ITIL

ITIL Overview (http://www.benchmarklearning.com/COMMUNITIES/ITIL/ITIL.aspx)
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a comprehensive, non-proprietary and publicly available set of guidelines for "best practice" in IT service management, owned by the British Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Each library module provides a code of practice intended to improve IT efficiencies, reduce risks and increase the effectiveness and quality of IT services management and infrastructure. ITIL has recently undergone a refresh and the newly published ITIL v3 core books have adopted an integrated service lifecycle approach to IT Service Management.

What is ITIL All About?• A set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.
• A set of best practices—not a methodology
• Providing guidance, not a step-by-step how-to manual
• Providing optimal service provision at a justifiable cost
• A non-proprietary set of best practices—public domain
ITIL often relies on the skills of the Project Manager and the Business Analyst to ensure project success

2. A more detailed summary of ITIL Service Desk

ITIL Service Desk (http://www.educause.edu/wiki/ITIL+Service+Desk)
The Service Desk is critically important as the very first contact the organization's users have with IT Services. The Service Desk is a single point of contact for end users who need anything from IT. The Service Desk handles day-to-day customer issues, end-user calls, and related service issues. The Service Desk is NOT just a call center or expanded help desk. IT offers a broader range of services through a more global approach to IT. Not only can a Service Desk handle incidents, problems and questions, but a Service Desk can also provide an interface for other activities such as customer change requests, billing and availability management. The Service Desk has great strategic importance. It represents the interests of the customer to the rest of the IT organization, and is the most important function in an organization for many customers. Because of this, the Service Desk helps to ensure the delivery of customer satisfaction - the key measurement of effective IT Services Management. Some important parts regarding the ITIL-based Service Desk:

• Provides a single point of contact (SPOC) for customers and users
• Facilitates the restoration of normal operational service
• Is the front door for other IT departments
• Deals with many customer queries without needing to contact specialist personnel
• Follows up calls originating from within the IT organization
• Detects incidents
• Verifies the details of a caller and their IT resource (also called a configurable item, or CI)
• Always acts professionally when dealing with users
• Ensures that users do not have to search endlessly for a solution
• Is consistent and efficient in all customer contacts
• Serves as the main source of information to users
• Provides information about new and existing services, provisions of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and order procedures and costs
• Performs backups and restores, provides LAN connections, allocates disk space change requests, creates accounts, authorizes and changes passwords (i.e., "standard changes")
• Has access to a knowledge base, which will contain a list of known solutions for common incidents
• Is responsible for keeping the customer informed on the status of their request
• Is a centralized function for incident and request handling
• Performs ongoing monitoring and management of customer satisfaction
• Provides strong levels of incident communications and ownership
• Has staff and management with the right level of support and customer care skills
• Ensures long term customer retention and satisfaction
• Assists in the identification of business opportunities
• Reduces support costs by the efficient use of resource and technology
• Provides advice and guidance to customers
• Communicates and promotes IT services

3. A profile of an ITIL consulting company - what is their pitch, what services, discuss one reference client from their website.

TDG CONSULTING
For many enterprise organizations in the Southeast, TDG is the natural choice to deliver cost-effective, comprehensive, compelling, and creative IT Service Management services.
TDG provides practical ITIL consulting, mentoring, and training - all across a variety of offerings, engagements, and scenarios.
Services
Many organizations understand that they need some type of assistance, but they are unsure of what type, when, and why. Furthermore, many have been burned by too much consultancy or ITSM services of the wrong type, or in the case of ITIL assistance, consultancy that forced a 'vanilla' version of ITIL without regard to organizational uniqueness.
TDG recognizes and, frankly, encourages each organization to adapt ITIL disciplines to their specific IT culture.
The TDG set of ITSM service offerings ranges from fixed price assessments, implementation assistance, focused workshops, and ITIL certification training. Each offering is geared towards a certain point in an organization's implementation timeline.
In order to determine where potential clients would fall on this process improvement trajectory, TDG recommends their clients use an IT process improvement timeline which represents the various phases most organizations will encounter as they move from the early state of pre-ITIL awareness to one where ITIL disciplines are interwoven in the fabric of day-to-day IT Operations. I found this timeline interesting. Please see below:


Reference Client Example
Checkfree Corporation
Reference: David Bryant
Title: Senior Manager
Location: Atlanta, GA

"CheckFree engaged TDG to conduct a strategic assessment of several ITIL and non-ITIL processes at CheckFree. This engagement involved interviewing all senior and executive IT management, conducting a process-specific maturity assessment based on the CMMI , investigating all evidentiary support for process tasking, documenting necessary cultural barriers to change, performing a detailed SWOT analysis, assembling budgeting and cost payback figures, and developing a 3,000 line-item project plan.
Based on the final report delivered by TDG, CheckFree decided to launch a rollout of the ITIL Service Management processes in its key operating environments. In their capacity as coaches, consultants, ITIL educators, content developers, training collateral and process engineers, TDG led the CheckFree ITIL team through a multi-phased deployment methodology.
TDG was an invaluable partner in the ITIL rollout at CheckFree and I would highly recommend them to other companies who are transitioning to ITIL. TDG's knowledge, expertise, and technical competency sets them apart from other consultants."

4. Find an ITIL software tool and briefly describe the service desk functionality.
(http://www.numarasoftware.com/#1)

I did research on Numara Software, which has a software tool called Numara Footprints for service desk management and the Numara Asset Management Platform (NAMP) for IT asset management. By relying on a single vendor to automate and manage all types of service requirements and processes, including those beyond IT, their clients deliver world-class support. With a low cost of ownership and a practical approach, Numara Footprints is fast to implement, simple to use, easy to scale, and inexpensive to own.
"With its unique "multi-project" architecture, Numara Footprints enables it’s clients to manage service desk processes from a single integrated platform – minimizing overhead and increasing service delivery quality. Automating and consolidating processes, such as internal and external customer service, facilities management, and HR simultaneously helps clients reduce complexity and the support burden. Numara FootPrints puts instant changes and customizations in the hands of the service management team, not expensive programmers or consultants. Numara FootPrints helps service management organizations "do more with less" by requiring fewer resources to design, implement, adapt, manage, and report on multiple services and business processes. With zero programming and no extensive consulting engagement required for implementation and customization, Numara FootPrints gives IT and support groups control and reduces cost of ownership."