You don't need to be certified in ITIL or have any intention of implementing it to use Novell Service Desk. However, you should have an understanding of the main concepts as ITIL is well on the way to becoming the de facto approach for running I.T within an organization.
The objective of ITIL is to provide IT services that are fit for purpose, stable and reliable so that customers trust them as a utility. This is achieved by encouraging adoption of a common framework of practices across all areas of IT with the single aim of delivering value to the business.
An ITIL approach to service management protects an organization's IT investment. It ensures baseline services and build capabilities to learn in one area of the organization while providing improvements elsewhere. ITIL delivers service management functionality with sound structure, stability and strength that is built on principles, methods and tools.
The essence of ITIL core practice is captured by the Service Lifecycle that demonstrates an iterative and multidimensional approach to providing services. The phases of the Service Lifecycle include:
Service Strategy: sets the objectives and performance expectations for IT Services and IT Service Management in line with the organizational needs.
Service Design: focuses on designing new or changed services for introduction into the production environment.
Service Transition: plans and manages the capacity and resources needed to package, build, test and deploy a release into production, while establishing the service within the customer and stakeholder requirements.
Service Operations: coordinates and conducts activities and processes needed to deliver and support services at agreed levels to business users and customers.
Continual Service Improvement: constantly aligns and realigns IT service to the evolving business requirements by identifying and implementing to the IT services that underpin the business processes.
With each core phase there are various processes that help to deliver the desired outcomes (Novell Service Desk has up to 11 process depending on version):
Financial Management (Service Strategy)
Service Portfolio (Service Strategy)
Service Catalog (Service Design)
Service Level Management (Service Design)
Change Management (Service Transition)
Service Asset and Configuration Management (Service Transition)
Release and Deployment (Service Transition)
Knowledge Management (Service Transition)
Incident Management (Service Operation)
Problem Management (Service Operation)
Request Fulfillment (Service Operation)