ITIL Infrastructure Library (ITIL) refers to a set of comprehensive, consistent and coherent codes of best practice for IT Service Management.

It comprises a library developed by the Central Computer & Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) in the United Kingdom. Since April 2001 the CCTA was renamed into OGC (Office of Government Commerce). The library describes a number of related processes.

Dependence on IS

ITIL was developed in the late 1980's after the UK Government recognized that organizations were becoming increasingly dependent on Information Systems (IS). The objective of the OGC in developing ITIL is to promote business effectiveness in the use of IS due to increasing organizational demands to reduce costs while maintaining or improving IT services.

Current Best Practice

The ITIL concepts for best practices, through the involvement of leading industry experts, consultants and practitioners remain the only holistic, non-proprietary best practice framework available. As a result, it has quickly become the global benchmark by which organizations measure the quality of IT service management.

Specific Processes

Each described process in the Infrastructure Library covers a specific part of IT Service Management and its relationship to other processes. Each process can be read, and the process implemented, independently of the others. However, there is a focus on the holistic approach suggesting that organizations are likely to gain the most benefit from implementing all processes rather than some processes discretely.