ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a model consisting of guidelines and best practices for IT services management, successfully adopted in many contexts and described in appropriate publications.
Developed for ICT by the British Government at the end of the 80 's it has now spread throughout the world as a "de facto standard", non-proprietary, and inspiring the recent ISO/IEC 20000 (previously BS 15000).
Among the main advantages of ITIL, which guarantees better quality and lower costs, we can include:
- facility in adoption thanks to "adopt and adapt" (the method must be adapted to individual situations and gradually activated and targeted),
- process oriented approach: strategy, design, transition (Change Management, Configuration Management, etc), operational management (Incident Management, Request Fulfillment, Problem Management, Event Management, etc), continuous improvement,
- strong specialization and complete computer services orientation,
- systemic and integrated vision of the IT environment,
- proactive attitude towards service management.
CMDBuild is inspired by the best practice ITIL, to which is fully "compliant":
- CMDB is structured in entities and correlations,
- full and continuous tracking of all changes to the data (historization),
- editor and workflow engine for implementation of all processes of interest,
- possibility of complete personalization of the data model and processes (as suggested by the slogan "Adopt and Adapt"chosen by ITIL),
- control mechanisms guaranteed SLAs for users (automatic notifications via email, reports, dashboards),
- connectors and interoperability mechanisms to interact with other IT systems (Federated CMDB).