ITIL – Volumes & Disciplines

ITIL consists of seven volumes. They are:

1. Service Delivery – Deals with customer agreements and monitors compliance to these agreements by the IT service provider.
2. Service Support – Deals with any failures to meet the levels of service agreed in the customer agreements.
3. Business Perspective – Business Perspective is made up of a group of people who serve as liaisons between the business and IT. It (BP) clearly indicates how they (the business and IT) will interact with each other. The people in the Business Perspective group are usually those who have a deep understanding of the business, it’s current goals and future direction and can quickly get the new products and services in place when there is a business requirement for the same.
4. Infrastructure Management – Guides business users through the planning, delivery and management of high quality IT services.
5. Application Management – Manages the relationships between different projects. ITIL considers that every application is made up of different project of groups of different projects.
6. Planning to Implement Service Management – Used by Project Managers while implementing ITIL.
7. Security Management – Provides security related information and management about the ICT infrastructure.

The CENTRAL Part of ITIL only consists of the first five volumes mentioned above.  But we will only focus on CORE ITIL which consists of Service Delivery and Service Support.

CORE ITIL is made up of 11 (Eleven) Disciplines – 05 of these disciplines come under Service Delivery and the other 06 of them come under Service Support. Let’s take a closer look:

SERVICE DELIVERY DISCIPLINES:

Sl. No.	Service Delivery Discipline	What does it do
1	Service Level Management	Deals with providing high-quality services to customers at the right costs.
2	IT Services Financial Management	Deals with providing maximum (business) value at minimum costs.
3	Availability Management	Manages and maintains a cost-effective level of service availability by optimizing the capability of ICT infrastructure.
4	Capacity Management	Provides information on the available (service) capacity at any site or location.
5	IT Service Continuity Management (Business Continuity Management [BCM])	Deals with managing and maintaining the minimum level of service delivery required to keep the business free from any interruption in case of any natural disaster. (Example: Floods, earthquakes etc.)

SERVICE SUPPORT DISCIPLINES:

Sl. No.	Service Support Discipline	What does it do
1	Service Desk	It is the single point of contact for customers who need any help with the service(s) they are receiving from an (IT) service provider.
2	Incident Management	Deals with restoring a service (an IT service) as quickly as possible by providing a solution or a ‘work-around’.
3	Problem Management	Identifies the underlying (unknown) cause of the incident and provides a permanent (long-term) solution.
4	Change Management	Ensures that any change to the ICT infrastructure has minimum effect on the IT services being provided by efficiently handling any incidents that may arise as a result of such change(s).
5	Release Management	Implements new (hardware/software) releases into the live (operational) environment under the supervision of Configuration Management & Change Management.
6	Configuration Management	Manages the (ICT) assets of an organization and the relationship between these assets. [ICT stands for Information & Communication Technology]

All these disciplines are known as “Processes” except Service Desk, which is known as a “Function”.