The history of ITIL began over 20 years ago in the UK. At the time, the United Kingdom was in a severe economic recession and the quality of IT services provided to the British government by various vendors was so poor that the then Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA, now known as the Office of Government Commerce, OGC) was instructed by the government of this country to develop principles for the efficient and cost-effective use of IT resources in ministries and other government agencies and, based on them, form a provider-independent approach to the provision of IT services. The result of the work carried out was the ITIL library, which brought together the description of the best practices that existed in the IT services industry.

ITIL contains a detailed description of the most important activities in IT work, as well as a complete list of responsibilities, tasks, procedures, process descriptions and action lists that can be adapted to any organization. These descriptions are often used in defining improvement goals for IT organizations and IT departments.

Currently, ITIL books are supported by the IT Service Management Forum, ITSMF, whose members are companies and organizations interested in improving the efficiency of IT service delivery.

Today, ITIL has become the de facto standard for describing fundamental IT service management processes. A number of companies based on the ITIL library have created their own structured approaches to managing IT services – HP ITSM Reference Model (Hewlett-Packard), IT Process Model (IBM), Microsoft Operation Framework (Microsoft) and many others.