ITIL glossary

IT service management runs on precise words. When an incident hits, the service desk restores service within the SLA, while problem management looks for the root cause so it does not happen again. Hover over (or tap) the underlined words to see their definitions.

Service management basics

ITIL

A widely used framework of best practice for IT service management.

ITSM (IT service management)

How an organization plans, delivers, supports and improves the IT services it provides.

Service

Something a provider offers so customers can get the results they want, while the provider takes care of the costs and risks of running it.

Customer

The person or group who defines what a service must do and is responsible for the results of using it.

User

The person who actually uses a service.

Sponsor

The person who approves the budget for a service.

Value

How useful and important something is, as seen by the people it serves.

Output

Something an activity produces, such as a report, a fixed laptop or a new account.

Outcome

A result a stakeholder cares about, made possible by one or more outputs.

Service value system (SVS)

The ITIL 4 model of how every part of an organization works together to turn demand into value.

Service value chain

The six activities at the heart of the service value system: plan, improve, engage, design and transition, obtain or build, and deliver and support.

Practice

A set of resources for doing a type of work or meeting an objective, such as incident management. ITIL 4 describes 34 practices.

Guiding principles

Seven pieces of advice that apply in any situation: focus on value; start where you are; progress iteratively with feedback; collaborate and promote visibility; think and work holistically; keep it simple and practical; optimize and automate.

Four dimensions (four dimensions of service management)

The four views to consider for any service: organizations and people; information and technology; partners and suppliers; and value streams and processes.

Continual improvement

The ongoing work of finding and making improvements to services, practices and everything that supports them.

Incidents, problems and requests

Incident

An unplanned interruption to a service, or a drop in its quality.

Major incident

An incident with a big business impact that needs its own, faster response and communication.

Incident management

The practice of getting a service back to normal as quickly as possible after an incident.

Problem

The cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.

Problem management

The practice of finding and managing the causes of incidents, so they happen less often and do less harm.

Known error

A problem whose cause has been found but not yet permanently fixed.

Workaround

A way to reduce or avoid the impact of an incident or problem that has not been fully fixed.

Root cause analysis (RCA)

A structured look at why something went wrong, to find the underlying cause rather than just the symptoms.

Service request

A request from a user for something that is a normal part of the service, such as information, access or a new laptop.

Service desk

The single point of contact between the service provider and its users, for incidents, requests and questions.

Escalation

Passing an incident or request to someone with more expertise (functional escalation) or more authority (hierarchical escalation).

Impact

How much an incident affects the business, for example how many users or how much revenue.

Urgency

How quickly an incident needs to be resolved to avoid business harm.

Priority

The order in which work is handled, usually worked out from impact and urgency.

Event

Any change of state that matters for a service or configuration item, usually detected by monitoring.

Shift left

Moving work closer to the user, so the service desk or self-service can resolve what used to need specialists.

Change and release

Change

Adding, modifying or removing anything that could affect a service.

Change enablement (change management, change control)

The practice of assessing, authorizing and scheduling changes so that more of them succeed.

Standard change

A low-risk, pre-authorized change that follows a known procedure, such as applying the monthly desktop patches.

Normal change

A change that needs to be assessed and authorized before it can go ahead.

Emergency change

A change that must happen as soon as possible, for example to fix a major incident, with a faster approval path.

Change authority

The person or group who can authorize a particular type of change.

CAB (change advisory board)

A group that reviews proposed changes and advises on whether and when they should go ahead.

Release

A version of a service or other configuration item, or a set of them, made available for use.

Deployment

Moving new or changed hardware, software or other components into a live environment.

Service levels and configuration

SLA (service level agreement)

A documented agreement between a provider and a customer that sets out the service and the target levels expected.

OLA (operational level agreement)

An agreement between internal teams that support a service, so the SLA can be met.

Underpinning contract

A contract with an outside supplier that supports the provider's SLAs.

Service catalog

The list of services available to users and customers, with what each includes and how to request it.

Availability

The ability of a service to do what it should when it is needed, often shown as a percentage of agreed time.

MTTR (mean time to restore, mean time to repair)

The average time it takes to get a service working again after a failure.

MTBF (mean time between failures)

The average time a service or component runs normally between failures.

Configuration item (CI)

Any component that must be managed to deliver a service, such as a server, an application or a contract.

CMDB (configuration management database)

A database of configuration items and the relationships between them.

IT asset

Any valuable component that can contribute to delivering an IT product or service, such as a laptop or a software license.

Knowledge management

The practice of capturing and sharing knowledge so people can find answers instead of rediscovering them.

Self-service portal

A website where users raise requests, find answers and follow progress themselves.

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