It also states “ITIL is based on the collective experience of commercial and governmental practitioners worldwide. This has been distilled into one reliable, coherent approach, which is fast becoming a de facto standard used by some of the world's leading businesses.”

ITIL is nothing more than a set of books that reference other international standards, de facto-standards, best-practices, and generally accepted business books.

As to whether ITIL itself is a best-practice is a matter of opinion, but there is no debate about the best practices and standards referenced and recommended by ITIL.

A quick review of just ITIL Service Support book (half of what most know as “ITIL”) references eight International Standards Organization (ISO) standards, five related industry best-practices (including CMM, Deming, Balanced Scorecard, and others), eight popular management books, and several other national standards and common practices.

No Panacea

I won’t insult your intelligence and say ITIL is the answer to all the ills of IT because it is not. Nor will I say ITIL is a worthless solution that should not be investigated because it is not.

What I will tell you is that year-after-year two significant industry reports show that most IT organizations could benefit handsomely from some or all of the concepts in ITIL; for the majority of IT organizations are severely dysfunctional.

Every year the Standish Chaos Report documents that the majority of IT projects fail to deliver the business value required, planned, or expected. This occurs at terrible expense.

Every year think tanks like Gartner and others report that roughly 80% of the problems experienced by IT customers are caused by failed changes and activities within IT. Again, at terrible expense.

These statistics, which anyone can verify, clearly show that IT is actually quite “broken” and that IT is its own “biggest problem.” Clearly then, most IT organizations could benefit from anything that brings about stability, improves quality, increases efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces the costs of IT.

I agree with those that say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” But IT is broken in the majority of companies around the world. While ITIL is not for everyone, you have to ask yourself: Is it for you? Only you can know if ITIL will benefit you and your organization.

Any Best-Practice

It is hard to argue against the ideals and philosophies contained within ITIL and its references. Even so, and contrary to the marketing hoopla, ITIL is not a perfect, ready-to-use, out-of-the-box solution to all the ills of IT. Nor was it planned as such.

All one has to do is actually read ITIL to know it does not tell you how to do much of anything. ITIL is an evolving set of books that describe how an evolving set of standards and practices might be organized to resolve common IT issues. ITIL was never intended to be a cut-and-paste methodology.

The authors took existing standards and practices and cobbled them together into ITIL. Thus, similar to best-practices, ITIL is not static, and evolves. For example, ITIL is currently getting a refresh.

The ITIL v3 refresh committee solicited and reviewed 530 written responses and over 6,000 comments, representing 80% of the countries with an itSMF chapter. As accepted best-practice evolves so does ITIL. This is natural. Just as medicine evolves, psychology evolves, technology evolves, so to the practices of IT must evolve.

It also states “ITIL is based on the collective experience of commercial and governmental practitioners worldwide. This has been distilled into one reliable, coherent approach, which is fast becoming a de facto standard used by some of the world's leading businesses.”

ITIL is nothing more than a set of books that reference other international standards, de facto-standards, best-practices, and generally accepted business books.

As to whether ITIL itself is a best-practice is a matter of opinion, but there is no debate about the best practices and standards referenced and recommended by ITIL.

A quick review of just ITIL Service Support book (half of what most know as “ITIL”) references eight International Standards Organization (ISO) standards, five related industry best-practices (including CMM, Deming, Balanced Scorecard, and others), eight popular management books, and several other national standards and common practices.

No Panacea

I won’t insult your intelligence and say ITIL is the answer to all the ills of IT because it is not. Nor will I say ITIL is a worthless solution that should not be investigated because it is not.

What I will tell you is that year-after-year two significant industry reports show that most IT organizations could benefit handsomely from some or all of the concepts in ITIL; for the majority of IT organizations are severely dysfunctional.

Every year the Standish Chaos Report documents that the majority of IT projects fail to deliver the business value required, planned, or expected. This occurs at terrible expense.

Every year think tanks like Gartner and others report that roughly 80% of the problems experienced by IT customers are caused by failed changes and activities within IT. Again, at terrible expense.

