During the last years, ITIL has become the standard for Service delivery Processes within IT organisations. No-one, which claims he or she is an IT professional, dear to say, at least not in public, that they are not certified in ITIL. The consequence is that every IT professional does everything according to the ITIL. Has ITIL become a religion? Are the books and papers from OCG praised like a bible? Consider the following
Who define a process bad performing? A low-score in a Capability Maturity Model…
What is this model benchmarked against? The ITIL definition..
Who defines the model and its measures? Consultants which make a living of fixing bad processes…
ITIL has become a major industry itself, which employees a lot of consultants in different industries like benchmarking, training and certification, support systems, process fixers etc. In early days, ITIL was a synonym to “Best Practise”. In order to feed the ITIL industry hunger for bigger pieces of the margins, it has evolved to “Proposed Practise”.
I think it is time to stop and think before we go further. We need to change this dangerous trend saying that ITIL is the salvation for all our problems within the IT industry.
ITIL says a lot about management of processes. But it says nada about management of human resources. Those humans, which actually are the blood and sweat of the process needs motivation and stimulation for give their blood and sweat to the processes.
- The structuring of the ITIL processes may lead to lack of synergies caused by a unification of the business. A reduction of specialising causes a need for more resources to solve same tasks. Loss of adapted consistency in the struggle to define something new.
- Process managers and owners dictate how others should do their work causes loss of efficiency due to a detailed autocratic management.
- The map is not according to the terrain. ITIL process definitions need to be renewed as well, they are not the bible.
- Let ITIL run resource allocation and IT the governance process. Each and every employee will become just a piece in the machinery and not an individual which can influence on the quality of the total delivery. Remember that ITIL was formed by very hieratic UK organisations…
- When ITIL become a religion. The one-track-minded focus has its deadly price. Obvious and simple solutions become unattainable because that everything has to go through bureaucratic (and expensive) processes. The gain of rationalization may be lost if the focus is to consequent follow the System without any exception to the rule.
ITIL is here and will never stop making influence on how IT professionals do their deliveries. As an alternative to the well known anarchistic way of doing IT service deliveries, ITIL is probably the choosen one. But, we must be on alert when the dominant of all thinking in the IT organisation is ITIL. Still, we are measured on delivered service level vs the cost of the service…
