Noel Bruton explains why ITIL’s days are numbered, and introduces a series of articles which cover everything about effective IT support that is missing from the ITIL books.
The news as reported on ServiceDesk360 about how the government copyright owners of ITIL have insisted that the framework’s original developers, the Office of Government Commerce, has no remit to develop it further. Let us not underestimate the significance of how this effectively kicks one of ITIL’s legs away. Adding this to ITIL Version 3’s faltering start and its decision to abandon altogether any idea of specific practice instruction at the user support operational level, and the ITIL edifice is beginning to wobble like a cheap wardrobe.
So I’ve found myself using this summer, a time of respite and retreat before it all kicks off again in September, to look back on what ITIL actually gave us. I warn you now, this is going to be a rant, so let me state where I’m coming from. My sole interest in this is IT user support. It’s where I’ve spent the last thirty-odd years of my professional life and I’ve written four books about it. By ‘IT user support’ I mean that suite of organisational philosophies and mechanisms by which we keep IT users working effectively with the tools that manufacturers and developers foist upon them, especially when the tools appear not to be functioning as they should. Throughout, I am keeping that in focus – IT support specifically, not IT in general and not even ‘T Service Management’ (whatever that is – it seems to be so many things).
IT support better off
The main reason ITIL annoys me so much is because it lurched, gauche, ignorant and ill-conceived, into my beloved arena of IT user support and proceeded to screw it up, increase its costs, misdirect its managers, dilute its goals, confuse its staff, hinder its progress and hamper its developers. I sat on the fence for a while, to my shame in hindsight. But now, after ITIL’s eight years of lumbering glory (yes, it is only that few), I am utterly convinced that IT support would be better off without ITIL’s unfocused banality. And I am deeply glad that we are now seeing the back of it, so we can now get on with managing IT support instead of just renaming and reorganising it. Get out of the way, ITIL – there’s real support management to be done.
ITIL is only popular nowadays because of the UK’s helpdesk software vendors. ITIL was nowhere before they hijacked it for the purely commercial end of inventing a stamp of official approval for their products – and its own history suggests that it would still be nowhere if they had not done so. ITIL has only been in the popular consciousness since 2002, even though it existed for a decade and a half of relative obscurity and stagnation before that. And even now, ITIL continues its endeavours to make itself impracticable to most organisations, while the software companies who came to depend on ITIL look increasingly bereft of technological strategy.
Also I call them ‘helpdesk’ software vendors for a reason – for that is what they were before we found ourselves replacing the helpdesk’s proven idea with the wasteful, misguided, excessively costly and underdeveloped, blunt instrument that is the ‘ITIL Servicedesk’, which seems to persist despite its own obsolescence. The software does largely what it always did, but market forces have changed the terminology.
High level
ITIL deals at a higher level in IT service management than just IT support. In fact, it deals at a high and imprecise level in pretty much everything it even mentions, in order to make itself vaguely relevant to as many potential corporate customers as possible. It is deliberately short on detail (all together now, “ITIL is not prescriptive”, yawn) and what little there ever was in ITIL specifically about how to run IT support, was abandoned along with ITIL Version 2. In practice, once IT service managers have decided to call the heart of IT support the ‘Servicedesk’, ITIL is thereafter pretty much useless to IT support’s first- and second-line managers, offering virtually nothing in the way of practical guidance.
It’s not all bad. From the IT support perspective, there is in ITIL at least one area of success I cannot dispute. This is the fostering of the idea of a supreme authority to which all IT must defer when making alterations to the computer estate, so that those who need to know, get to know, and the ill effects of these alterations can thus be minimised. IT support managers don’t implement this idea – it has to happen further up the hierarchy because it affects so many areas of IT – but support teams benefit from it, so long as the systems owners abide by it.
ITIL calls this feature ‘change management’. Good idea; terrible, inaccurate, ill thought-out and misleading name. As a term, change Management was used in general management by such luminaries as Charles Handy, Tom Peters and Peter Drucker for a much larger concept than mere technology upgrades, for years before Thatcherism coughed up ITIL. Couldn’t they have called it something more relevant and less confusing? Or perhaps the data processing-based civil servants who drew up the original ITIL hadn’t read the works of leading management thinkers?
So, thank ITIL for change, problem and configuration management, all have some merit, but conceptually, they also harbour flaws of idealism. They are anachronistic, coming as they do from an era of mainframe-dominated comparative stability.
