Just kidding. ITIL is far from dead, and here’s some proof.
“ITIL is dead” said the sign hanging in the network ops group at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio. Take a look at this article on how it’s going in the trenches of ITIL adoption. The article is “ IT pros share their tales of making ITIL work” on networkworld.com. The article talks about how the “people” aspect of ITIL’s People/Tools/Processes triangle is easy to overlook and can be the toughest sell, but likely the most important.
Another article with an interesting “people” idea is IASA News: CIOs Bear Alignment Burden from informationweek.com. Here’s a quote: “Insurance is about insurance, not technology, so IT bears a heavier burden in pursuing the elusive goal of IT/business alignment…” Basically, they have their IT folks shadow underwriters to show them the effect that IT has on their fellow coworkers. How’s that for a low-technology, no-tools-required method for getting the real scoop on business services and managing them, in real life?
This job shadowing idea is something we talk about in user assistance design all the time. Imagine watching someone who uses applications that rely on the IT infrastructure every day. Would it be a humbling experience when you find out they have some strange workaround for a process that you thought was just fine the first time? For me, my humbling moment came while watching someone in our usability lab try to find something in a help system for which I wrote and helped design the structure. We learned that our embedded search engine couldn’t look up an error message based on the error number alone. Woops! Back to the help system design drawing board.
But back to the surge in interest in ITIL. From DataPoint: IT research that matters, Chris Jablonski points out that ITIL is getting more and more mainstream. Interestingly, a coworker had also pointed me to this BMC-sponsored white paper (registration required, but it’s quick and painless). Here’s what my coworker and I found interesting, is the jump in interest levels in ITIL and also implementations of ITIL frameworks.
ITIL has made significant in-roads into the enterprise: In 2003, only 26 percent of organizations were familiar with ITIL. Today, 73 percent are in various stages of implementing the framework. In just two years, a general lack of awareness has leap-frogged into implementation, although only 1 percent have reached the highest level of maturity.
These organizations are mostly in the US and Canada, have more than 100 employees, and the respondents were mostly in technical job roles (over 80% of them). How about you? Are you in the ITIL trenches? What’s your perspective?