Service Management - A new book

LONDON - March 11, 2013 - PRLog -- Service Management with ITIL® looks at the lifecycle of this essential component of modern business from the ITIL® perspective.  The book leverages the author’s 30 years of experience in providing consultancy and teaching services to industry and commerce to deliver essential reading for anyone dealing with Service Management, or who is contemplating taking any of the ITIL® exams.

A sample of chapter 1 from Service Management with ITIL® follows:

ITIL® is the registered trademark of The Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom in the UK and other countries.

Imagine the following situation.  You have just inherited some money from a rich relative.

·         You decide to build your dream home.

·         You have no practical building skills, nor any of the associated skills (plumbing etc).

·         You purchase a piece of land quickly and without looking at it.

·         You commission a builder without consulting any plans or appointing an architect.

·         You constantly drive the builder to “get on with it” without giving them any guidance.

·         When the plumber, electrician, carpenter, painter ask for guidance you reply “I am too busy to bother with the details, so just get on with it”

·         The gardener is also told “I just want a quiet garden” just get on with it.

·         There is no discussion about the land drainage, the slope of the land and so on.

The final day of building approaches and you grandly arrive at the site.

·         The house colours are wrong.

·         The room layout is nothing like you required.  

·         The garage is far too small for your cars.

·         The light switches are all in the wrong place.

·         The garden looks OK but you are not too sure.

·         Then it rains.

·         The garage fills with water and floods the downstairs of the house.

·         Much of the garden becomes unusable marsh land for the next few days.

And so on.

It wouldn’t happen in reality, would it?

The above is clearly an exaggeration but it is not too far removed from what happens time and time again in many IT Service/System developments.

ITIL® was conceived to try and ensure that IT services are created to provide value, that these services are carefully designed from the start, that the “building work” is carried out with effective consultation with the owners (stakeholders) and that any errors are reported back and acted on before the owners (stakeholders) move into the “new property” (operate the service).

This might well sound simplistic, but in other areas of human development and industry we have thousands of years of experience (agriculture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering and so on). In IT systems and services we have approximately 65 years of experience, so it is unsurprising that we keep getting it wrong.  The important fact is that we learn from our mistakes and improve our performance in these areas.

ITIL® means many things to many people.  It can be thought of as a:

·         Framework for running IT Services

·         A library of reference books

·         A collection of “good” or “best” practices

·         A collection of industry-based suggestions on how to run IT effectively

Exactly how any one person or industry views ITIL® will be dictated by their needs, the complexity of their IT infrastructure, the maturity of their organisation and many other factors.

Historically, ITIL® started as a project in the mid 1980’s sponsored by The British Government’s Civil Service to look at how the general computer industry ran it’s various IT systems.  This was collected as a library of IT “Best Practice” and published by the Government’s publishing department.  

ITIL® stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library®

ITIL® has gone through a number of revisions.  Version 1 was published in 1989, Version 2 was published in 2000, Version 3 published in 2007 and the latest version was published in 2011.  Usefully, the latest version is referred to as “the 2011 version”.

Now the Cabinet Office (part of the UK Civil Service) owns the copyright and the books are published by The Stationary Office but many industry groups continue to have an input.  A shortened list of these appears in the back of this book.

So now the ITIL® community consists of many tens of thousands of organisations, in many different  industries, spread across over 50 countries and continents, well over a million qualified users and an even larger body of staff either formally trained in or active users of one or more ITIL® processes.  ITIL® forms the basis of ISO 20000 certification which will become the worldwide standard for the assessment of industry suitability, maturity or conformance for the running of their IT departments.

ITIL® is a framework around which an organisation, or business (we use the two words interchangeably here) can design, develop and organise its IT services and Infrastructure. As it is a framework no two organisation’s implementation of ITIL® will be completely the same.  The precise details of what works for a car manufacturer will be different from, say, a pharmaceutical company.  The essential components will almost certainly be the same however differently they are applied.

Interested?  Then get hold of the book!

Price printed £7.00 $11.28/ISBN: 978-0954528829

Price eBook £3.53 $5.35/ ASIN: B00AC32AYO

All books will be produced in both electronic and printed versions, and are available in all good bookstores. Discounts are normally available on the printed books.

DSPress is an independent publisher located in the United Kingdom.

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Contact: www.dspress.org.uk     email feedback@dspress.biz

Forthcoming Titles:

Books in preparation include: Business Analysis Basics: What The BABOK Won’t Tell You; The Business Analysis Basics Toolbook; Technical Writing: The POWER Process; Project Management Essentials and Change Management Essentials