These statistics, which anyone can verify, clearly show that IT is actually quite “broken” and that IT is its own “biggest problem.” Clearly then, most IT organizations could benefit from anything that brings about stability, improves quality, increases efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces the costs of IT.

I agree with those that say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” But IT is broken in the majority of companies around the world. While ITIL is not for everyone, you have to ask yourself: Is it for you? Only you can know if ITIL will benefit you and your organization.

Any Best-Practice

It is hard to argue against the ideals and philosophies contained within ITIL and its references. Even so, and contrary to the marketing hoopla, ITIL is not a perfect, ready-to-use, out-of-the-box solution to all the ills of IT. Nor was it planned as such.

All one has to do is actually read ITIL to know it does not tell you how to do much of anything. ITIL is an evolving set of books that describe how an evolving set of standards and practices might be organized to resolve common IT issues. ITIL was never intended to be a cut-and-paste methodology.

The authors took existing standards and practices and cobbled them together into ITIL. Thus, similar to best-practices, ITIL is not static, and evolves. For example, ITIL is currently getting a refresh.

The ITIL v3 refresh committee solicited and reviewed 530 written responses and over 6,000 comments, representing 80% of the countries with an itSMF chapter. As accepted best-practice evolves so does ITIL. This is natural. Just as medicine evolves, psychology evolves, technology evolves, so to the practices of IT must evolve.

It also states “ITIL is based on the collective experience of commercial and governmental practitioners worldwide. This has been distilled into one reliable, coherent approach, which is fast becoming a de facto standard used by some of the world's leading businesses.”

ITIL is nothing more than a set of books that reference other international standards, de facto-standards, best-practices, and generally accepted business books.

As to whether ITIL itself is a best-practice is a matter of opinion, but there is no debate about the best practices and standards referenced and recommended by ITIL.

A quick review of just ITIL Service Support book (half of what most know as “ITIL”) references eight International Standards Organization (ISO) standards, five related industry best-practices (including CMM, Deming, Balanced Scorecard, and others), eight popular management books, and several other national standards and common practices.

No Panacea

I won’t insult your intelligence and say ITIL is the answer to all the ills of IT because it is not. Nor will I say ITIL is a worthless solution that should not be investigated because it is not.

What I will tell you is that year-after-year two significant industry reports show that most IT organizations could benefit handsomely from some or all of the concepts in ITIL; for the majority of IT organizations are severely dysfunctional.

Every year the Standish Chaos Report documents that the majority of IT projects fail to deliver the business value required, planned, or expected. This occurs at terrible expense.

Every year think tanks like Gartner and others report that roughly 80% of the problems experienced by IT customers are caused by failed changes and activities within IT. Again, at terrible expense.

These statistics, which anyone can verify, clearly show that IT is actually quite “broken” and that IT is its own “biggest problem.” Clearly then, most IT organizations could benefit from anything that brings about stability, improves quality, increases efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces the costs of IT.

I agree with those that say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” But IT is broken in the majority of companies around the world. While ITIL is not for everyone, you have to ask yourself: Is it for you? Only you can know if ITIL will benefit you and your organization.

Any Best-Practice

It is hard to argue against the ideals and philosophies contained within ITIL and its references. Even so, and contrary to the marketing hoopla, ITIL is not a perfect, ready-to-use, out-of-the-box solution to all the ills of IT. Nor was it planned as such.

All one has to do is actually read ITIL to know it does not tell you how to do much of anything. ITIL is an evolving set of books that describe how an evolving set of standards and practices might be organized to resolve common IT issues. ITIL was never intended to be a cut-and-paste methodology.

The authors took existing standards and practices and cobbled them together into ITIL. Thus, similar to best-practices, ITIL is not static, and evolves. For example, ITIL is currently getting a refresh.

The ITIL v3 refresh committee solicited and reviewed 530 written responses and over 6,000 comments, representing 80% of the countries with an itSMF chapter. As accepted best-practice evolves so does ITIL. This is natural. Just as medicine evolves, psychology evolves, technology evolves, so to the practices of IT must evolve.

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.