ITIL books

Service Strategy
talks about the need for a service approach itself, considers the advantages of a service approach to building a business. The ITIL book describes processes such as: risk and demand management and issues such as strategy formation, how to calculate the cost of a service, as well as issues of interaction between IT and business. This introduces the concept of a service as a whole entity, and not just an add-on over an existing software tool, around which the service suddenly grows. A service is a whole set of concepts - not only software and hardware, but also how it works, support, cost of use, etc.

The book provides an answer to the question of who are the consumers of IT services, what IT services need to be provided to meet their needs, what resources are needed to implement these IT services, and what needs to be done to implement these IT services perfectly. The concept of IT strategy is formulated, and the emphasis is placed on the fact that the costs of implementing the strategy should be commensurate with the value of services for consumers (companies). Building an IT strategy is directly linked to the need for a Business Strategy. This phase also provides an answer to the question - how the IT department can agree with business owners on the required level of investments / investments / financing for IT development.

It tells about what advantages a service model gives a business, how to build a strategic policy for correlating this model with external and internal standards of an organization, how to calculate the cost of a service, manage uncertainty, complexity, and risks. There has been a transition from the previously existing concept of a value chain to the term of a value network, which takes into account more complex company relationships: outsourcing, partnerships, a large number of customers.

Service Design
considers all stages of building a service: from the emergence of new and / or changed business requirements to the implementation of a ready-made solution. The book contains a story about the policy of designing services and provides answers to questions: how to choose the services that we will design, what makes sense to outsource, what to do in-house, and where to use the strategy of partial return to third parties. The book describes processes such as: service level management, capacity, availability, continuity, information security, etc.

The result of designing a service should be a service package. The service package contains detailed information about the service: what it will be responsible for, how it will be implemented, and even what circumstances may force you to redesign it. The reasons for the redesign can be: an increased number of users, the service reaching a certain age, etc.

Service Transition (Introduction (sometimes translated as transformation) of a service)

considers the specifics of introducing changes to an existing service and introducing new services to the IT infrastructure, as well as control over all innovations. The book describes processes such as change management, configuration management, asset management, release management, and deployment management.

The point is that we cannot judge the acceptability of an IT service until we know exactly how it will be used. Often the customer needs something completely different from what he formulated at the design stage. In this case, serious changes are made to the already designed IT service. And it is necessary that when building new services, you can control the progress of the work. This book brings together techniques for transitioning, evaluating, and testing services. The formalization of support for the “combat” operation of the system in the early stages contained in the volume is especially highlighted. Very often, the team involved in the launch of an IT service is eliminated immediately after the completion of this work. ITIL developers do not consider this approach to be correct, and their task was to convey to readers their own vision of customer support by the project team in the early stages of “combat” operation.

Service Operation
considers the processes of supporting IT services: managing incidents, problems, events, requests, access. The book describes in detail the Service Desk (which received the status of a function in the third version of ITIL): structure, construction criteria, possible implementation problems, and the role of the service in the IT infrastructure.

Continual Service Improvement
considers the issues of evaluating services, regardless of whether they are provided to internal or external customers, ways to continuously improve the services provided (7-step service improvement process), which results in continuous improvement in the quality of services.