Thank you for buying (or borrowing!) this book, and I hope you’re keen to get on with reading it. Good. I’m sure you’ll find the journey ahead interesting, informative, and useful. But, before we start, are you clear in your own mind about what you want to achieve?
I guess that many readers will have the clear and simple aim of passing their ITIL Foundation exam—getting the qualification on their CV (or résumé). That’s fine. When I’ve been interviewing people who want to join my staff, I have been particularly interested in those with this qualification because I knew they came with some understanding of what we were trying to do and why we were going about it the way we were.
Of course, you may well have a longer-term career aim. The ITIL Foundation certification is just that, a foundation on which to build. If you want to take your formal understanding of IT service management further, you’ll have to get this qualification before you can take the next-level exams. More importantly, if you want to improve your effectiveness as a manager, gain that promotion, and open up more job opportunities, you’ll find an ever-deeper understanding of ITIL crucial to achieving that aim.
Or you may be seeking just to find out what all this “ITIL stuff” is. Perhaps you’re a technical wizard who wants to put a context around the great work you do. Maybe you’re a highly experienced IT manager, even an IT director, who’s heard about ITIL and wants to understand it better. If so, you’ve made the right choice. This book is not “ITIL for Dummies” nor is it a bluffer’s guide. My aim is to take you through the ITIL framework at a comfortable pace to demystify it and to ensure that you’ll gain a sound appreciation of what ITIL is about and why it is so valuable.
I’ll be especially delighted if you’re from outside the world of IT. A big welcome! By reading and understanding this book you’re going to have a huge advantage over your colleagues because you will come to realize how IT service management (which is what ITIL is about) is a strategic business asset, essential to the success of practically all enterprises. If you’re not already the executive vice president, your journey to achieving such eminence could well start here!
The point I want to make is that this book is for everyone. It almost goes without saying that service desk analysts and IT service managers will find it extremely valuable as will everyone involved in IT because the reason they’ve got a job is, ultimately, to provide a service—a service that enables a customer (which is the “business,” however we define it) to do its job.
This book is for more than just those good people in IT. Everyone who uses a computer of some sort (pretty much about everyone in the world these days) depends on it for their employment, their entertainment, their human interactions, and so on. We all fall into this latter category. Appreciating how the service you’re receiving should be delivered will help you communicate more effectively with your service provider, which should not only help them do their job better but also increase the value you get for your money. Likewise, on a broader scale, business executives and managers need to understand what ITSM is so that they can work in effective partnership with their IT people to maximize the value of the business investment in IT.
Let’s Keep It Simple
In its fullness ITIL encompasses much complexity and contains a number of subtle interpretations. Happily, here we are focusing on its foundations so we can take a more comfortable, straightforward, and unsophisticated approach. However, the formal ITIL Foundation syllabus omits some important elements of ITIL, so to ensure you get a comprehensive picture, I’ve put these elements back in. A list of this additional content is at the end of this front matter.
Nevertheless, although we are going to keep things simple, I appreciate that the readers of this book will be intelligent, experienced, and perceptive people with incisive, analytical brains. That being the case, you may question some of the statements I make because you may envisage some circumstances where this basic ITIL guidance may not give a full answer. When I’m delivering an instructor-led course, we could discuss these matters freely. However, in a book such as this, that is impractical. Please bear that in mind. Occasionally, and to help, I’ll refer to “classic” ITIL, an expression I use to mean ITIL in its straightforward and uncomplicated conception.
Using This Book
This book is laid out in the same logical order that an instructor-led course would take, and I recommend you start at the beginning and work through Chapters 1 to 7 sequentially. However, you can dip into Chapter 8 whenever you like. Electronic practice exams are also provided for you to tackle (see Appendix D). After you’ve completed the book, you can take a practice exam in simulated exam conditions, mark your work, and, depending on your level of success, revisit any parts of the book you need to and then tackle another simulated exam.
I’ve written the contents and the sample exams in alignment with the official syllabus (see the ITIL Foundation Level page at www.axelos.com for more exam information and the ITIL syllabus). Table 1 is a topic map, aligning the exam domains and additional material with the contents in this book.
Table 1 Map of Exam Domains and Additional Material
Additional Material
The following list indicates, by section headings, the material that is in the book but is outside the syllabus for the ITIL Foundation exam.
Strategy Management
Demand Management
Component Failure Impact Analysis (CFIA)
Fault-Tree Analysis (FTA)
Measuring Availability
Roles in Service Design
Getting Started with SACM
Raise RFC
Change Evaluation
Roles in Service Transition
Balance
Incident Matching (Incident Management)
Incident Matching (Problem Management)
Roles in Service Operation
Implementing Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
Kotter’s Eight Steps
Roles in Continual Service Improvement