What is ITIL 4 Foundation

This article is devoted to ITIL 4 Foundation PDF (IT Infrastructure Library) - a library of best practices for the provision of IT services, which has become the de facto standard today - a generally recognized standard for managing the maintenance of information systems.

Modern problems of consumption of IT services

Over the past two decades, information technology has had a great impact on business processes in a wide variety of companies. The emergence of personal computers, business applications, local and global networks has led to radical changes in many areas of business. Under these conditions, the quality of IT services provided to companies is of great importance.

The achievement of business goals by companies today depends to a large extent on the effective use of information technology and on the provision of quality IT services that meet business goals, customer requirements and expectations, while more and more attention has recently been paid not to develop IT solutions (for example, business applications), but the management of services for their maintenance, which guarantees high availability of the solution for end users. At the same time, in the life cycle of IT solutions, their operation accounts for 70 to 80% of the time and financial resources, and only 2-30% of the time and funds are spent on the development (acquisition) and implementation of the product.

ITIL 4 Foundation PDF

Note that today the leaders of many companies are dissatisfied with the quality of IT services provided by their own IT departments. There are many reasons for this. IT projects are far from being always completed within the given timeframe and budget, and post-project support often negates the efforts made to implement projects. The issues of organizing the processing of requests from users and heads of departments by IT departments, introducing changes in the presence of constant operation of existing corporate information systems, efficient use of resources of IT departments - this is not a complete list of problems faced by consumers of IT services. It's no secret that corporate executives often see the IT department as a bottomless pit into which huge amounts of money are thrown, while IT professionals from all other departments often seem like whimsical and impatient children demanding immediate miracles.

Addressing these issues requires a structured approach to IT service management to make IT efficient and effective. This approach is called IT Service Management (ITSM), and its main principle is to consider the IT service as a unit that is constantly focused on the needs of its users and solving changing problems, while quantifying both the level of quality achieved and the resources used is available. This principle of organizing activities is applicable to companies of any size and does not depend on whether the IT service is part of the company or is an external IT service provider.