Despite claims that its currency is diminishing, ITIL still dominates conversations in the ITSM industry. James West explains why we must call time on ITIL for the foreseeable future.
Back in August, I wrote an article arguing that while our industry needs ITIL more than ever, our attachment to the best practice framework is also holding us back. The ITIL Paradox article was very well received, tweeted and retweeted numerous times, with industry commentators arguing the various points raised by the article in the comment section.
In my view, it was almost a throw away piece, but it obviously struck a chord and expressed an opinion which many of us have shared at some stage. More recently, we published a guide for service desks supporting BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) which was far more challenging to research and create. In my opinion, it is practical and helps address one of the most pressing issues facing the ITSM industry, and for those reasons it’s something ServiceDesk360 and our sponsors are extremely proud of producing.
While the feedback has been excellent for this guide, it’s slightly disappointing that there aren’t as many comments or shares as the ITIL Paradox piece. Yes, I know that human nature means we are more likely to comment on something we don’t agree with. It’s the same phenomenon which causes us to complain to a cinema or restaurant after a poor experience, but we never reach out to congratulate the same businesses when we have a great time.
Yet I feel the reaction to both of these indicates a wider problem in our industry. The ITIL Paradox asks us to consider reducing our reliance on ITIL, and to instead put the challenges and needs of the business first. I worry that the message isn’t strong enough, so I’m going to be even bolder in the next paragraph.
ITIL interests no-one outside of our department. If it helps solve business challenges, then it is of value. However – and this is the key point – if we continue to waste so much time debating the merits/limitations/minutiae of ITIL, the revolution in business technology will pass us by.
If this seems extreme, consider this research which says even IT has little faith in the service desk’s ability to support user-owned devices. The service desk has some catching up to do, but the problems it faces are not insurmountable, as our guide suggests. However pouring effort into something which will have little direct bearing on the future of business technology support is misguided and delusional, and in this critical context, we must push ITIL to one side and take positive action.
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I think this article is ridiculous. Clearly the author has failed to understand what ITIL is. BYOD is vital and important but it isn’t an alternative to having sensible processes for managing calls, incidents and problems. If your processes are working, then the BYOD will fit in seamlessly. I realise that you sometimes set out to be controversial in order to stimulate debate but this article is specious, This is doubly so as you identified in your earlier article abuot BYOD that service desks and managers were locking down processes afraid of change and the risks that change might present to their work. These are timeless issues but the point of ITIL is to be able to embrace that change (I believe that this is the raison d’etre of continuous service improvement) and not to slow it down.
Thanks for your comment Polly. I need to stress that this article is not a criticism of ITIL. I’ve made it clear in all of my ITIL articles that the framework is valuable (reiterated in the penultimate paragraph of this piece) if it’s useful to the business in question (I do wonder why, given the column inches, cost/time allocated to training and volume of discussion centred around ITIL during the past 15 years that most organisations have failed to progress beyond problem, incident and basic change management, but that’s a separate argument.)
My point is that referencing ITIL or even trying to improve our capabilities in relation to the guidelines it offers is fine. The problem I’m trying to highlight is that as an industry, why are we still debating the finer points of ITIL when there are issues which threaten the very fabric of corporate IT delivery?
Look at it this way, what’s a bigger issue:
1) That ITIL adoption isn’t as wide as it should be.
2) The influx of consumer devices is making the IT department obsolete.
Anyone who thinks that issue 1) is more important, and/or that point 2) is hyperbole, is proving the point of this article.
Sorry Polly, but have to disagree completely. And while James may not criticize ITIL, I will. If your processes are working well enough to cope with BYOD, then great, but it’s probably got more to do with your talent as a manager than with ITIL. James’ article is not ridiculous, because he’s is right, but it’s not BYOD that should have prompted replacing an ITIL that has been out of date for the last fifteen years. Key among these is the thing that made ITIL, the Servicedesk – if it hadn’t been for that, ITIL would be as obscure now as it was for the first fifteen years of its existence. This much is clear – ITIL does not even begin to scratch the surface of managing calls, incidents and problems. Not even close. Almost everything it professes about call handling is inefficient, outmoded, inflexible, bureaucratic, technocratic, devoid of management information and esoteric. With every refresh, ITIL becomes less practical and more theoretical, as it seeks to broaden its appeal rather than fix its massive flaws. ITIL is a 1990′s call-centre fad built on a 1980′s mainframe model. BYOD may be a latter-day flash in the pan, but ITIL’s default fix – changes to the SLA – is woefully inadequate. ITIL’s replacement with something that even notices the existence of the Internet, or of users, service breadth, management reporting, technicians and customer service and much more is long, long overdue. We don’t need ITIL’s emperor’s-new-clothes process theories – we need practicality, measurement, decision bases and instruction.
I am also in favour of Noel and the article here, ITIL is expiring in transit.
There is mention here of ITIL being a tool for the IT department, rather than the business, yes ITIL teaches us to identify the needs of the business and to meet those needs with a service… what it does not teach us is how to understand our business. Service management is evolving and Business relationship management is the new game, and the basis of BRM is understanding and business and not just meeting the needs and values, but sharing them and working along side of the business to achieve the common goals.
BYOD fits into this ideology far better than it does into ITL, as Noel states, ITIL is theoretical. And theoretically BYOD holds no technical value; replacing standard, supported resources that have lifecycles, with unfamiliar kit that we have little or control over. ITIL teaches us to standardise so that we may have efficient, planned SLAs- how can you set an SLA on a piece of hardware if your support teams have never used it before?
