Customer Reviews

Applications Management: Itil (It Infrastructure Library Series)

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This ITIL guide is the weakest of the series because the approach is outmoded with respect to contemporary development life cycles. The chapters address the following key areas and follow the older waterfall SDLC:
(1) Requirements
(2) Design
(3) Build
(4) Deploy
(5) Operate
(6) Optimize

The latter three milestones - deploy, operate and optimize - spill over into service management covered in the Service Delivery and Service Support guides in the series. In that respect this guide does provide a comprehensive picture of applications delivery, and service and support delivery.

If you are pursuing ITIL certification you will need this guide, despite the shortcomings I noted because the material will be part of the exams. However, if you are only exploring ITIL as a viable framework for your organization I would bypass this book unless/until you decided to actually implement ITIL and/or pursue certification.

The App Management book is in a different format from other ITIL books, but on a consistent theme. There is a tendency for these books to be rather dry reading, and therefore purely reference, but this book is definitely more readable (and correspondingly less referenceable).

Would I recommend it? Not for a casual user. Consider it if you are collecting the set of ITIL books, but otherwise look elsewhere.

I probably am biased a little because of a belief that ITIL (V2) doesn't really handle Application Management as well as the more generic service delivery and service support functions. If you are 100% ITIL is the answer for everything, feel free to ignore this review and buy it anyway.

I'm from the ITIL v1 generation - in the late eighties I got my ITIL Managers certification, based on the original set of endless white books.

Then along came service support and service delivery in ITIL v2 which brought it all together and changed the face of IT Service Management forever. After that a few other volumes were released of which this was one - and it never has been really clear where it fitted in.

Ah well, on to ITIL v3 I say.