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Reference · IT service management

IT Service Management Reference

A short reference section covering core IT service management (ITSM) concepts drawn from the ITIL framework: service support structures, service delivery processes, the bodies that certify ITIL practitioners, and how a Request for Change moves through formal change management.

ITSM is the practice of designing, delivering, and improving the IT services an organization provides — as opposed to managing individual pieces of technology in isolation. ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is the most widely adopted framework for doing this: it does not prescribe a fixed set of tools, but instead defines a common vocabulary and a set of processes that let a service desk, a change advisory board, and a capacity-planning team all work from the same definitions of "incident," "problem," "change," and "service level." The four reference pages below cover the parts of that framework most often searched for on their own: the day-to-day support functions, the longer-horizon delivery processes, who actually administers ITIL certification today, and how a single Request for Change is assessed and approved.

The framework itself has gone through several revisions since its 1980s origin under the UK government. ITIL v2 introduced the process groupings still recognizable today; ITIL v3 organized those processes into a five-stage service lifecycle (Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, and Continual Service Improvement); and ITIL 4, the current version published in 2019, replaced that lifecycle model with a more flexible "service value system" built around 34 discrete management practices. None of the revisions discarded the underlying vocabulary — an incident, a problem, and a change still mean the same thing they did under ITIL v2 — so the four pages below still hold up as a plain-language reference regardless of which version an organization has formally adopted.

Related reference: ISO/IEC 17799 to ISO/IEC 27000 overview.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ITSM the same thing as ITIL?

No. ITSM (IT service management) is the general practice of designing, delivering, and improving IT services. ITIL is the specific framework most organizations use to structure that practice — the most widely adopted one, but not the only one.

Is ITIL still relevant, or has it been replaced?

It is still the dominant reference framework for IT service management, now in its fourth major revision (ITIL 4, published 2019). Newer approaches like DevOps and site reliability engineering address adjacent ground, but most large organizations still run ITIL-aligned service desks and change processes underneath them.

What changed between ITIL v3 and ITIL 4?

ITIL 4 replaced the older lifecycle-stage structure (Service Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, Continual Improvement) with a more flexible "service value system" built around 34 management practices, and restructured certification into four levels instead of the older credit-based scheme.

Where should someone new to IT service management start?

With the vocabulary: the difference between an incident and a problem, what a service-level agreement actually commits to, and how a Request for Change moves through approval. The four reference pages below cover exactly that ground.