ITIL® was born in '80, when the quality of IT services delivered to the British Public Administration was so poor that the CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, now Office of Government Commerce, OGC®) developed an approach for an efficient and effective use of the IT resources into the Public Administration. The result was the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) that was based upon a set of best practices detected in to the IT service management industry.
Since then ITIL® provides a detailed descriptions of several IT best practices, as checklist, tasks, procedures and it clearly defines the responsibilities to be implemented and designed accordingly to each organisation. Where possible these practices have been defined as processes and they are applicable to any IT organisation independently from its dimension or technology used.

The key message of ITIL® is that IT services are made only to support business.

Then it is a Business Vision of Technology and Processes.

A lot of IT service management frameworks have been developed based upon ITIL from business companies like, for instance, Hewlett & Packard (HP ITSM Reference Model), IBM (IT Process Model), Microsoft (MOF) and many others. Thanks to them too, ITIL is now the standard de facto for IT Service Management Processes like: Service Delivery, Service Support, ICT Infrastructure Management, Planning to Implement Service Management, Application Management, The Business Perspective, Security Management.