ITIL

ITIL

Information Technology Infrastructure Library, ITIL, are processes created by Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency of the British government. ITIL process consists of Planning Service-Management, Service Support, Service Management, Service Delivery, IT Security Management, Application Management, Business Perspective, and IT Infrastructure Management. ITIL defines structure and skill requirements of information technology of an organization. It is also a set of standard operational management procedures and practices to manage an IT operation and associated infrastructure. ITIL is currently on its third version as it continues to advance with technology.

An overview image of ITIL


A key function of every IT firm is the Service Desk. The Service Desk is ideally a single point of contact for users (SPOC). The two main focuses of the Service Desk are: Incident Control and Communication. The Service Desk handles all incoming calls and only escalates them to the second or third tier support when necessary. Ideally, the Service Desk will have access to a Knowledge Base, which will contain a list of known solutions for common incidents. This allows for questions or incidents to be solved by the Service Desk staff without taking time from skilled IT technicians.


Evergreen Systems is an ITIL consulting firm.
Evergreen was founded in 1997 with the focus of helping large, complex organizations to improve the way their IT organization runs. Thier motto is “We bridge the gap between ITIL and your company’s IT operations challenges.” They offer practices in process consulting, technology services, ITIL training services and HP software support. They usually work with government, retail, energy, financial services, insurance and health sciences sectors. They have been noted working with Cleveland, Ohio bank, KeyBank. In the fall of 2004, Evergreen assisted KeyBank's Enterprise Technology Operations (ETO) organization in developing a successful IT Asset Management (ITAM) program. The ETO wanted to commit to standardizing critical processes around the ITIL framework. KeyBank's server inventory in their two primary data centers and their remote locations was unreliable. Evergreen evaluated the process against best practices and designed recommended process changes. Those changes included request, procurement, receiving and deployment, maintenance and retirement processes.



Sunrise Software Company based in England produces ITIL software including Service Desk Software Solution. Sunrise has designed an ITIL software package for service desks and helpdesks wanting to step up to best practice ITSM processes.
The software includes 'Sostenuto' browser based service desk software, standard implementation, training and one Year Support. The software package includes incident, problem, change, release, knowledge, service level, product, order, contract and reporting management. The implementation process includes software installation, data imports, license/permissions, personalization, and testing. Training and support is also provided which includes user training, system management, documentation, and one year support and software maintenance.

Software Design Patterns

According to Christopher Alexander, the great architectures are not made from rigorous, planned designs. But designs are made of pieces custom fit to each-other and to their environment. All involve recurring themes or patterns. Software patterns include dataflow batch processing, pipes and filters, independent component communication processes, Object Oriented systems, Virtual machines interpreters, and blackboards to name a few. Object Oriented technology was introduced to lessen difficulty of software. To better handle this difficultly, patterns provide the terminology beyond objects and tie them together. Software design patterns can be traced back to the influence of three primary sources. The first is the Design Patterns book by Gamma et al., a book that helped people conceptualizes beyond individual design relationships to grasp important structure of micro-architectures, and to value proven solution strategies over raw innovation. The second was the series of pattern conferences (PLoPs) that provided a forum for pattern enthusiasts to support each other in creating a new body of software literature. Lastly was Christopher Alexander, who directly engaged design in his keynote speech at OOPSLA 1996.



Logo from OOPSLA 1996






An example of design pattern is a multi-tier architecture and more specifically three-tier model. Multi-tier architecture is used to describe a degree of separation attained by one or many software agents between discrete components in order to facilitate processing in some manner. An example of this would be the use of middleware to more efficiently service data requests between a user and a database.


Examples of a multitier architecture







In computing, Three-tier is a client-server architecture in which the user interface, functional process logic ("business rules") and data storage and data access are developed and maintained as independent module s, most often on separate platforms. The term "three-tier" or "three-layer", as well as the concept of multitier architectures, seems to have originated within Rational Software or Microsoft.




Apart from the usual advantages of modular software with well defined interfaces, the three-tier architecture is intended to allow any of the three tiers to be upgraded or replaced independently as requirements or technology change. For example, an upgrade of desktop operating system from Microsoft Windows to Unix would only affect the user interface code.

An example of three-tier architecture