I started to write down a list of the crucially important things that ITIL ought to deal with to have any real credibility in IT support management. These are concepts that ITIL should have covered but amazingly still has not, despite governmental design, consultation with some seriously clever people, two and a half upgrades and a quarter of a century of what at least one ITIL website laughably calls ‘evolution’. I soon found that my list was too big for the page and could run to several articles.
So that’s what I’m going to do. Over the next few months, I intend to offer a series of articles. Each one of these will deal with just one area of IT support management without which IT support cannot function effectively and which ITIL, for whatever reason, has only barely acknowledged or in many cases, ignored. But they won’t be just rants – they will contain specifics on how support managers can plug these exasperating gaps. So if your site is ITIL, don’t worry – you can use these techniques without negatively impacting your ITIL implementation, so long as you don’t mind improving your service, staff job satisfaction, management information, operational efficiency, business value and customer satisfaction.
I could have called the series ‘Why ITIL is useless to IT support managers’, but instead I’ll call it ‘Crucial guidance missing from ITIL’. By the way – I anticipate there will be those who say: “that’s mentioned in ITIL’s supporting literature”. Of course it is. But then what isn’t? The boundaries of the ITIL bandwagon are as nebulous as you want them to be. I will gladly defer to anybody who can show me where the ITIL core is as specific as I will be about these issues. I don’t expect to have to make that deference.
Noel Bruton is a UK-based consultant and trainer who advises companies on the practicalities of IT support management and improvement and the author of best-selling books on all aspects of IT service delivery. See more of his work at www.noelbruton.com.
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I look forward to reading your articles.
I have been thinking of trying to introduce some of the ITIL principles, guidelines and structures into place in my organisation but have run afoul of the “making ITIL work for you” problem in that as you also say much of it is inherently impractical when applied to my organisation. So far we have adopted a what works for us method that leaves a bitter taste as i know ultimately a successful IT department satisfies it’s users and itself. The ultimate aim that i would say is a true measure of success as a mission statement is “An IT department the staff are proud of”. This is my own personal mantra and it is the staging ground for the changes i plan to push through.
thanks
Hi Noel,
An interesting article with many good points.
I for one will be disappointed if ITIL disappears completely. Whilst ITIL is common sense, by adopting ITIL practices we have improved the service to end users dramatically and now have much better control in how we do things. The word service is now firmly on everyone’s lips and part of our continued strategy to improve the service we offer our users. I do agree that ITIL is very broad and does not always seem updated with real life experience of IT, however we cannot deny what it has done for us. If OGC don’t want it, then I hope someone else takes it on and move it forward …
Thanks,
Having HAD a career in both project and support roles – and many roles around those areas – I look forward to your articles with eager anticipation.
I do hope that your output is less “width-feeling” than most of the product of the OGC! -
Interesting, the main problem is that most people have hung their hats on ITIL as a holistic solution to all their IT woes however the majority forget that you only need to pick the bits that are relevant or can add value to your organisation.
Secondly re ITIL V3 – quite simply it’s pants (modesty permits a stronger expletive) a lame attempt to comercialise further the previous good work (V2 in particular).. ITIL as was gave the business and the IT department a common set of terms and reference around which to build relationships and value, to build bridges between the geeks and accountants !
Finally in response to the above misson statement. Remember we are service providers not technical support departments Whislt we shouldl all be proud of what we do our misson is to be cost effective, agile, innovative and most importantly to make sure we meet or exceed the business needs (our users !)
Wow, what a rant!
Anyway, look forward to seeing how you substantiate your “accusations” and plugging those ITIL gaps in your articles!
(May even see if anybody has one of yours books so I can borrow it…)
Your article is quite timely but ITIL is only a framework. It can’t answer all the questions.
It has been pretty successful in redefining organisational thinking as it relates to service management. There will always be gaps but that should not sideline the benefits. I look forward to reading your articles.
Noel, great introduction to your new articles and I look forward to reading them. I agree with your observation that ITIL has effectively served as a badge of honor for UK IT Support vendors and I think that version 3 did little more than confuse existing converts and put off new adopters rather than provide any worthwhile updates, all in it seemed rather self indulgent and detracted from one of ITILs genuinely worthwhile goals of providing a common terminology.
What a rant – perhaps Noel should get out a bit more!
ITIL – crap name – good ideas.
It was never meant to be taken literally – the concepts behind ITIL are that people need a common language and a common process so IT can get things done.
I have worked in IT for many years and I have never seen ITIL implemented as it says in the book – you just use the terminology and apply common sense – ITIL is a framework – a way to make people understand Service – which IT people do badly.
