A bit about ITIL

The company I work for creates software that help organizations with huge IT infrastructures manage their IT and tie it very strongly to their business needs.

As IT organizations grow mature and stressed to improve and bring more value for money, we see they tend to look for "best practices" for managing their IT business. ITIL is one of the sources they go to, so we decided to learn ITIL in order to "speak" the language our customers are speaking and understand the way they see their domain.

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It is actually a collection of books, describing different aspects of managing an IT organization. It is organized into several parts, including:

• Service strategy - how to decide what services to provide to bring value to your customers
• Service design - how to design and implement the service
• Service transition - how to move the new or updated service from the lab to production
• Service operation - how to operate the service and support the users on an ongoing basis
• And...
• Continuous service improvement - how to keep improving these process and make them even better (maybe "bester"?)
  

BTW, "Best Practices" reminds me of dilbert, asking the pointed hair boss: if everybody is doing a "best practice", doesn't it become a "mediocre practice"?

I rather enjoyed the training - we had an excellent instructor with YEARS of tough industry experience, and excellent examples for everything.

To read more about ITIL go:
ITIL official site - http://www.itil-officialsite.com/AboutITIL/WhatisITIL.asp
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library