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Matti Grönroos
ITIL
There is a lot of buzz and misconceptions about ITIL. Fundamental mistakes have also been made in the history of ITIL, such as calling things that are not processes as processes.
Some companies have decided to organize themselves as "ITIL-compliant" and some sell "ITIL-compliant" products. However, there is no such thing as "ITIL compliance".
In the latest version 4 of ITIL, many things have changed for the better, having descended to the level of reality. It is a good cookbook for how to start building the IT service delivery. But it is not the whole truth.
ITIL has moved quite far from what it originally was: a British guideline on how to run data center operations. Several data centers of public organizations were in danger of being outsourced because of their random ways of operating. Hence the name "Infrastructure Library".
The paper machine has a wet end and a dry end. Pulp-mixed sludge is put into the wet end as a raw material, and later ready paper rolls come out of the dry end. The continuous IT service can be seen as the shared wet end of the value chain. ITIL is a set of advice on how to organize a wet end and what is the common IT delivery related terminology.
The common terminology is one of the biggest values of ITIL. The value of common and commonly understood terminology should not be underestimated. Nowadays, about everyone working at the IT service delivery knows what "Incident Management", "Configuration Item", and "Service Portfolio" are about.
Back in the years before ITIL was widely known, I had technical responsibility for an outsourced customer. It soon became clear that it was not just about outsourcing IT, but about the survival of the customer company. The company's IT staff had lived a rather isolated life for ten years and during that time had developed a quite unique vocabulary for themselves. During the first months, misunderstandings because of the terminology were almost daily. In the current era of ITIL, this is quite rare.
The ITIL and the Service Delivery Manager (or whatever manager) relate to each other in the same way as a cookbook and the chef: The cookbook gives advice, and the chef decides which advice to use and how. ITIL is a good servant but a bad master. It is not an everythingable Big Book to ensure purism. Instead, it is a set of guidance and proven good practices.
Special Note: The idea of a process is not to prevent from using common sense. It is not a fence to block the operations development.
ITIL 4 has changed its approach compared to the previous versions.
Above all, the term "process" has been left more in the background. This reflects the truth that a significant part of IT service delivery is expert work that does not make sense to organize into a process. A specialist is a person, who knows what to do next. Making the specialist work a strict formal process stinks micromanagement hated by most specialists.
The replacement term is "practice", which describes quite well that it is a set of different tasks around something. All translations to other languages have not been that successful.
Another visible thing about the new ITIL is the identification of the delivery-time value chains instead of isolated process silos. The third point is liberalization. From detailed process descriptions the bias is towards a checklist model: This is the list of items to take care of; the implementation remains your responsibility.