One of the things I do from time to time is interview with various enterprises, sometimes for jobs and sometimes, just out of curiosity. Recently, I went through a couple of such meetings with a local financial institution, and for the first time, saw first hand, some interest at the enterprise level for acquiring talent schooled in ITIL.
Now this was not really all that surprising, as the importance of IT in the enterprise has grown over the years, and the need to catalog best practices has also increased just to keep the quite chaotic and ever evolving morass running. Another not surprising reason is that the parent company was a member of the British Commonwealth, which is where ITIL originated a while back.
While I had read about ITIL in the past, I really hadn't studied it, so when the interviewer inquired about my knowledge of ITIL I told him I had none... And proceeded to spend a good portion of the next hour receiving a lecture on the importance, role and value of ITIL in the enterprise. Quite educational. He was, if not an eloquent speaker, at least quite passionate. He was quite adamant about one thing in particular - that ITIL was all about Risk Management (and (IT) operations management in general isn't? - ???). Anyway, he peeked my interest enough so that I decided to make this my next course of study, just out of curiosity.
According to Wikipedia.org: "The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations". I prefer to think of it as a guidance for technology in the enterprise.
I am now about midway through the foundations sequence and I see a lot of good thinking - if your interest is the philosophy of service provisioning. Not really of much use in terms of concrete operational doctrine though (no easy outs here) - hence my preference for calling it a guidance (at least at the foundations level), and which is why it probably hasn't yet caught on with many small to medium businesses. In passing, I would note that most companies really can't afford to even think about it as an enterprise process until they hit the billion dollar revenue mark (defining and tabulating all those metrics and having all those planning/review meetings tends to be labor intensive, and storing all that accumulated data for regulatory compliance can be costly).
As to the content, nothing really new - to me at least. Things I have spent the last 3 decades learning through the old apprenticeship process, they have spindled, collated, acronymed and formalized into a nice, (barely) digestible tome of wisdom. Perfect for the MBA set, who usually start out at the (project) manager/consultant/analyst level, so they rarely learn the ins and outs of the reality of IT (which means dealing with the details of day-to-day operations in the trenches). (I am not intending to demean the MBA, quite the contrary, however, I do view a new MBA like the army views 2nd Lieutenants - stuffed with lots of info, but very short on practical experience. (As I once heard stated, the job description of a 2LT was to relay instructions to the troops, observe, report and listen attentively to his sergeant for every pearl of wisdom he deigned to drop.) Though this is changing for the better at many institutions (I had to pleasure of working with some MBA students on a team project last year. They did a bang up job on an analysis for Business Continuity solutions for one of my clients (though I still wouldn't want them running a datacenter for me).
I do see ITIL (at least the foundation level) as becoming a requirement for the CIO/CTO role in the next decade. I also believe that it should be required for any C level executive, so that they have at least a basic concept of what IT is trying to do (I also note that there is a lot of very good general thinking here for all aspects of enterprise operation). In particular the CFO, to whom IT reports to in many organizations (to the detriment of those companies in many, but not all, cases).
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