Back To School - Learn ITIL From The Ground Up.

Dr. ITIL has just made learning the UK Government's Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) even easier by discovering a wealth of information that's just waiting to be accessed.

Sometimes, the excellent and highly recommended OGC ITIL books are just a little overwhelming and difficult for beginners in Service Management to grasp.

But what if a more rudimentary - but fully complete - set of ITIL based practices existed. What if an entire set of FREE ITIL based processes, procedures, templates, how to guides and other resources lay waiting to be accessed?

Well they are... allow me to explain...

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) is the UK Government's key partner in the strategic development and delivery of its information and communications technology (ICT) and e-learning strategy for the schools and the learning and skills sectors in the UK.

Becta has helped develop FITS. This stands for Framework for ICT Technical Support and it is based on ITIL.

ITIL is derived from the collective experiences of ICT technical support providers all over the UK. It represents their learning curve over the last 20 years and has been distilled into a set of common processes applicable to any establishment using ICT.

Becta have applied these processes to UK schools, and FITS is designed to enable you to by-pass all the mistakes commonly made and implement the processes successfully from the start but at a more basic to intermediate level.

The emphasis of FITS is on proactive tasks as well as reactive ones. It views technical support not just as a function responsible for resolving incidents, but as a service provider whose main objective is to prevent incidents from occurring in the first place. We see this as the ultimate goal of technical support and we aim to help you make it happen.

There are many benefits of FITS. Here are just a few.

- It gives you the benefit of hindsight over the last 20-plus years of the development of ICT technical support techniques and is based on ITIL.
- It contains tried and tested processes that have been adapted with the school environment in mind.
- It provides simplified and ready to use processes that can be used immediately.
- It contains templates, checklists and downloads that can be used as they are or personalised.
- It has a quick-start approach to help you make the best use of time and resources available and see quick results.
- It separates administrative tasks and technical tasks to help you assign the most appropriate resources.
- It helps you keep costs to a minimum.
- It helps you protect (school) teachers from having to get too involved in technical support issues.

Before you go overboard at finding this superb set of resources - please remember:-

- This is a much more basic to intermediate view of ITIL. It is perhaps not comprehensive enough for most commercial organisations.
- Some of the advanced detail available from the OGC is not replicated within FITS, so care should be taken when using the material to base your entire multi-million dollar ITIL investment strategy?!

However, it has several other advantages:-

- It is easy to get into!
- It is easy to absorb and appreciate the core concepts (if you're new to ITIL).
- It is a rudimentary ITIL resource enabling you to swiftly move onto the bigger stuff armed with a solid appreciation from the 'grass roots' up.
- It is easily accessible, intuitively laid out and well hyper-linked.
- It is presented in a complete "case study" scenario... Schools Technology.

FITS is ideal for more junior staff to begin learning about ITIL too. Ed note - From the feedback we have received it is interesting to note that perhaps some CXO's new to ITIL would also pay a sneaky visit to get up the learning curve faster ;>

Which ever way you look at it - FITS is a great 101 primer in ITIL - and it's FREE!

Begin your FITS journey here...