Deployment Guide Series: IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager V7.1

4 Deployment Guide Series: IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager V7.1

1.1 ITIL financial management

In today’s environment, businesses are very dependent on IT. Requirements

from customers for standard compliance are apparent and IT services are

required to better align with business objectives. The IT Infrastructure Library®

(ITIL®) is a set of best practices that can help address these issues.

ITIL is a collection of IT best practices designed to help organizations overcome

current and future technology challenges. Originally created by the UK Office of

Government Commerce (OGC) in 1988, ITIL currently has evolved as a result of

years of experience contributed by major IT organizations and companies,

including IBM.

ITIL is a library of books that document industry-accepted best practices for IT

service, infrastructure, and application management. ITIL is an excellent starting

point from which to adopt and adapt best practices for implementation in any IT

environment.

ITIL’s models show the goals, general activities, inputs, and outputs of the

various processes. They help to address the most common questions asked by

IT managers worldwide:

򐂰 How do I align IT services with business objectives?

򐂰 How do I lower the long term costs of IT services?

򐂰 How do I improve the quality of IT services?

ITIL is currently on its Version 3 release. However, the discussion of ITIL in this

book is mainly based on ITIL Version 2. In the Version 2 publication, the contents

of ITIL are shown in Figure 1-1 on page 5.

Chapter 1. Solution introduction 5

Figure 1-1 The contents of ITIL

The most popular books of the ITIL are Service Support and Service Delivery.

These two books together form the Service Management discipline. The financial

management process is part of Service Delivery. This is apparent because

financial management is strategic for aligning IT to perform as a business entity

and providing the ability to manage IT as a business.

The Service Delivery aspect uses the configuration data for building IT services.

򐂰 Service Level Management manages service level agreements with IT

consumers. Service level agreement is the base measurement of IT services

that are provided to consumers.

򐂰 Financial management manages the day-to-day IT finances and quantifies IT

investment into IT Service improvement. It also generates a balance report of

IT budget and accounting.

򐂰 Availability management ensures that IT services are available to the

business users. It identifies and mitigates risks involved with unavailability due

to an IT resource failure.

򐂰 Capacity management ensures that IT can provide its services with

reasonable performance as dictated by the service level agreement. This

requires an adequate capacity of IT resources.

The business

The technology

Planning to implement service management

Application management

The

business

perspective

ICT

Infrastructure

management

Service management

Service delivery

Service support

Security

management

Software Asset

management