The Cabinet Office's joint venture with Capita has extended its best practice framework for IT management to incorporate practical advice
IT best practice organisation Axelos has launched a new qualification to its ITIL (formerly the IT Infrastructure Library) framework in the form of ITIL Practitioner.
Peter Hepworth, chief executive officer of Axelos, told UKAuthority the new qualification provides a next step for those who have an awareness of the main processes and principles of the basic ITIL Foundation qualification.
"Once you have the awareness of the why and what from the Foundation, it's about how we go to deliver that, and will incorporate the practical emergent areas such as lean, agile, DevOps (a software development method) and cloud," he said.
ITIL is a best practice framework for IT service management that emerged from the Civil Service but draw on best practice from public and private sectors. It is part of the Best Management Practice Portfolio for government published by the Cabinet Office, which owns Axelos in a joint venture with Capita.
The official announcement from Axelos said the focus of ITIL Practitioner will be on:
- Practical advice on how individuals can make use of continual service improvement;
- Aiming to improve the capability of individuals to use ITIL in their day to day roles;
- Making use of more recent technological capabilities, such as automation, real time reporting and cloud, to improve service design and efficiency;
- Using other frameworks, good practices and methodologies to make the IT Service Management qualification more valuable.
It will sit alongside the existing ITIL qualification levels of Foundation, Intermediate, Expert and Master.
Axelos has announced the qualification in advance of it becoming available towards the end of the year so that IT practitioners can provide input for its content.
Community has answers
"We're not assuming that we have all the answers," Hepworth said. "The community will have the right answers and the case studies, whether it's UK public sector or elsewhere, and the authoring team is broad. We want to sense check it with practitioners so we have a beta test approach.
"This is as much of a call for reviewers as it is 'Here we go'."
Hepworth said ITIL Practitioner will be offered to the UK public sector through a number of strategic partnerships, including the Civil Service Learning Programme in which the other ITIL qualifications are already widely used. It takes in best practice from public and private sectors worldwide, and is mandated by the Australian state government.
"The good news for the UK public sector is that the best practices benefit not just from the one view of the world, but from all of the good learnings," he said. "This is the benefit of having a global community continuing to evolve."
Axelos has been managing the ITIL framework since July 2013 under a 10-year business plan. It runs a number of other best practice frameworks including PRINCE2 for project management.
Pictured: Peter Hepworth; from Axelos
