to use the services of a supplier who already owns a large storage system and has the appropriate experience and capabilities. This will be the provision of secure information storage services.

In defining a service, we also encounter the concept service value(value). It is measured in the context of two concepts:

• Service Utility is what the customer receives as a result of using the service;
• Service Warranty is how the provider delivers the service in terms of availability, performance, continuity and security.

Here are definitions from the ITILv3 Glossary:

Utility- functionality offered by a product or service to meet specific needs. Often defined as “what the product/service does.”

Usefulness of the service- functionality of the IT service from the customer’s point of view.

Guarantee- a promise or guarantee that a product or service will meet agreed requirements.

Service quality guarantee - confidence that the IT service will meet the agreed requirements. May be in the form of a formal agreement such as an SLA or contract, or as a marketing message or brand introduction.

In other words, utility is what the customer receives, quality assurance is how he receives it. In Fig. Figure 1.2 presents a simplified scheme for creating the value of a service.

When purchasing a service, the customer wants to get results from its use, that is, to extract value.

Utility is achieved in one of the following ways:

1. ensuring the performance required by the customer;
2. removing or reducing restrictions.

Performance- a measure of what is achieved or produced by a system, person, team, process, or IT service.

Productivity here refers to the ability for a customer to do more in less time, at lower cost, or using fewer resources. In other words, some kind of optimization that will allow the customer to solve the problem in less time and money.

Limitation- this is a prohibition or impossibility of performing some actions.

The guarantee consists of four main aspects:

• accessibility
• power
• security
• continuity

It is clear that it is easier to measure the quality assurance of a service than its usefulness to the business.

When a person presses a button, he expects the light to turn on. Unfortunately, with IT services it’s not that simple. The result of using an IT service depends not only on the properties of the service itself, but also on the management of this service - this is where the term service management or service management appears. IT services management is a set of specialized organizational capabilities for delivering value to customers in the form of services. “Customized capabilities” refer to the processes, methods, functions and roles that a supplier can use to provide a service to a customer. In Russia, the term IT service management is used quite rarely, preferring it service management. The abbreviation is also used to denote IT service management ITSM(IT Service Management). Throughout the course we will use the terms “Service Management”, “Service Management” and ITSM interchangeably.

The provision of services covers issues of IT infrastructure management, including maintenance and support. Before purchasing any product from a store, we usually evaluate its quality based on appearance, suitability and reliability. In a store, the buyer has little opportunity to influence the quality of the product due to the fact that it is already produced in the factory. Through careful control of production, the manufacturer will endeavor to provide products with the same level of quality. In this example, production, sale and consumption are separate stages. In the IT field, everything is somewhat different, since the overall quality of a service is actually determined during its operation, and it cannot be unambiguously determined in advance.

Quality- a set of characteristics of an object related to its ability to satisfy established and expected needs.

An organization can buy a very expensive IT service, but if the supplier cannot provide high-quality and responsible management, this purchase will become meaningless. Customer satisfaction largely depends on how well the service parameters have been previously agreed upon with the service provider.

The supplier must be mindful of the need to ensure consistent quality. That is, the service provided must be stable over time.

Thus, the main goal of service management in the context of ITIL is to provide customers with reliable, stable IT services that fully satisfy their needs in a given area.

Another key term in ITIL is organization. Customers of IT services and suppliers of IT services are considered in the form of an organization.
Rice. 1.3. Structure of formation of the corporate goal of the organization

Mission is a short and clear description of the goals an organization faces and the ideals in which it believes.

Strategic objectives(objectives) are a more detailed description of what the organization wants to achieve in the long term. Well-formulated strategic objectives must have five main properties (comply with the SMART principle): be specific (Specific), measurable (Measurable), be relevant and relevant to the situation (Relevant), be realistic (Achievable) and have clear time boundaries (Time-bound ).

Organization policy(policy) is the totality of all decisions and measures taken by an organization to set strategic goals and achieve them. When developing its policy, the organization determines the priorities of its strategic objectives and the ways to achieve them. Of course, depending on circumstances, priorities may change over time. The better the organization's policies are explained to all parties involved, the less problems there will be in explaining to employees how to do their jobs. Unlike detailed procedures, these rules can be used as guidelines by organizational personnel. Clearly formulated company policies (rules) contribute to the flexibility of the organization's structure, since all levels in such a company can quickly respond to changing situations.

Implementation of policies in the form of specific activities requires the development strategies. The strategy is developed for certain periods and consists of several stages. It is important to be able to monitor the implementation of assigned tasks during the execution of planned work. In other words, it is necessary to measure the extent to which the organization or processes are close to achieving its strategic goals. There are various methods for this. One of the most well-known methods in business is Balanced Score Card (BSC). According to this method, critical success factors (Critical Success Factor - CSF) are determined based on the organization's strategic goals or process goals.

