ITIL History can be traced back to the late 1980’s when the British government determined that the level of IT service quality provided to them was not sufficient enough. The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now called the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), was tasked with developing a framework for efficient and financially responsible use of IT resources within the British government and the private sector.

ITSM and ITIL

The idea of ITSM as a means to improve business functions is nothing new. The concept of ITSM has been around for nearly as long as there have been IT services. However, the concept of collecting, documenting, and maintaining all service management best practices together within one body of knowledge was outstanding for its time.

Goal

The goal was to develop an approach that would be vendor-independent and applicable to organizations with differing technical and business needs. This resulted in the creation of the ITIL.

Yesterday

ITIL version1 (because the current publication is regarded as ITIL version 2) grew from a collection of best practices observed in the IT service industry. How this was done was to identify all practices the measure against that what was working industry wide and obviously what wasn’t. This approach is why ITIL is regarded as best practice in that it is from examples from a practical world rather than just a theoretical model or methodology.

Today

That was all well and good but the infrastructure that we manage through ITIL has changed significantly over the years but ITIL version 1 was static so over the last few years OGC made changes (some of those are quite significant) to ITIL and the latest publication of the library is regarded as version2 and Current Best Practice!