ITIL 4 Foundation Overview

Four Dimensions

Organizations and People

Information and Technology
Partners and Suppliers
Value Streams and Processes

External Factors – (PESTLE)

Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental

Service Relationship Model

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Service Value System

Guiding Principles: Recommendations that can guide an organization in all circumstances, regardless
of changes in its goals, strategies, type of work, or management structure.

Governance: The means by which an organization is directed and controlled.

Service Value Chain: A set of interconnected activities that a organization performs to deliver a
valuable product or service to its consumers and to facilitate value realization.

Practices: Sets of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.
Continual Improvement: A recurring organizational activity performed at all levels to ensure that a
organization’s performance continually meets stakeholders’ expectations.

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ITIL Guiding Principles
Focus on value: Everything that the organization does needs to map, directly or indirectly, to value for
the customer.

Start where you are: Do not start from scratch and build something without considering what is
already available to be leveraged.

Progress iteratively with feedback: Do not attempt to do everything at once.

Collaborate and promote visibility: Working together across boundaries produces results that have
greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives and better likelihood of long-term success.

Think and work holistically: No service, or element used to provide a service, stands alone. Work on
the service as a whole, not just on its parts.

Keep it simple and practical: If a process, service, action or metric provides no value, eliminate it. Use
the minimum number of steps necessary to accomplish the objective. Always us outcome-based
thinking.

Optimize and automate: Eliminate anything that is truly wasteful and use technology to achieve
whatever it is capable of. Human intervention should only happen where it really contributes value.

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Service Value Chain

Plan: To ensure a shared understanding of the vision, current status and improvement direction for all
four dimensions and all products and services across the organization.

Improve: To ensure continual improvement of products, services and practices across all value chain
activities and the four dimensions of service management.

Engage: To provide a good understanding of stakeholder needs, transparency, and continual

engagement and good relationships with all stakeholders.

Design and Transition: To ensure that products and services continually meet stakeholder
expectations for quality, cost and time-to-market.

Obtain / Build: To ensure that service components are available when and where they are needed, and
meet agreed specifications.

Deliver and Support: To ensure that services are delivered and supported according to agreed
specifications and stakeholders’ expectations.

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ITIL Management Practices
General management Service management Technical
practices practices management
practices
 Architecture  Availability management  Deployment
management management
 Business analysis
 Continual  Infrastructure and
 Capacity and
improvement platform
performance management
 Information security management
management  Software
 Change Enablement development and
 Knowledge management management
 Incident management
 Measurement and
reporting  IT asset management
 Organizational change  Monitoring and event
management management
 Portfolio management  Problem management
 Project management  Release management
 Relationship  Service catalogue
management management
 Risk management  Service configuration
management
 Service financial
management  Service continuity
management
 Strategy management
 Service design
 Supplier
management  Service desk
 Workforce and talent  Service level
management management
 Service request
management
 Service validation and
testing

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ITIL Management Practices
General management Practices
Architecture Management: Is to provide an understanding of all the different elements that make up an
organization and how those elements interrelate.

Continual Improvement: Is to align the organization’s practices and services with changing business
needs.

Information Security Management: Is to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct
business.

Knowledge Management: Is to maintain and improve the effective, efficient and convenient use of
information and knowledge across the organization.

Measurement and Reporting: Is to support good decision-making and continual improvement by

decreasing levels of uncertainty.

Organizational Change Management: Is to ensure that changes in an organization are smoothly and
successfully implemented and that lasting benefits are achieved by managing the human aspects of the
change.

Portfolio Management: Is to ensure that the organization has the right mix of programs, projects,
products and services, to execute the organization’s strategy within its funding and resource constraints.

Project Management: Is to ensure that all projects in the organization are successfully delivered. This is
achieved by planning, delegating, monitoring and maintaining control of all aspects of a project, and
keeping the motivation of those involved.

Relationship Management: Is to establish and nurture the links between the organization and its
stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.

Risk Management: Is to ensure that the organization understands and effectively handles risks.

Service Financial Management: Is to support the organization’s strategies and plans for service
management by ensuring that organization’s financial resources and investments are being used
effectively.

Strategy Management: Is to formulate the goals of the organization and adopt the courses of action and
allocation of resources necessary for carrying out those goals.

Supplier Management: Is to ensure that the organization’s suppliers and their performance are
managed appropriately to support the provision of seamless, quality products and services.

Workforce and Talent Management: Is to ensure that the organization has the right people with the
appropriate skills and knowledge and in the correct roles to support its business objectives.

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Service Management Practices
Availability Management: Is to ensure that services deliver agreed levels of availability to meet the
needs of customers and users.

Business Analysis: Is to analyze a business or some element of a business, define its associated business
needs and recommend solutions to address these needs and/or solve a business problem, which must
facilitate value creation for stakeholders.

Capacity and Performance Management: Is to ensure that services achieve agreed and expected
performance, satisfying current and future demand in a cost-effective way.

