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IT Best Practices With ITIL: Page 6 of 7

There are plenty of products and consultancies offering ITIL verification (see "Sites to See," below). This isn't certification, but consulting and training. These organizations can provide audits that conclude whether your organization's IT practices appear to be ITIL-compliant.

Vendors also can get some ITIL peace of mind: Pink Elephant, for example, offers ITIL verification (not certification) to vendors, for a price, and publishes the criteria it uses in PinkVerify, its verification service. The company also offers a do-it-yourself survey that provides a snapshot of ITIL compliance. And the itSMF site has a self-evaluation for both vendors and enterprises that gives some basic verification of ITIL compliance.

But ITIL is no silver bullet. It's more an encyclopedia of all possible best practices, consisting of code books that cost a couple of hundred bucks apiece. You can't use all the ITIL documents as one big cookbook. Instead, think of ITIL as a raw repository of best practices from which you can pick and choose to fit your organization.

Bruce Boardman, executive editor of Network Computing, tests and writes about network management and systems. Write to him at [email protected].

Find the IT Infrastructure Library a bit daunting? For guidance on how to implement its best practices, pick up a copy of The Visible Ops Handbook: Starting ITIL in Four Practical Steps, published by ITPI (Information Technology Process Institute).