So I think it is a real shame that people like Noel cheer the death of ITIL, perhaps we should go back to calling the same things different names in different departments- because that was what we had before ITIL gave us the framework
Hi Noel
finally you are exposing what we and other vendors with pragmatic solutions have been thinking for years……ITIL is just a bible for making a lot of work and qualifications for people…..really smart shops buy smart technologies to solve ITIL’s issues and save their companies tons of money too.
Good luck with this crusade – its sorely needed and will leave some looking for a new “IT religion” now that you have exposed the old one.
Rgds Stuart
Thank you Noel for saying what I think many were afraid to say in front of management. Our organization has spent over 5 years implementing ITIL and its been wonderful for those in the mainframe area, as well as infrasture engineering. But when it came to support, although we in 1st tier support adopted it quickly, n-tier support has taken a passive agressive approach. And thats damaged relationships leaving a bad taste in everyones mouth.
ITIL has given us a framework, a reference point and afforded some stability to our immature ICT organisation.
It’s identified a common service goal to many disperate groups within ICT and improved our focus and work prioritisation.
It’s helped us to define job roles and responsibilities and identify key service management areas that we were neglecting e.g. capcaity and availabillity management.
ITIL does not provide the answer to everything (nor did we expect it to) but it’s helped us to be mature and to improve our service to the business.
I agree that ITIL V2 was more useful than V3 adn I look forward to reading the future articles.
Disappointed to read the tone of the rant and I wonder if Noel thought about the impact that his words may have on those who have studied hard to gain qualifications up to ITIL Expert status.
Looks like Noel is looking for publicity for his new articles!
Like a number of people have pointed out, ITIL is a framework, and it never ever claimed to be a complete solution or set of instructions on how to manage ICT – as ICT professionals we’re supposed to do that.
What it does do is set out guidance to best practice, and at the end of the day, this is what we all want, surely? Where it has failed I think reflects poorly on the management that’s implemented it. Personally I think ITIL’s demise is greatly overrated and I don’t think it is unhelpful, impractical, or doomed. Sorry Noel, but I won’t be reading your books or articles myself!
Speaking as someone who has had the pleasure of being trained by Noel, I always look forward to his articles with interest.
Having read this one, I can see the angle and the frustration that Noel feels as he has been in the trenches for years producing excellent results before, during and probably after the ITIL wave has hit.
However, whilst Noel is an expert in his field and capable of dramatic results during a project, others need guidance and support to achieve their goals and that is the purpose of ITIL.
The bad rep that ITIL has gained is not so much about what it is, but the way in which people perceive it, use it, sell it and cling to it for results.
ITIL is a framework / a body of knowledge and used in this way it has good value much as one of Noel’s seminars does – another tool in your belt to use to achieve Service Excellence.
I participated in a linkedin discussion recently where someone asked ‘why do government projects fail’ and a response came back (not verbatim) that project management is fairly simple and rarely fails, it is the people carrying it out who are the weak link and so the question that should be asked is “why do people fail”.
I think the same applies here. ITIL is a good idea (isnt knowledge sharing and teamwork the heart of any good helpdesk?) however some people have sent it off track with an almost religious devotion to its teachings or a commercial slant behind their decision making (yes exam board I am talking to you)
ITIL is a great idea at its heart and I hope it has many years of life left in it, with people like Noel watching carefully to keep it in line
Hi Noel, good to see you back and blogging with a piece of 4×2. Check in with me sometime – a kindred spirit.
I think Noel is taking an extreme view here in order to sell his books. I can also guarantee that he doesn’t fully understand ITIL version 3 – anyone who does can see the benefits it delivers when done properly.
When ITIL first emerged I made a serious review of it and it seemed to me that it was mainly aimed at government contracts. The result of that seemed to be that there were too many cooks involved and that keeping the lines of communication open and everyone appraised would be a mammoth task. In its defence V2 and V3 addressed this problem to a certain extent.
I’m currently looking at V3 Foundation Level and as an ISO9000 Lead Assessor I still fail to see any advantage over a well implemented ISO 9000 Quality Management System or TQM programme, in fact there appears to be some parts of ITIL which are very contrary to the fundamentals of QMS or TQM mainly due to obfuscation by ITIL’s vocabulary, terminology and if I’m honest its somewhat “smug satisfaction” with itself. I’ll be disappointed if it goes having spent money on the courses but I wouldn’t lose sleep over its demise as there are plenty of quality systems out there that can do the job and in a lot of cases considerably better.
Spot on. ITIL is a load of old Tripe. ITIL is a framework but it is common sense. We have stopped all ITIL training.
