Thursday, June 14, 2012

Overview and Defition of ITIL and the ITIL Exam

By Anthony Biggs


ITIL is a framework that gives guidance on identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT Services to the business. Making use of the ITIL framework ensures that IT services are aligned to business expectations, which allows business to respond efficiently and effectively towards the ever transforming surroundings. ITIL has grown to become possibly the most generally followed IT Service Management Frameworks, which includes organizations like NASA, HSBC Bank and Disney who've successfully integrated ITIL. Contemporary IT Departments are faced with the battle of implementing an increasingly customer focused approach to IT Service Management and performing superb IT Services at a lower cost is developing into the standard. Also, it is fundamental that IT Services are aligned to business needs, actively assist them and underpin the business processes. In addition it is increasingly becoming obvious that IT is the agent of change in a number of businesses and helps business improvement.

IT has become a essential element of the business and much more often than not may be the collapse of a business if it's not controlled the right way. Business is dependent significantly on the reliability and availability of IT service and major disruptions or outages will surely have devastating repercussions on, not really just the bottom line, but reputational damage as well (Blackberry as the prime example).

ITIL uses a Service Lifecycle method in their framework which is comprised of the following Lifecycle components:

Service Strategy

Service Design

Service Transition

Service Operations

Continual Service Improvement

This lifecycle is a long-term development that focuses primarily on continuous enhancement of the other lifecycles,producing an endless improvement process. These multiple components are addressed at length within the ITIL Expert component. It's fundamental to understand that ITIL is technology vendor agnostic and it is focused on the principles of IT Service Management as opposed to the management of the technology itself (which happens to be for architecture). ITIL has many complementary publications with COBIT and Prince2 experiencing the most synergies. ITIL is composed of several processes with Change Management, Configuration Management, Problem Management and Incident Management being by far the most executed processes.

The ITIL Certifications are divided into 2 important areas, ITIL Foundation and ITIL Expert in addition to a practical (or experience related) ITIL Master certification which has been released on the 1st May 2012. The ITIL Exams, that can be written at the end of each module, may be done electronically or paper based at endorsed testing centres. To complete an ITIL Exam is one of the most rewarding exams to successfully pass and displays proficiency in the IT Service Management (ITSM) field. The ITIL Expert certification follows a capability stream and a Lifecycle stream which could possibly be mixed and matched as long as a total of 22 credits are completed to attain the ITIL Expert certification. The ITIL course can either be taken online or at an authorised educational center.

To complete the Expert courses physical presence is necessary but this could be supplemented by online courses. Most course materials comes in a ITIL pdf file format. ITIL Jobs are reasonably easy to find and any organization which has accepted ITIL really is a company worth working for.




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