The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an Information Technology (IT) management framework that provides practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), IT development and IT operations.
ITIL gives detailed descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its needs. ITIL is published in a series of books, each of which covers an IT management topic. The names ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce (OGC).
The eight ITIL version 2 books and their disciplines are:
The IT Service Management sets
1. Service Support
2. Service Delivery
Other operational guidance
3. ICT Infrastructure Management
4. Security Management
5. The Business Perspective
6. Application Management
7. Software Asset Management
To assist with the implementation of ITIL practices a further book was published (Apr 9, 2002) providing guidance on implementation (mainly of Service Management):
8. Planning to Implement Service Management
And this has more recently (Jan 26, 2006) been supplemented with guidelines for smaller IT units, not included in the original eight publications:
9. ITIL Small-Scale Implementation