Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®)

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) is a body of guidance for managing IT-enabled products and services. It helps organisations connect service management with stakeholder value, governance, risk, continual improvement and day-to-day delivery.

When to use it

Use ITIL when digital services depend on repeatable management practices across people, partners, technology and workflows. It is relevant when an organisation needs to improve service quality, clarify ownership, manage incidents and changes, align technology work with business outcomes or create a common service-management language.

ITIL can complement rather than replace other frameworks and standards, including:

• COBIT for governance and control
• Six sigma for quality improvement
• TOGAF for enterprise architecture
• ISO 27000 for information security
• ISO/IEC 20000 for service-management systems.

The comparison with ISO 9000 is limited: ITIL offers adaptable guidance, while ISO standards define requirements that may support formal conformity assessment. Adopting ITIL language or certificates does not by itself certify an organisation’s service-management system.

Origins

The UK government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency began developing ITIL in the 1980s to improve public-sector IT management. The guidance expanded and was adopted internationally. Version 3 appeared in 2007 and was revised in 2011. Ownership and certification arrangements later changed; the current generation is ITIL four, administered through PeopleCert, and it replaces the earlier lifecycle-centred architecture with a service value system.

What it is

ITIL is flexible guidance, not a mandatory process manual. The current service value system connects guiding principles, governance, a service value chain, management practices and continual improvement. It also asks practitioners to consider four dimensions: organisations and people; information and technology; partners and suppliers; and value streams and processes.

The historical version 3 lifecycle, released in 2007 and updated in 2011, organised guidance around strategy, design, transition, operation and continual improvement. Those concepts remain useful context, but an organisation starting now should use the current guidance rather than treating the old lifecycle as the latest edition.