The Information Technology Infrastructure Library lovingly referred to as ITIL is a set of concepts and practices for managing Information Technology services, development and operation. It was founded by the UK Government in the 1980s as the need to have standard IT practices began to arise.

Some of the main tenets of this discipline are:

• Service Support- This practice focuses on the user of the service, primarily censuring they have access to the appropriate servcies to support business functions. This involves effectively managing changes, incidents, releases and other configuration related issues.
• Service Delivery – This practices is mostly concerned with the proactive services the technology department must deliver to provide adequate support to business users. This involves efectively managing service levels, capacity, continuity, availability and finanacials.
• ICT Infrastructure Management -This contains recfommendation for best practivces for requirements analysis, planning, deployment, and ongoing operations and technical support
• Security Management – This involves managing information security in the management organization. The primary goal is to protect information assets against risk and maintain their value to the organization.
• The Business Perspective – This are issues that are encountered in understanding and improving IS Services as part of the entire business this involves issues such as Business Continuity Management, Surviving change, transformation of business practices through radical change, partnerships and outsourcing
• Application Management – These are the best practices employed to improve the overall quality of IT software development and support throughout software development projects.
• Software Asset Management – is the practice of integrating people, processes and technology to allow usage and licenses to be systematically tracked and managed.This reduces IT expenditures. » Read more: Information Technology Infrastructure Library