ITIL v3 - A blessing or a curse for the IT-management?

[hugigo]

Hello together,

what do you think, is ITIL more a "curse" or a "blessing" for the IT-Management?
I am maybe not as skilled as you with the theme ITIL v3, but I try to understand and become acquainted with ITIL.

But now, in the beginning, ITIL looks very complex (too complex) and it seems to go ahead with high costs, when we want to integrate the services in our company.
And what' s about the employees? They must re-learn processes and workflows!?

But on the other hand it' s maybe like an "industrial revolution" for IT-services!? We have standard and routinely processes (best practices). This would reduce costs and time.

So, what' s about you?
Blessing or curse?

Regards,
Julian

[Sorry for the short sentences and explanations. I' m a young German and not as confident as I want in writing skills. Please apologize]

[Diarmid]

hugigo,

I think you are not fully understanding what ITIL is. There is no complexity beyond what you decide you need and there is no cost beyond what you decide to pay.

Your question suggests that you are regarding ITIL as something to implement. It is not.

ITIL is a set of guidance on best practice for IT service management. The only certain costs are associated with coming to understand it, by reading the books, attending training, becoming involved in such fora as this, discussing it with your colleagues or some combination of these.

Everything else you do is part of service improvement and how much ITIL (or COBIT or anything else) influences your improvement plans is up to you.

None of the cost of improvement is down to ITIL. It is all down to your evaluation of the benefits of the improvement.

So, for example, you see some good stuff in ITIL about incident management and you design an improved incident management process for your organization. The cost of design and implementation (including training staff in new procedures) is cost against improvement, not against ITIL.

The only way in which ITIL can properly be a curse to IT management is if, after reading and coming to understand ITIL, the management believe they have wasted their time because it has nothing to offer them.

The other way it can be, and I suspect often is, a curse is when it is "implemented" rather than used as guidance towards improvement. In this case it is a double curse. firstly it is an expensive pain to implement and then it behaves like a straitjacket hindering quality improvement to your management system.
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"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718