Peer to Peer learning and focus groups have delivered better and more measurable success in the last 6 months than ITIL did in the last 5 years.
This helps our staff feel more rewarded as they are changing the way we operate. We also add in a manager from the business side to put the business perspective.
ITIL provided a base due to adoption which we would have done anyway over that time period.
I urge IT departments to leave it behind, take what you find useful and move on using the skills you have in house. Leave the name ITIL firmly behind
I am sorry but ITIL as a Best Practice that is already delivering results cannot be dead, but what is true is that this kind of headline will generate a lot of readers.
ITIL is what happens when good ideas get absorbed by a bureaucracy and institutionalized and homogenized to a point where they are almost useless. Why is ITIL so obtuse that someone has to ask “Is rebooting a production server considered a change?” as I saw on another board.
ITIL as a formal entity runs a very significant risk of becoming yet another 4-letter word in the IT industry – tried it, it failed, we moved on. Just like CMMI, SQA / QA / QC, PMBoK, TQM, PRINCE, et al. OK, some of those aren’t 4 letters, but they have effectively become 4-letter words in the industry at this point.
The ideas behind ITIL are still meritorious, however, just as the ideas behind the CMMI still have huge value – IT needs to provide value and service to the company beyond simply helping them stay in business.
The problem is, any improvement process like ITIL needs champions, sharp people, freedom to act, and long-term vision, all seriously lacking in modern business, at least from what I have seen over the past few years in the US. Modern companies seem to value “getting along” with each other much more than standing out, being a champion, or violating the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” meme, at times even more than valuing profitability.
ITIL (and the other improvement programs) tend to be top-down due to scope, cost and staff allocations. Guerrilla, ground-up implementations of the core ideas can be successful up to a point. The hard part is getting the two efforts in place and meeting at the same point. That point is where our efforts need to be addressed, because it is at that point that value to company becomes real.
Wow – thanks for the comments everybody!.
1) Context check – must just point out what I said twice in the article – that my focus is on not what ITIL does for IT in general, but IT user support in particular.
2) @Cliff, I’m sorry you won’t be joining in because I will be taking the “Best Practice” claim apart – ITIL is far from “best”. And these pieces will be about what is missing from ITI, not about ITIL itself. But I have seen that what is missing from ITIL is way more powerful than ITIL itself.
3) Am I doing this to sell books? No. I don’t get paid for these articles. I don’t make enough money from book sales to keep me in socks. I’m doing it because I believe it needs doing.
4) As to the impact my words will have on all those trained people – I’m not nullifying the value of their training – perhaps they can add these ideas to those that may not have been adequately dealt with in that training
Absolutely agree with almost everything you wrote. And about time there was a voice of dissent as I’ve been alone in the wilderness for too long! ITIL v2 was pretty good as a framework but then v3 was a real mess. Also, when ITIL tried to move into App Dev rather than just Operations it missed the mark by a mile.
I was always annoyed about the way that a bunch of helpdesk products suddenly called themselves “ITIL service management” products and bolted other components onto their Helpdesk software. For me the CMDB is at the heart of Service Management so you get this right – not just add as an afterthought
I’ve always struggled with “service management” where the foremost document for interaction is an RFC! How does that work? The foremost document should be a Service Request and yet in v2 the notion of a Service Request was tucked away as a class of incident if memory serves me correctly. When you go to the garage to get your car serviced are you reporting an Incident or raising an RFC? No! You’re submitting a Request For Service (or Service Request)!
Also the CMDB (certainly v2) never properly dealt with versioning which you really need to do. If you’re wanting to track software successfully anyway. Again this showed the roots of ITIL as coming from a hardware focused support environment with delivery of software not properly considered.
I had high hopes for the evolution of ITIL and wanted to get involved at one point as I have spent a lot of my career architecting solutions and processes in this area. But when I saw the pre-release of v3 I realised that ITIL had lost its way and I switched off. And now I work in another area of IT where I am subject to other people’s naff interpretation of ITIL where they’ve actually used ITIL as an excuse not to think about how service should be managed and thereby implemented a compromised solution that is not fit for purpose or efficient “but we’re following ITIL”
Noel
Good article that says what so many of those who rely too much on ITIL can’t, or won’t say for various reasons. You only have to compare how the business side has matured over the years in response to a ‘service experiential’, with customer experience management and contact centers. ITIL has left us with a 9yos view of break fix support.
