ITIL® stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, and is a registered trademark of the Office of Government and Commerce in the UK. ITIL is essentially a set of standards, or good practices, for IT service management. These practices were developed in the UK and are internationally recognized and widely adopted.

IT departments are the predominant users of ITIL best practices, although any sector can benefit from the adoption of these practices to help manage their services.

Many smaller businesses might be put off by the seeming complexity of ITIL, but it's actually just great common sense and we believe anyone can and should benefit from it.

The beauty of ITIL is that it can structure and clearly define how your projects and services are working out for you. It enables your business to become more proactive as opposed to reactive and establishes a platform for continual improvement of your services. If you're looking for an effective way of managing deadlines, priorities and service level agreements, then ITIL might be just the ticket.

It's internationally recognized and widely adopted so chances are your competitors will already be using ITIL, a similar recognized framework, or looking into it.

No they don't need to be ITIL agents or even know what ITIL is. ITIL is a method of documenting common sense for your IT department. We've made a point of trying to keep things as straightforward and jargon free as possible so there's no need for big investments in training or heavy manuals. In fact your staff may not even be aware that they are using ITIL principles at all - they might even enjoy it!

No tool can claim to be "ITIL certified". ITIL is a non-prescriptive framework from which you can pick and choose processes or parts of processes that best fit your business needs. If you're asking "does Service Desk have PinkVERIFY™ certification or is it process compliant under OGC's new scheme?" The answer is no. Service Desk supports key ITIL processes in an easy to use and practical way that is focused on adding value to our customers' business. Our focus on practicality and ease of use means sometimes we make deliberate design choices which may conflict with aspects of the certification schemes.

Service Desk is currently based largely around ITIL v2 and also includes knowledge management with more ITIL v3 or ITIL 2011 processes to be incorporated in the future.

• Use Services and Service Management
• Use Incidents and Incident Management
• Use Problems and Problem Management
• Use Changes and Change Management
• Use Releases and Release Management
• Use Knowledge Articles and Knowledge Management