Effective IT Service Management: To ITIL and Beyond!

IT service management (ITSM) is the group of processes and functions that oil the wheels of the IT machine. Without ITSM, every IT project and system would deteriorate over time until failure. ITIL is the recognized best-practice standard for ITSM, and has been around since the late 1980s, with ITIL version 3 published just recently. However, many of today’s IT problems have been around for just as long - so in order to manage IT effectively, organizations must go beyond the ITIL framework.

Rob Addy provides IT service managers and professionals with practical guidance on delivering and managing IT services in an effective and efficient manner by extending the ITIL approach to deliver proactive and pragmatic IT service management. His book is a candid look at the relative merits of currently accepted wisdom regarding the provision of IT services, using the principles of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidance series. It describes IT service management processes related to service delivery and service support (as well as other non-ITIL areas), their objectives, shortcomings, and how these issues can be addressed in real-life situations. In addition, it delivers a workable definition of what exactly an ‘IT service’ is and how it can be defined and used in practice. Overall, he gives an unbiased view of the discipline, its objectives, major processes, and their benefits and shortcomings.

Managing and mitigating IT risk is critical to the survival of every business. Success is an optional extra! Proactive IT service management can be thought of as risk management for IT: Can you afford to ignore it?