Critical Success Factors (CSFs)- factors that must be implemented for the success of a project, process, plan or service. Such factors are formulated for several of the most important areas of interest of the company, called perspectives (projections) of the organization: customers/market, divisions or service providers must also change in accordance with the requirements and goals of the business.

This article is devoted to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) - a library of best practices in the provision of IT services, which today has become a de facto standard - a generally recognized standard for managing the maintenance of information systems.

Modern problems of consumption of IT services

Over the past two decades, information technology has had a major impact on business processes in a wide variety of companies. The advent of personal computers, business applications, local and global networks has led to radical changes in many areas of business. In these conditions, the quality of IT services provided to companies becomes of great importance.

The achievement of business goals by companies today is highly dependent on the effective use of information technology and on obtaining high-quality IT services that meet business goals, customer requirements and expectations, while recently more and more emphasis has been placed on the development of IT solutions (e.g. business applications), and management of services for their support, guaranteeing high availability of the solution for end users. At the same time, in the life cycle of IT solutions, their operation accounts for 70 to 80% of the time and financial resources, and only 2-30% of the time and funds are spent on the development (purchase) and implementation of the product.

Let us note that today the managers of many companies are dissatisfied with the quality of IT services provided by their own IT departments. There are many reasons for this. IT projects are not always completed within the given time frame and budget, and post-project support often negates the efforts made to implement the projects. Issues of organizing the processing of requests from users and department heads by IT departments, introducing changes in the presence of constant operation of existing corporate information systems, and the efficient use of IT department resources - this is not a complete list of problems faced by consumers of IT services. It is no secret that company managers often see the IT department as a bottomless barrel into which huge amounts of money are thrown away, while to IT specialists, employees of all other departments often seem to be capricious and impatient children demanding immediate miracles.

Solving these issues requires a structured approach to IT service management to make the work of the IT department efficient and rational. This approach is called IT Service Management (ITSM), and its main principle is to consider the IT service as a unit constantly focused on the needs of its users and solving changing problems with the availability of a quantitative assessment of both the achieved level of quality and the resources used. This principle of organizing activities is applicable to companies of any size and does not depend on whether the IT service is part of the company or is an external supplier of IT services.

ITIL Library

The history of ITIL began more than 20 years ago in the UK. At the time, the United Kingdom was experiencing a severe economic downturn, and the quality of IT services provided to the British government by various providers was so poor that the then Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA, now called the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has received instructions from the government of this country to develop principles for the effective and cost-effective use of IT resources in ministries and other government agencies and, based on them, to formulate an approach to the provision of IT services that does not depend on their supplier. The result of this work was the ITIL library, which united a description of the best practices that existed in the IT services industry.

The ITIL library contains detailed descriptions of the most important activities in IT operations, as well as a comprehensive list of responsibilities, tasks, procedures, process descriptions and action lists that can be adapted to any organization. These descriptions are often used when defining improvement goals for IT organizations and IT departments.

ITIL standards are currently supported by the IT Service Management Forum, ITSMF, a public forum whose members include companies and organizations interested in improving the efficiency of IT service delivery.

Today, ITIL has become the de facto standard for describing the fundamental processes of IT service management. A number of companies based on the ITIL library have created their own structured approaches to IT service management - HP ITSM Reference Model (Hewlett-Packard), IT Process Model (IBM), Microsoft Operation Framework (Microsoft) and many others.

ITIL Library Books

The ITIL library defines the goals and activities and parameters of each of the IT service management processes, but does not contain any specific descriptions of how these processes are carried out, since they may vary from company to company. The purpose of this library is to help plan the most commonly used processes, roles and activities by identifying the relationships and necessary interactions between them. Part of the ITIL library philosophy is based on quality standards (eg the ISO-9000 series).

Currently, the ITIL library exists in the form of several books. Two of them, devoted to the provision and support of services, are considered the most popular - as practice shows, the solution to the primary tasks of introducing best IT service management practices is implemented according to the recommendations given in these two books.

Provision of services

The ITIL book on Service Delivery describes the requirements needed to deliver IT services. It covers the following IT service management processes:

• service level management;
• IT financial management;
• capacity management;
• IT service continuity management;
• Availability management.

This book has also included a section on information security management, although this area is not directly relevant to the service delivery area.

Purpose service level management is the achievement and implementation of mutually understandable agreements on IT services between their supplier and customer. Such agreements should be based on an understanding of the customer's needs, the capabilities of the supplier's technical equipment and available financial resources. Service level management issues include optimizing services to provide them to customers at affordable prices based on the precise definition of agreements in the service level agreement, conducting service monitoring, and supporting services with the help of external suppliers.

