Introduction

ITIL is a concept complementary to ITSM. Both of them work towards ensuring that the right people and the right services are used in the right place to ensure that businesses achieve their corporate goals and please their customer base. ITIL mainly focuses on providing the best tools, while IT service management focuses on properly allocating these tools in the organization. ITIL particularly focuses on IT service providers to businesses and customers.

Definition of ITIL

ITIL is an infrastructure that provides a set of best practices for IT services. It gives accurate guidance and information on which mix of services would fulfill their requirements and is the top quality grade.

Basics of ITIL Services

While talking about ITIL basic services, we must also know what we are talking about when we mention ‘service’. Service provides customers with an intangible asset with a particular utility to achieve the customer’s needs and demands. ITIL or its IT services cannot be termed as products for the following reasons:

1. Services are intangible assets (cannot be touched and felt), while products are tangible assets (can be touched and felt).
2. Services can be produced, provided, and sold at the same time. However, real products cannot be produced and sold simultaneously.

Since ITIL is a subset of IT service management, the main goals of service management are:

• Development of IT services that can be implemented in business processes can also be provided to customers and customized as per their tastes and preferences.
• Ensuring correct use and maximized efficiency of IT services through resource management since IT services are valuable resources.
• Provision of quality IT services which can be delivered at a low cost.