Does ITIL Hinder Technology Adoption? Good Question Stevie. #ITIL

Stevie Chambers, on his ViewYonder blog, has a thoughtful posts on ITIL's sometimes complicated relationship with technology.  I too have felt that this people, process ONLY focus rather than technology is counter-productive. I've written about it before.

If ITIL is to be useful for anything other than being a lingua franca, it is making technology adoption successful.  Why is this?  Please step in to my office.

I don't think of it as ITIL is the problem, but rather what I call ITILista's -- people who really are good at the people or process part of the equation but fear technology. I know a few of them; heck I have some in my family.  

It's fair to disagree and I am a vendor. But the fact is that cloudcomputing is bringing in a self-service era that demands a service catalog and automation.  People are really doing it, and it's not coming from the ITIListas.

Recommended reading and worth discussing.  Follow me Twitter as @RRFlores

Comments

[Arlena Boxton]

The benefits of ITIL can get skewed when well meaning process folks, who do not necessarily have a broad technical background miss the part about ITIL not being prescriptive - meaning it must make sense and help streamline IT, not bury it under process workflows. An ITIL practitioner who has broad IT exposure, coupled experience in IT operations, infrastructure projects as part of application development and understanding of the customer view of IT service delivery can be one of the best "evangelists" for ITIL because chances are they are respected by technical staff, who are more inclined to listen to them, as opposed to someone who comes from a purely process and project management background who has studied ITSM theory and achieved ITIL certification without having a practical technical background. That is not to say process and project management are not great expertise to have! In my opinion, to truly understand how to help drive business processes using technology, it's really necessary to understand technology and have some technical experience, particularly if you are an ITIL practitioner, Service Manager (v2) or Expert (v3).

ITSM and ITIL best practices have to make sense within the IT organization. An ITIL process adapted and fit for purpose coupled with automation (technology) along with skilled IT folks who understand and embrace the "service management" mindset can streamline IT service delivery and promote technology adoption.

[Lars Christiansen]

As ITIL has become mainstream it has become somewhat deturned from the initial baseline "ITIL tells what the best practices are, not how to implement them".
You can do ITIL with any technology, as a matter of fact you can do ITIL without technology.
If you remember that ITIL is not a trip, but more like continous traveling (improvement) technology is extremely important.
The technology which is satisfying at one point in the cycle of innovation, becomes obsolete as new technologies emerge and brings us new new opportunities for improvement.

So the marriage of ITIL and technology gives a lot bette payback than each of them alone.

So we should avoid to do ITIL for the sake of ITIL, and to do Technology for the sake of Technology. Those are both wrong directions and both lead to regression.