Stories about: Office of Government Commerce

It has been just over a year since the introduction of Version 3 of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The update to ITIL, a framework for best practices in IT service delivery, was intended to sharpen its focus and attract a new group of followers.

It's been nearly a year since Version 3 of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) came out. The update to ITIL, a framework for best practices in IT service delivery, was intended to sharpen its focus and, not incidentally, to attract a new group of followers.

The Internet was defined in 1974, but, in 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book called 'The Road Ahead' and failed to mention how it would transform our lives. Similarly, Informational Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) first saw light of day in the UK in the mid 1980s. Today there is hardly a serious CIO who has not embraced this set of concepts and techniques for managing IT infrastructure, development and operations. However, it has taken a long time to gain traction and is only now gaining significant support in the US.

The U.K. government's CIO Council has agreed a procedure to intervene in major public sector IT projects where whistleblowers raise concerns.

David Farris, IT manager at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, has been working for five years to change some of the processes within his 300-employee organization. He hopes the changes will lead to significant savings in the IT department, which now spends about US$100 million annually.

As part of a seven stop itSMF International roadshow, the IT Service Management Forum will launch ITIL v3 in Australia on Wednesday, June 20.

Technology vendors try to develop new releases and upgrades at a regular pace to keep their users happy and their profits up. But it has been seven years since the U.K. government agency that develops the ITIL specification updated the IT service management guide -- a situation that finally will change when an upgrade becomes available this week.

A leading provider of gaming solutions has made best practice IT frameworks exciting with the introduction of the world's first IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3 simulation.

The city council of Birmingham, U.K., has defended its year-long trial of desktop Linux, claiming it to be a success, despite an independent report showing it would have been cheaper to install Windows XP.

In December 2005, the International Standards Office published ISO/IEC 20000 (the international standard for IT Service Management). It is based on the British standard of the same topic (BS15000) which was also published by Standards Australia (AS8018). ISO/IEC 20000 is a standard that promotes the adoption of an integrated approach for the effective delivery of IT services. The standard comes in two parts; Part 1 is the Specification for Service Management and Part 2 is the Code of Practice.

Many companies are using standards and frameworks to deal with certain aspects of information security. These models can help protect systems and data, but each plays a very different role in an overall security plan.