For this, BRM is more suitable and as it encourages us to understand why our staff would use their own laptops/phones etc, how it benefits the way they work, and then for us to build flexible ways of supporting this.
BYOD only threatens ‘the need of service desk’ if it doesn’t realise that the cultural changes are just as important as the technical/service management changes.
Its vitally important within most organisations to have a process framework from which to align best practice within IT. This can be ITIL or another flavour (and there are many alternatives) but as long as it works within your own business so that IT becomes a partner in moving the organisation forwards then its irrelevant what is used.
Whether we like it or not IT is a complex and ever-evolving beast and despite the advent of projects such as BYOD and Cloud Services designed apparently to make things easier for the user, without some form of process and framework – industries such as my own (legal) will end up failing the very customer base we are trying to provide a first class service for.
Thanks David,
Yes, we need processes and frameworks, that’s not in question. But by definition cloud and BYOD move the ‘framework’ beyond the immediate sphere of the IT department, therefore they are of limited use to meet these challenges and deliver what customers want. IT wants to use these frameworks to keep in control of their technology estates, but they have already (partially) lost them.
Frameworks and processes won’t in isolation deliver the first class service your customers demand. You deliver the services your customers need to work effectively by asking them why they are rejecting the tech procured by the business in favour of their own. You ask them to explain they need from IT and how you can provision it, then use this intelligence to rethink and rebuild IT services. Once you have restructured IT services, the processes such as ITIL will underpin the operation.
I realise this is radical. Building IT services that the business wants, not those that are easy to procure and support, is counter to how corporate IT has been managed for 30 years. I understand the implications of such a radical shift is causing many to hide behind a ‘safe’ ITIL debate rather than face reality, but BYOD and cloud are not going a way, and this is why I’m stressing this point.
James West, ServiceDesk360
Whilst I agree with a lot of the comments posted, I wonder how big this issue really is in the immediate future. I see a lot of organisations who still haven’t grasped the concept of Services, usually implementing ITIL V2 with a Service Catalogue, whilst a huge proportion of Enterprises don’t run web based apps for a lot of Business critical processes so, as Noel pointed out somewhere in this or a related chain, the issue boils down to some core IT components such as the SMTP/POP or some other protocol.
ITIL needs to be brought up to date and I believe it should be re-written in smaller releases rather than a huge great big lump every few years and embrace a more agile approach. However, do we really want ITIL to define call handling etc? Isn’t that what organisations such as SDI do? If ITIL goes down to that level on every process it will become, or be perceived as, prescriptive, and also be so large that everyone will lose interest. The answer isn’t ITIL, it’s ITSM. ITIL never has, and nor should it, prescribe exactly what a Service Desk should do. It should provide a framework which Organisations can then develop to suit their needs. There is no one-size fits all. Some sectors are very locked down and regulated and probaby will be for a long time to come and this should also be recognised.
Whilst ITIL needs a serious re-think if it is to stay relevant, it isn’t the issue. How it is implemented or a lack of understanding of the wider ITSM landscape is the issue. Why does it have to be written in an ITIL book to become Best Practice?
BYOD is here to stay and is a great opportunity to integrate with the Business as has been described previously, but trying to narrowly define it and document it goes against the Knowledge Centred, agile approach some people are advocating. Long live ITSM (with or without ITIL).
Thanks Simon, it’s good to see a progressive, considered view of the value of ITIL. I suspect the problem is that too many organisations have tried to use ITIL in a prescriptive way, which wasn’t the interpretation the authors intended (and in defence of the countless ITIL consultants/vendors/authors/associations such as itSMF I have spoken to over the years, all without question have understood and tried to communicate that ITIL shouldn’t be ‘implemented’ literally). However, this misinterpretation and over-reliance on ITIL means that, when practitioners consult the ITIL books and fail to see a heading called ‘how to manage BYOD’ they say ITIL is inadequate, but in reality, ITIL never claimed to offer such detailed guidance, for fixing any issue.
The problem isn’t ITIL. The problem is that too many people in the industry have become reliant on ITIL and blame it when something goes wrong. The point I’m trying to make is that ITIL is a great resource, but if it doesn’t help solve a problem like BYOD (and was never intended to fix this type of ‘problem’ in the first place), we should be talking about ITIL less, and instead focusing on sharing knowledge and ideas for addressing these pressing concerns.
James West
ServiceDesk360
Some debate about ITIL, whether in the industry or within a company is healthy. Adopting some of the practices ITIL suggests will undoubtedly make for service improvements. What I think most of us now recognise is that not all of ITIL is current best practice and it doesn’t contain everything you need to know about ITSM. What is positively unhealthy is not recognising there is a more to ITSM than ITIL, doing ITIL for ITIL’s sake, and not addressing the needs, pain and value of customers.
I suspect that at some time in our careers most of us, except Noel, have taken Polly’s stance. In the right context it is fine, but making ITIL a fetish isn’t.
James, great points, thank you. Just to elaborate on your message, if ITIL doesn’t solve all of our ITSM problems, why does it capture so much of the online/offline conversation? Saying we talk about it too much isn’t the same as saying it has no value.
James West
ServiceDesk360
James, because as some of us have been saying for a very long time IT people like to think in terms of products/frameworks/methodologies that they can hang a name on to and then claim to be an expert in.
Fully agree with both James’. I think there is a gradual shift in thinking about ITIL and I have noticed more COBIT and Lean appearing, but it’s still a small percentage and very sporadic. I think one of the barriers to a sea change is that trying to establish a new Project/Program around ITSM is a harder sell to a CIO. ITIL has a brand, is recognised, and as James F pointed out, will still deliver benefits.