Psst � ITIL Isn't For Everyone

Who Doesn’t Need ITIL

While ITIL has clearly benefited many, there are a number of organizations that don’t need ITIL.

Anyone with a smoothly operating IT organization. Don’t laugh. Even though I sound contradictory, I have met two or three in my career. These organizations evolved their own processes and workflows. They often write or modify their own support solutions. And as they say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

Interestingly, if you look into these organizations, the established workflows and so on are usually very nearly identical to what ITIL already describes. This makes sense since all ITIL did was to cobble together what successful enterprises did to succeed.

Very small organizations. ITIL essentially describes how to ensure communications between IT silos, organizations, service providers, customers, etc. Thus, if you have a small IT shop where “me, myself, and I” do pretty much everything, you normally don’t have too many communications issues.

Since you run such a small IT shop, you may also have other roles in the company, so you probably don’t have too many communications problems with customers either. A review of ITIL wouldn’t hurt here, and you might get some good ideas as well, but you don’t need it.

Companies that are not regulated. If your company is not public and/or is not subject to any form of auditing, regulation, legislation, or governance, and your competitiveness and IT costs are under satisfactory control, then you might not need ITIL.

Carriers and other IT service providers. If you provide services to customers for hire (e.g., a carrier, outsourcer, etc.) then parts of ITIL are 100% dead wrong for you.

For example, ITIL Service Level Management (SLM) describes everything from the perspective of an enterprise and simply won’t fly for a service provider without massive changes.

If you are a service provider you also have lots of other issues that enterprises do not have. Since ITIL is predicated on a large enterprise, it does not cover many critical aspects a service provider needs to manage.

This is not to say other parts of ITIL won’t fit. For example, ITIL presents an excellent scheme to manage change in any environment. And ITIL Service Desk/Incident/Problem management description is probably one of the most robust in existence.

So, you see, not everyone needs ITIL, and this leads into a second revelation: You don’t have to do everything in ITIL. In fact, in most cases, you simply couldn’t do everything in ITIL. But, that's enough for now. More on this topic in a later column.

Hank Marquis is a managing partner and CTO at itSM Solutions. You can contact Hank at hank.marquis@itsmsolutions.com.