IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) is a collection of the best IT service management practices and, in recent years, has spread its use in organizations of all sectors and sizes, becoming a de facto standard by the market. ITIL was developed in the 1980s with the influence of the OGC and the British trade office; its primary goal is to define a management model that helps organizations realize their business strategies. ITIL consists of a series of 5 books that describe guidelines for offering quality IT services. These five volumes map the entire IT services lifecycle, starting with identifying customer needs and translating them to IT requirements, following the design and implementation of IT services that give an appropriate response to these needs, and ending with the continuous management and improvement of these services.

ITIL is not a methodology; it is a set of best practices that must be adapted to the specific needs of an organization and that are easily integrated with other standards and models such as Lean IT, ISO 20000, ISO 270000, and TOGAF®. One complaint about ITIL® is that it is often considered to be bureaucratic, heavy, and complicated. However, this is largely because many organizations who have tried to adopt it have done so without taking the characteristics of their organization and equipment into account. In these situations, the problem is not ITIL itself, but the inadequate adoption of ITIL.