ITIL

⏱ 3 min  ·  📅 2026

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a compendium of concepts and best practices for the development, operation, and management of information technology services. It was developed by the British government in the 1980s and is today one of the most widely used reference frameworks for IT service management in the world.

Origin and evolution

ITIL's recommendations were developed in the 1980s by the British government's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), with the aim of standardizing the diverse practices of service providers to the public administration.

In 2001, the CCTA was merged into the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), which was already managing the different versions of ITIL.

Version 3, published in 2007, reduced the number of books that make up the framework from nine to five, organized around the service lifecycle (ITIL Service Lifecycle):

1. Service Strategy.
2. Service Design.
3. Service Transition.
4. Service Operation.
5. Continual Service Improvement.

In 2011, ITIL V3 updated its recommendations by incorporating feedback from users and teachers.

Certification

ITIL offers a professional certification model with three levels:

1. Foundation Certificate: knowledge of ITIL concepts and terminology.
2. Practitioner's Certificate: practical application in specific processes.
3. Manager's Certificate: management of the complete lifecycle of IT services.

Criticisms

Within the industry, critical views of the model coexist with defenses of it. Some criticisms:

Becoming a slave to outdated definitions / letting ITIL become a religion. — Dean Meyer

The consistency that characterizes the service support processes disappears in the service delivery books. — van Herwaarden

The OGC does not claim that ITIL best practices describe pure processes, nor that ITIL is a framework designed as a coherent model. That is what most users make of it. — Jan van Bon

Common mistake

Adopting ITIL dogmatically without adapting it to the context. ITIL is a catalog of good practices, not an exact prescription. Organizations that adopt all ITIL processes without analyzing which ones are relevant to their size and maturity tend to generate bureaucracy without improving service quality. ITIL explicitly recommends adopting only what is useful in each organization's context.

See also

CMM-SW CMMI ISO 15504 Predictive management The Agile Manifesto

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