Change Enablement: Is to maximize the number of successful IT changes by ensuring that risks have
been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing a change schedule.

Incident Management: Is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service
operation as quickly as possible.

IT Asset Management: Is to plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets, to help the organization;
maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support decision-making and meet all requirements.

Monitoring and Event Management: Is to systematically observe services and service components, and
record selected changes of state identified as events.

Problem Management: Is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and
potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and know errors.

Release Management: Is to make new and changed services and features available for use.

Service Catalog Management: Is to provide a single source of consistent information on all services and
service offerings, and to ensure that it is available to the relevant audience.

Service Configuration Management: Is to ensure that accurate and reliable information about the
configuration of services, and the Cis that support them, is available when and where it is needed. This
includes information on how Cis are configured and the relationships between them.

Service Continuity Management: Is to ensure that the availability and performance of a service is
maintained at a sufficient level in the event of a disaster.

Service Design: Is to design products and services that are fit for purpose, fit for use and that can be
delivered by the organization and its ecosystems

Service Desk: Is to capture demand for incident resolution and service requests. It should act as the
entry point / single point of contact for the IT or service organization.

Service Level Management: Is to set clear business-based targets for service performance, so that the
delivery of a service can be properly assessed, monitored and managed against these targets.

Service Request Management: Is to support the agreed quality of a service by handling all pre-defined,
user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.

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Service Validation and Testing: Is to ensure that new or changed products and services meet defined
requirements

Technical Management Practices

Deployment Management: Is to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes,
or any other component to live environments.

Infrastructure and Platform Management: Is to oversee the infrastructure and platforms used by an
organization.

Software Development and Management: Is to ensure that applications meet internal and external
stakeholder needs, in terms of functionality, reliability, maintainability, compliance and auditability.

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Definitions:
Availability: the ability of an IT service or other configuration item to perform its agreed
function when required.
Change: the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on
services.

Configuration Item (CI): Any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service.
Configuration Management System (CMS): A set of tools, data and information that is used to
support service configuration management.

Cost: The amount of money spent on a specific activity or resource.

Critical Success Factor CSF: A necessary precondition for the achievement of intended results.
Customer: A person who defines the requirements for a service and takes responsibility for the
outcomes of service consumption.

Event: An event can be defined as any change of state that has significance for the management of a
configuration item (CI) or IT service.

Incident: An unplanned interruption to a service, or reduction in the quality of a service.

IT Asset: Any valuable component that can contribute to delivery of an IT product or service.
Key Performance Indicator KPI: An important metric used to evaluate the success in meeting pre-set
objectives for performance.

Known Error: A problem that has been analyzed and has not been resolved.
Organization: A person or a group of people that has its own functions with responsibilities, authorities
and relationships to achieve its objectives.

Outcome: A result for a stakeholder enabled by one or more outputs.

Output: A tangible or intangible deliverable of an activity
Organizational Velocity: Is the speed, effectiveness and efficiency with which an organization
operates. Organizational velocity influences time to market, safety, costs and risks.
Performance: A measure of what is achieved or delivered by a system, person, team, practice or
service.

Problem: A cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.

Process: A set of interrelated or interacting activities that transform inputs into outputs. A process
takes one or more defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs. Processes define the sequence
of actions and their dependencies.

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Product: A configuration of an organization’s resources designed to offer value for a customer.
Release: A version of a service or other configuration item, or a collection of configuration items, that is
made available for use.

Request Catalog: A view of the service catalog, providing details on service requests for existing and
new services available for the user.

Risk: A possible event that could cause harm or loss, or make it more difficult to achieve objectives. Risk
can also be defined as uncertainty of outcome, and can be used in the context of measuring the
probability of positive outcomes as well as negative outcomes.

Service: A means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve,
without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.

Service Management: A set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers
in the form of services.

Service Offering: A description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target
consumer group. A service offing may include goods, access to resources, and service actions.

Service Request: A request from a user or user’s authorized representative that initiates a service
action that has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery.

Sponsor: A person who authorizes budget for service consumption.

User: A person who uses services.
Utility: The functionality offered by a product or service to meet a particular need. Utility can be
summarized as ‘what the service does’ and can be used to determine whether a service is ‘fit for
purpose’. To have utility, a service must either support the performance of the consumer or remove
constraints from the consumer. Many services do both.

Value: Value is the perceived benefits, usefulness and importance of something.

Value Stream: A series of steps an organization undertakes to create and deliver products and services
to consumers.

Warranty: Assurance that a product or service will meet agreed requirements. Warranty can be
summarized as ‘how the service performs’ and can be used to determine whether a service is ‘fit for
use’. Warranty often relates to service levels aligned with the needs of service consumers.

Workaround: A solution that reduces or eliminates the impact of an incident or problem for which a
full resolution is not yet available. Some workarounds reduce the likelihood of incidents.

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