Article ID: PR034
Category: Process
Title: That Was ITIL, That Was

By Noel Bruton

Remember ITIL? Great, wasn't it? Once upon a time, we had all these processes, a magnificent structure from which we could hang our IT support services. I'm being very deliberate about using the past tense here - and that's because I believe that at least in the UK, ITIL has peaked. Actually maybe not just here, for I have it on good authority that in a major series of IT services seminars to be done by an Australian company next year, they won't be mentioning ITIL down there either.

The evidence is either patchy or irrefutable, depending on how you look at it. The way I see it, ITIL is on the wane. I first began to suspect this at a respected industry conference in 2005, where a group of senior IT services managers were discussing their consensus that ITIL had missed a trick or two. The framework was criticized for having too many implementations that dealt with only the front end of IT - what was being referred to as the 'low-hanging fruit'. It is true that a 2004 survey of ITIL adopters showed that although almost all of IT felt at least some of the effect of ITIL adoption, those most affected were - you guessed it - the various factions of user support, helpdesk, second line, change management. Most of the rest of IT prefers not to get heavily involved and some omissions from mainstream ITIL reduce the relevance for IT backline departments.

It's not just here and Oz though. In the USA, an industry observer is currently writing a book about what's missing from ITIL and consulting with various potential contributors. Elsewhere over there, a leading figure who has been synonymous with helpdesks for years has chosen specifically not to pursue ITIL certification for his customer support consultancy practice.

Imagination

In the UK, there was the HITSS show in April 2006, which generated little if any excitement among press and industry observers. There was a distinct lack of imagination among many of the vendors there. If a theme could be said to have emerged from the exhibition floor, it was 'Configuration Management', a topic which those of us who were interested had sussed completely by December 31st 1999 at the latest or face possible operational surprises the following day. As a process, configuration management has its own problems, largely stemming from four schools of thought - one that has begun its configuration management programme but is yet to complete it, another that is confused about the difference between configuration management and asset management, a further one that does asset management but calls it configuration management because, well, you do don't you, and a fourth that believes configuration management to be so complex and fluid that as to be fundamentally non-doable.

Other hints were at the show. At one end of the hall, there was Fox-IT, whose stand at more than one event in recent years has promoted that company as a leading ITIL consultancy and training company. Yet this year, rather than just sticking to that noble ground, Fox has become a reseller of a configuration management package. Notwithstanding the potential risk to any consulting firm's reputation for objectivity, perhaps the reason may be that the ITIL business is not so lucrative as it was. Or maybe there's not sufficient growth or new business in ITIL alone. I'm speculating, of course. It could also be however, something to do with Purple Griffon's little stand at the other end of the aisle, selling ITIL Foundations by Computer Based Training for just a few hundred quid, plus the cost of the examination, itself often less than another ton. To me, the diversification of major players and the increasing availability of lower-cost alternatives are the signs of a growth market that's gone commodity through saturation - and that's usually the point at which the smart money starts to head elsewhere.

Favours

Of course ITIL has done itself few favours in recent times. The much vaunted 'ITIL Refresh' currently underway will change little. Aidan Lawes himself, chairman of the IT Service Managers Forum (ITSMF), ITIL advocate extraordinaire and a man for whom I've considerable respect, summed up the response to consultation about the refresh as "ITIL ain't broke, so don't fix it." Unfortunately, they asked as many interested parties as they could - and of course, the larger the sample size, the more it will naturally come to represent mediocrity. Survey after survey shows that ITIL adopters have had to add other processes to make up for the gaps in ITIL. The ITSMF perspective is to foster IT Service Management, seeing ITIL as a tool for that. The refresh was a chance to bring more specific IT service management topics into ITIL to plug some of those gaps - yet they passed it up.

Then there's ISO2000, the auditable version of ITIL, from which there already appears to be emanating a faint whiff of fiasco. There is reputed to be, oxymoronically, two versions of the standard, one of which includes an ITSMF insignia on its logo. Betamax, anybody?

Non-Prescriptive

On top of all that, ITIL itself doesn't really understand what it's trying to achieve. It makes this persistent claim to be 'non-prescriptive', and thus allow for adaptation. Well it would, wouldn't it, because if it were too rigid, it would match fewer potential environments and so would fail to be adopted there. But ITIL has really only ever advised on what to do and is pretty scant on how to do it. Of course the ways and means are covered in associated literature - but they're not in the core processes in any real, useful detail.

Because it offers no real means of benchmarking itself, nor can ITIL really ever prove that it is successful in operation. Admittedly, consultancies will produce various diagrams of gap analyses, but those maturity models are not part of ITIL itself.

So on the one hand, ITIL prescribes a certain set of processes, yet on the other it is 'non-prescriptive' - but when you take your Foundation exam, you'd damn well better be able to quote the prescribed jargon back at them. Perhaps part of what is killing ITIL is the very fact that it doesn't prescribe enough, and just too much independent thought is required. Then again, perhaps those who can think independently don't need ITIL anyway, as was the case for, coincidentally, all the finalists in a recent industry award for user support excellence.

Implications

The thing is, if ITIL really is dead, what happens now? ITIL had been hanging around for over fifteen years before the helpdesk vendors spotted its potential for product differentiation. When they did, within two years pretty much every mainstream helpdesk system and many of the pretenders were claiming ITIL compatibility. Here we go again - another commodity market. Every product looks the same, They're not of course, but when the Statement of Requirements (SOR) documents land on the desk of vendor salespeople, they all want a tick in the box marked 'ITIL Pink-Verified'. And in the spreadsheet compiling all the vendors' responses, there'll be a column marked 'Cost Per Seat'.

With ITIL abdicating its own future, from where will the vendors get their guidance and differentiation? They'll have to start taking risks again. Remember those days before ITIL when the vendors tried various add-on features to attract the business? There was survey software and Customer Relationship Management and knowledge bases and self-support and PDA connectivity and so on and so on. None of these bells and whistles changed the industry that much - indeed a lot of this stuff flopped. If we go back to that, of course there'll be some innovation (about time too) but there'll also be some industry attenuation, as the rush to differentiate pushes up development and sales costs in what is already a confused and price-conscious market.

And what about IT itself? The king is gone, leaving no heir. A leadership vacuum emerges. No longer can IT managers utter the vicariously decisive sentence "We're going down the ITIL route" with solemn confidence, because ITIL has shown itself to have no particular route in mind. So what are we supposed to do for operational guidance now? Heaven forfend that industry leadership should default to a vendor because whenever that happens in this industry, we get stuff like Windows XP trying to pretend it's not MS-DOS while it's running SCANDISK-in-blue. I know some really nice and clever people working for HP, but 'Service Desk' - dear oh dear.

Of course what companies really want is to improve their IT support services. ITIL never really showed them how to do that, and it's clearly not planning to change that strategy any time soon. I cannot decide whether we're in for an exciting or depressing time. One thing occurs though - eighteen months from now, I doubt I'll be writing about ITIL.

Noel Bruton is an independent consultant and trainer who assists IT Services groups and helpdesks to improve the service they provide. Based in the UK, he has a worldwide clientele since establishing his consultancy practice in 1991. He is the author of 'How to Manage the IT Helpdesk - a Guide for User Support Managers' (ISBN 07506 49011) and 'Managing the IT Services Process' ISBN 07506 57235). He writes extensively in the IT press and is a popular speaker on the IT Support conference circuit.

For more information on on Noel Bruton's services, either call +44 (0)1239 811646 or email noel@noelbruton.com.