Businesses turning their backs on ITIL are missing valuable guidance for solving current business challenges.  John Prestridge, VP of Tampa-based ITSM software provider SunView, understands why ITIL has become slightly unfashionable but says the approach of the community, not the guidance in the books themselves, has tarnished its reputation. 

“Many organisations made the mistake of trying to implement ITIL for it’s own sake and this led to fatigue and little return.  To deal with the complexity of today’s IT challenges, you need a proven framework to underpin your services, and ITIL is one way to help you get there.  If you want to support BYOD or social channels, you need processes such as ITIL and strong platform underneath.”

The move to cloud is causing most businesses to question all enterprise software.  “The feeling seems to be ‘if we’re going to change (to cloud), it is worth looking at everything we use.’  Legacy ITSM tools are proving very costly to maintain and don’t meet the maturity most businesses are trying to achieve.”

Prestige says that SunView’s ChangeGear factor has the power to offer ‘ITIL as a service’, yet because it is based on modern architecture it can be adapted to fit the needs of each business.  “We have some customers who implement 80 per cent out of the box because they have the processes in place, while others we need to work with for five months to get them ready to implement.  Maturity is different for every company.  The most important thing is to get over the hurdle that says it’s difficult and get started with some strategically important areas.”