This small book is for practitioners of enterprise service management and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) who need a handy reference or overview of ITIL version 3. The book is organized around the five ITIL stages, and considers them by describing their purpose, key concepts, and roles.

The book has six chapters--an introduction, followed by five chapters for the five ITIL stages: service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, and continual service improvement. The introduction provides a brief description of the purpose of the book, its audience, and its organization. The second chapter, on service strategy, is rather brief. It contains two pages of text that provide a brief description of this important ITIL V3 stage, its primary practices, and supporting practices; this is followed by six pages of diagrams that illustrate the strategy overview and key concepts.

The next three chapters are organized in a similar fashion; they start with key concepts for the respective stage--using the same format as the second chapter--followed by sections that describe the various processes used within the stage. Each process is described in terms of its purpose, overview diagram, key concepts, and roles. The key concepts section consists mostly of a glossary of definitions rather than a discussion of the concepts. Chapter 3 covers the following service design processes: service catalog management, service level management, capacity management, availability management, IT service continuity management, information security management, and supplier management. The fourth chapter covers service transition processes, as follows: asset and configuration management, change management, release and deployment management, service validation and testing, transition planning and support, knowledge management, and evaluation. The fifth chapter discusses the service operation stage in terms of its processes: event management, incident management, request fulfillment, problem management, and access management. Chapter 6 covers the continual service improvement stage of ITIL in only three pages.

The main shortcoming of the book is its brevity on two key stages of ITIL V3--the service strategy and continual service improvement. The processes and stages could have been described using a more streamlined format, whereby a common thread would run through them in terms of definitions, concepts, practices, and roles; it does attempt to do this, but it gets mixed up. Also, it would have been useful to have an additional chapter to provide a succinct overview of how the ITIL stages interact and work together, from a high-level perspective.