A white paper explaining why an organization should commit to implementing IT Service Management and the recommended ITIL.

The IT Infrastructure Library® or "ITIL®" is a set of best practice guidelines published by the Cabinet Office of the British Government for IT Service Management. These guidelines have evolved considerably since the early 1990s and the most obvious changes made in this time have been on the focus of ITIL; from Function, through Process and now on the Service Lifecycle. The latest version is "ITIL 2011" which has replaced "ITIL Version 3".

Each Stage contains a number of Processes that can be implemented to improve the quality of the IT Services provided by the organization. There are over 25 processes to address in a full implementation of ITIL and most organizations take well over two years to do this, if they implement the full set at all. Furthermore, when starting ITIL, it is likely that many organizations will already have at least some of these processes established, even if in a modest form. This helps to ease into the ITIL environment.

In this paper, Trevor Lea-Cox considers why organizations should commit to implementing IT Service Management and the recommendations of ITIL.