Support is so much more than b/f. When a product manager I had to codesign support with developers to compensate for product quality, and target customers. ITIL fails miserably to offer any ‘go-to’ guidance. Incident is separated from request management – still. Problem should be in CSI if anywhere and does not explain how to describe a prob;em and its impact, or that a vital piece – control barrier analysis, is the 1st stage of cause analysis.
Configuration Management led lemmings off a cliff – its only just beginning to mature – and remember – it started with the goal of defining the infrastructure supporting a service, which implies we need to describe services first, and thats no easy task.
All in all – glad someone else has the balls to say this. I suspect you are not an ‘ITIL hater’ as I have seen tweeted recently, and more a ‘pro service support’ person. As someone who has tried to steer folks away from their Thelma and Louise moment with ITIL, I’m thanks furl for your ‘Nicholas Carr’ theme… ITIL Doent; Matter Service Support Does…
Thanks Ian. I don’t “hate” ITIL – it is what it is. But I am frustrated by the disproportionate emphasis it gets in the IT support industry when it is nowhere near as effective as other methods. My stance on ITIL is simple. 1)Is it what it claims itself to be (“best”, “management”, etc)? Provably, no. 2) Does it improve support? Anecdotally suggested, but scientifically it has no way of proving so, because it is different on every site. 3) Is it objective? Not likely – it is a commercial device to sell training, software and consultancy.
Given those three facts, we should be extremely wary of its claims. As you did in your book, I’m dealing here with what’s missing from ITIL, which produces what I have seen to be far more powerful results than ITIL can produce.
I think one of the merits of ITIL is that it gave IT people some kind of common vocabulary with management people. Management took a step towards comprehension and IT took another.
But you’re right that we need to move on.
ITIL gave us the “Service Catalogue” as a key concept, outside of the world of 3rd party suppliers who used it to detail the pieces of ‘delivery’ we paid for.
It will be interesting to see how this idea of a “service-centric” IT support environment works to improve the “IT User Support” world, without the concept of a “Service Catalogue” that links to all related information.
I would also be extremely interested to see how change (read “alterations to services or components that make up a serviice in the ‘production’ environment”) can be managed without having a single ‘change management’ process bridging the gap between what the development teams want to do – “agile” continual small systems development with minimal checks and balances slowing them down, and what the operational support teams would like – a controlled, clearly ‘signed-off’ change which is auditable and less likely to ‘break’ something in the live environment.
On the other side of the coin, Services are critical to allow us to build clear cost models, lifecycle reviews and a management perspective of what we deliver to the business.
On another side of the coin (I have many-sided coins…) there is the fact that the built in understanding that we should build a view of our services at a skim level (to show a ‘service catalogue’ we can then run costs and changes and raise incidents and problems against), but also a 3D model of our overall IT Infrastructure, allowing us to not only map out a full in depth view of what our customers ‘see’ as a ‘service’ (i.e. email or SAP) but also all of the components at each level all the way down, from hardware, databases and software to data flows.
Some may say this is EA. I say EA are a composite part of this.
Service Management is the ability to see the bigger picture of what these services do.
Monitoring and service improvement together, using this view, can deliver real benefit, whether you call it ITIL or not.
Have a look at what Deutsche Bank and the Spanish Department of Social Services are doing with their newfangled Novell BSM tool… (yes, Business Service Management). Saving 10′s if not 100′s of millions of pounds, enabling the business to ‘see’ and manage IT.
No, I don’t work for Novell. It just illustrates what I’m talking about.
Noel, I have loads of respect for you.
Sometimes though, it is too easy to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Patience and moderation in all things.
Hi Noel,
I think you have some very valid points howeverI do think there is place for some of the more practical ITIL processes that support the mass market. Not that I’m sold on the entire framework, incident and problem management does have a place. Configuration management seems to be overkill for the day-to-day IT support team. Creation and management of the CMDB appears to be a non-starter for most.
Looking forward to you next set of articles.
Hi Noel,
I look forward to reading your articles. I note what everyone has said and I would like to hear what you have to say to add to my knowledge of the subject. I held a 2 day intensive workshop on ITIL in Abuja, Nigeria last month. It was mainly for new converts to ITIL. I started by stating that adopting ITIL needs a mind set change. I think this is one of the aims of the framework. I find that in many technical environments, the technicains concsern themselves with the bells and whistles and tin. The user and busines is concerned with the service or user experience. I come from a legal background and ITILv3 to me is a welcomed change. I like to know ‘why’ not just what to do. Yes, there are gaps and no one can find all the gaps. I believe whatever gaps you provide I will add to my knowledge or discard as the case may be.
Hopefully, there will be a lot to take away.