ITIL Reality

Vendors have spent a lot of time -- and marketing dollars - promoting the benefits of ITIL this year. And they certainly aren't alone as analysts and the press offer up examples of how this best practices approach to IT service management can pay off for the enterprise. We have certainly spent enough time here talking the ITIL talk in recent months.But like so many other enterprise management strategies, hype preceeds reality, and sometimes that hyped reality never comes. I doubt that will be the case with ITIL but it is important that as the industry continues to tout the management strategy's benefits, to reap those rewards requires some work - and significant training for IT personnel. Thus, it is only logical that ITIL adoption in North America is coming at a fairly slow pace.

However, just because ITIL hasn't taken off like a rocket yet doesn't mean it the management approach isn't making some important gains. ITIL is being helped along by a number off factors from an increase in compliance regulations to a strong desire to streamline IT management. I just hope that the reality that ITIL is not something that can simply be plugged in in ten minutes or less doesn't discourage organizations from implementing it.