What Is ITIL?

Last week I wrote about iManifest. This week I’ll talk about ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), which just turned 20. Maybe for me, ITIL should be ITILi (I Tell I Love i). What ITIL really does is advocate that IT services must be aligned to the needs of the business and are critical support for the core business processes. ITIL provides guidance to organizations about how to use IT as a tool for business change, transformation, and growth.

ITIL was formed in the '80s by the UK Office of Government Commerce. They recognized the benefit of providing service-driven results from their IT practices. After all, the output of IT should be better resolution of customer problems, which in turn should improve customer service.

ITIL promotes the idea of consistent, repeatable, measurable processes. Wow—that sounds a lot like putting rules in place to automate computer systems! For years we’ve been helping customers build consistent rules to manage their IBM i servers and provide a cost-effective way to manage their business and operations. ITIL needs to be measurable, and it’s easier to measure your success if your process is database-driven, versus hard-coded scripts, or manual procedures in a run book.

The Robot products make your life easier when it comes to complying with regulations or, in this case, adhering to industry standards like ITIL. Our database-driven approach to building rules for managing job scheduling, message management, backups, reports, disk space, performance tuning, and security can help your IT group satisfy other regulations. We also offer free Robot dashboard templates for SEQUEL users that can help your organization present the metrics you need to run your computer operations.

I want to credit my ITIL mentor, Steve Rainone from Knoll in Pennsylvania, for discussing this topic with me.