ITIL is the accepted service management service framework for best practices for the provision of Information Technology services and is a basis for aligning business needs with IT.

ITIL was established by the UK government and is currently in its 3rd version. It places a framework around common sense practices, giving people guidelines on the areas they should focus on.

Previous versions of ITIL differ from version 3 in that they had more of a silo approach to process areas such as an incident, problem, change, service level, release and availability. What ITIL service desk practitioners found was that many people remained in their own silo and did not integrate all aspects required to make managing IT a common sense process. For example, many only performed incident management, some only problem management.

The intention of ITIL is that everything inter-relates and integrates – you don’t just perform incident management and then leave the remaining aspects of customer service to someone else. Version 3 attempts to better formalise integration of the services that IT provides to the business. It is much more focused on what the business requires of IT and focuses on what services IT is providing to the business.

Today, most businesses these days can’t operate without IT, but IT need to be seen to be providing the right service to the business. ITIL Version 3 is more service focused and advises that organisations should be agreeing with the business about what services they need IT to provide; then look how to implement the right processes – changing and improving those processes based on feedback from the business.

Version 2 processes are still a primary part of ITIL as you will continue to manage incidents and problems, and manage change requests from the business. However, today, the silo approach has been removed and there is more overlap so that people can see how they should be passing incidents, problems, changes and resolutions along the customer service chain.

In the past, whoever was handling incidents could only see the incidents; whoever was handling the problems would only see the problems. There was not an integrated approach and implementing ITIL version 2 was quite easy to do. However, if you view ITIL as a framework, Version 3 makes it more difficult to fall into a single process mindset. Version 3 diagrams are more inter-related and easier for people to see the overlap in functions and processes.

From the ITIL framework, most of the tools that are available try to address the integrated areas of management. Many products are certified to ITIL and Pink Elephant is one such organisation that verifies products support the ITIL framework. However, ITIL is not proscriptive – it doesn’t specify that you need to do this like this. One of the problems people have when they try to implement ITIL is that they expect to be able to pick up a book and say “if I want to manage change within my organisation using ITIL, this is …

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Environmental remediation can be a particularly tough subject to pin down. It is an extensive field, and not many people know, or even care to know, about it. Look, how many of your real life friends are familiar with the term "environmental remediation"? Some? A few? None? I'd go with the latter.

Environmental remediation is important because it directly affects our treatment of our natural surroundings. It is the branch of science that deals with the removal of contaminants or pollution from environmental media such as surface water, sediment, groundwater and soil. For what? For the general protection and benefit of human health.

Remediation is a widely practiced principle around the world under various government agencies, each with their own series of regulatory requirements and provisions.

Some of the most common and well-known environmental remediation technologies are dredging and excavation, SEAR or surfactant enhanced aquifer remediation, pump and treat, stabilization and solidification, in situ oxidation, and others like bioremediation.

One of the most complex and sophisticated type of environmental remediation is the soil vapor extraction, or SVE.

Soild Vapor Extraction
Soil vapor extraction is a type of remediation technology used for farming contaminated soil, as its name implies. Another similar but different type of remediation technology is the MPE or Multi-Phase Extraction, which is used for farming soil and groundwater but different from SVE in that both utilizes different types of technologies.

Soil vapor extraction is broken up into three different types:

1. Granular activated carbon – Granular activated carbon (or GAC) is a technology used as a filter for water or air. GACs are commonly seen in household sinks used for filtering tap water. It is not effective in filtering heavy metals from the water, though.

2. Thermal oxidation – Thermal oxidation is another kind of technology, yet also effective. But this approach has since proved controversial since it releases dioxins into the atmosphere as exhaust gas.

3. Vapor condensation – Vapor condensation is considered the most effective type of treatment technology around (off-gas) for high concentration vapor streams. This technology is also sometimes called cryogenic cooling and compression.

Soil vapor extraction is one of the more complex type of environmental remediation technologies around, but it also means it's one of the most effective. It is a technology carried out by experts on the field, environmental remediation engineers and scientists, and if you have reason to doubt the contamination level of your soil, it's best to contact your local agency to conduct a test on your property. …

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