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IT Best Practices With ITIL: Page 4 of 7

The final ITIL service-support discipline is software control and distribution, aka release management (depending on who you talk to). It involves software-feature development, installation and software-distribution planning. This may sound like a desktop-management suite, but it isn't. Rather, it's about the IT tasks that use desktop management.

The second ITIL core group is service delivery. This encompasses best practices for planning, including service-level management, capacity management, contingency planning, availability management and cost management for IT services.

Service-level management, according to ITIL, is the central purpose of IT. Though it may seem obvious, that philosophy de-emphasizes technology and puts control in the hands of business customers. SLM is sometimes considered synonymous with service-level agreements, but SLAs are basically an outcome of SLM. ITIL further defines service-contract maintenance: for example, outlining for customers what services you'll manage, as well as planning growth and establishing priorities for service delivery and remediation.

Capacity management defines monitoring, forecasting, sizing and modeling so you can determine what resources you need to meet SLM guidelines. Performance monitoring--the collection of statistical usage data--is paramount to this process, requiring instrumentation in the network, systems and applications in order to collect the data. But it's only a piece of the capacity-management puzzle. ITIL also defines how to apply this data to the services being delivered, and helps you project any additional IT resources (people, computers and software) that may be needed to deliver new or altered services.

Contingency planning is designed to help you restore operational services as quickly as possible and to maintain services even during a failure. This disaster-recovery planning attempts to identify all possible failures and then formally define recovery actions.