ITIL has already been adopted globally by thousands of organisations, professionals and consultants to help them deliver improvements to IT services. ITIL helps you to realise improvements such as cost reduction in service delivery, enhancements in processes, improved measurement and reporting as well as continually driving up the quality of IT Services. ITIL provides direct benefits to Service Providers, businesses and their customers.

Over the last three decades, ITIL has evolved considerably from both the public and private sectors describing how IT resources should be structured and managed to deliver lasting business value. In addition to the core books, ITIL is supported by a comprehensive qualifications scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools.

ITIL was originally developed within the UK government to support large government provided IT systems. Since its original inception in the early eighties with ITIL Version 1, and the development of version 2 in the late 90’s, ITIL has quickly grown to become the de-facto, non proprietary framework for driving improvements in IT service quality.

The very latest evolution of ITIL, version 3, was formally launched in June 2007. This latest incarnation provides many additional enhancements, new processes and a new lifecycle model at its core; enabling service providers to adopt and adapt best practices from Service Strategy and Service Design, through to Service Transition and Service Operation. This new core of ITIL also benefits from best practices contained within Continual Service Improvement. ITIL is still owned and maintained by the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and has been contracted out to the APMG Group to govern and control.

ITIL is Best Practice IT Service Management. A whole ITIL philosophy has grown up around the guidance contained within the ITIL books and the supporting certification and qualification scheme. The ethos behind the development of ITIL is the recognition that organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on IT in order to satisfy their corporate aims and meet their business needs. This leads to an increased requirement for reliable, high-quality IT services. ITIL provides the foundation for quality IT Service Management through documented, proven processes that cover the entire Service Lifecycle. It is easy for organisations to learn, tailor and implement to suit their environment and customers.