Financial management in IT deals with economic issues related to the provision of IT services, such as emerging costs, accounting for the relationship between costs and income when changing the IT infrastructure, forecasting and tracking costs. Financial management increases IT and company management's awareness of expenses and can be used in IT budgeting. This section also describes various IT billing and pricing methods, as well as various aspects of IT financing.

Purpose capacity management is the optimization of costs, time of acquisition and placement of IT resources required to ensure the implementation of agreements with the customer. Capacity management is closely linked to other processes such as resource management, performance management, IT demand management, modeling, capacity planning, load management and determining the required hardware capacity to run applications. One important aspect of capacity management is the planning required to ensure consistent levels of service, both now and in the future.

Continuity Management IT services is about preparing and planning for how IT service providers will respond to emergencies; this process focuses on the connections between all components necessary to protect the continuity of the company's operations during emergencies (such as disasters), as well as the means to prevent such situations . IT service continuity management is the process of planning and coordinating the technical, financial and managerial resources needed to ensure service continuity after disasters.

Availability management is a process that ensures that resources are allocated so as to be able to fulfill agreements with the customer. Availability management issues include optimizing service and minimizing the number of incidents (which will be discussed below).

Service support

The ITIL book on Service Support describes how a customer can access IT services. This book covers the following areas:

• Service Desk;
• incident management;
• problem management;
• configuration management;
• change management;
• release management.

The Service Desk puts the user in contact with an IT service provider. The main tasks of the Service Desk are to register, resolve and track incidents, as well as receive requests for changes in the IT infrastructure. Note that several years ago it was common to call such services the term Help Desk, although receiving requests for changes is usually not included in the tasks of Help Desk services.

Process incident management is designed to eliminate an incident (that is, a single case of contact regarding incorrect provision of a service or its absence) and quickly resume the provision of services. Incident logging by the Service Desk is one of the most important components of providing IT services - the information received is used in other ITIL processes, and their effectiveness depends on its quality.

Process problem management(that is, errors in the construction of IT infrastructure, which are often the causes of recurring incidents) is to identify and eliminate them. Once the problem is identified and its cause determined, a business decision is typically made about whether to make changes to the infrastructure to prevent further incidents from occurring, and if the decision is positive, a change request is submitted.

In this regard, I would like to draw attention to the difference between incidents and problems (apparently, the distinction between these concepts has become one of the most famous contributions of the ITIL library to the development of IT service management processes). The incident is a single case of failure and assumes rapid restoration of service in this particular case. The problem is the cause of incidents and requires certain (and not always quick) work to eliminate it.

Configuration management- this is the control of a changing IT infrastructure, its standardization, tracking its condition, inventory, verification and registration of its components (sometimes called configuration items and representing a set of software and hardware), managing documentation on the IT infrastructure, as well as providing information about IT infrastructure for all other IT service management processes.

Change management is to identify necessary changes to the IT infrastructure and how to implement them with minimal negative impact on IT service delivery, while monitoring changes through coordination across the company. Changes may be made as a result of requests from the customer, as a result of problem management, or as a result of some other IT service management process. Changes are made according to a developed scheme, including definition, planning, creation, testing, making the final decision to implement the change, implementation and evaluation of the result.

The main task release management is to ensure the successful deployment of releases (sets of IT infrastructure components that are jointly tested and implemented). This process ensures that only tested and correct versions of software and hardware are used. Release management typically handles changes.

In addition to the two books mentioned above, ITIL includes publications devoted to the following problems:

• IT infrastructure management(a general description of the methodology for organizing the work of the IT service is given);
• application management(considers ensuring that software applications meet business requirements and the application life cycle);
• business perspective(IT infrastructure is discussed in terms of its impact on business development);
• planning the implementation of service management, information security management(i.e. protecting the IT infrastructure from unauthorized use, assessing, managing and countering risks, and how to respond to security incidents).

Recently, much attention has been paid to managing relationships with IT service customers- it is this process that helps organize targeted and structured interaction between an IT organization that traditionally uses technical approaches to work, and customers working to solve the business problems of their enterprise.

The ITIL Library also includes a book (informally called ITIL Lite) on IT service delivery processes for small companies.

ITIL Library books are available for purchase in electronic and paper form (for example, at: http://www.get-best-practice.biz/itilProducts.aspx). The Russian version of these books is currently being prepared by I-Teco.

Why you need to implement ITIL processes

Studying the best practices described in the ITIL library books helps IT managers, IT specialists and CIOs understand the methods by which they can improve the quality of IT services (that is, deliver IT services in accordance with business requirements and the needs of each user ) provided by the IT department or an external IT service provider, and put them into practice.

Note that ITIL processes are implemented today by many large companies. Representatives of some of them note that, in general, such implementation made it possible to significantly reduce IT costs (there were statements from a number of companies about saving up to 10% of the annual budget of the entire enterprise), to increase the efficiency of the functioning of other divisions, and also to bring the enterprise to a higher level of relationships with clients .