Best Practice: Service Delivery

I purchased this book and its companion, Service Support, to prepare for the Master's level exam a couple of years ago. I read these books, made outlines, completed a practice exam and found that I was sufficiently prepared to pass the exam on my first try. I know that some people will sit for the exam using other sources, such as their class notes or materials their training provider created. I would rather not study from information too far removed from the primary source. Sometimes there is a reason you do not want to use a primary source. Perhaps the material is too sterile and you need the examples that secondary sources tend to provide. However, that is not the case for these books. The material is well organized. The concepts within chapters are numbered, and the accompanying charts and graphs help clarify the ideas. The concepts are written in an easy to understand style. On a cautionary note, you must decide whether you should purchase this version 2 book based on when you plan to sit for the certification exam. As you may have heard, Version 3 is scheduled for release in Spring of this year. If you are wondering what will be different between the two versions, as well as what changes to expect in certification and examination, do a google search for `ITIL refresh news straight from the source.' This newsletter contains an article written by Sharon Taylor, ITIL Chief Architect.

Among the official guides this one stands out as the most detailed and practical. Most of the official guides are, in my opinion, essential only if you are pursuing certification, but this one goes beyond the essential minimums by providing practical information about the five key process areas in more depth. The areas covered are:(1) Service Level Management(2) Financial Management for IT Services(3) Capacity Management(4) IT Service Continuity Management(5) Availability ManagementAs in all books in this series this one covers the theory, practical and implementation perspectives, as well as the relationships between and among key process areas. Another resource I highly recommend is ITIL Community Forum, which you can reach by pasting the ASIN number B0002FP9PO into the search box on this page, selecting all products and clicking GO. This site has a link to an open source version of the ITIL documentation that is evolving, but contains good descriptions of many of the key process areas.

The information Technology Infraestructure Library is a set of guidance developed by United Kingdom's Office of Goverment Commerce (OGC). The guidance, documented in a set of books, describe an integrated, process based, best practice framework for managing, delevop in this case, IT services. To date, this book is the only comprehensive, non-propriestary, publicly available guidance fot IT Management in Service Delivery.So, is primarily targeted at people responsible for managing IT services or IT consultants from enterprise that offers IT review services.