Should we abandon ITIL

An interesting and thought provoking session as always from Noel Brunton, an IT service management consultant. He examined the question, should the service desk abandon ITIL?

In short, the answer is - it depends! His view was the with version 3, ITIL has become more corporate, not about IT support, but about IT and the business and of less practical relevance to the service desk. Many things of prime importance to service management are missing from ITIL - dealing with users, out of hours support, skills, operational stats, structures, and staffing. All the difficult stuff!

However, ITIL is still relevant to the IT department. It addresses the basic concepts of change management, problem managment and incident management. You need to stick with ITIL until change management is universally adopted, all developments have supportablilty as a primary issue, and the development team carry out problem management including root cause analysis as a matter of routine.

But, if all of those things are embedded, then it might be time for the service desk and IT support to start developing differnet methodologies, more relevant to their user support role.