There are many benefits of ITIL. Here are just a few:

The first question should be 'Does the organisation need ITIL?' or 'What could the organisation gain from ITIL'. If the answer is negative on either account - stop.

ITIL books emphasise that organisations that have succeeded in implementing ITIL have one important thing in common - a strong 'Executive Sponsor'. This means a senior manager - ideally on the Board of Directors, the Corporate Information Officer or some similarly important role - is passionate about ITIL being implemented. When conflicts arise (as they do), the Sponsor will champion the cause, making sure the ITIL project has the funding and the authority to succeed.

Some organisations have started with a technical enthusiast, but it has taken a lot longer and usually only works once that person has a senior and powerful sponsor.

ITIL is not just a technical thing. Actually it isn't really technical at all - not like Java programming anyway! ITIL is ultimately concerned with aligning IT with the business - that means that the business is ultimately the driver, not IT.

In a small organisation a pencil and paper would be all the tools needed. If you have the proper process in place you could, in theory, write your Service Calls, Incidents, Problems Change Requests, and so forth on pieces of paper and circulate them. Thus you could say that paper and ink are 'ITIL-ready' tools and should be certified as such!

Naturally, a large organisation probably will do better with software, but an e-mail system might well be enough. The important thing, and the point of this answer, is that the processes and procedures make sense, are in place and that people use them - what software tools are used and exactly how they work is secondary to that.

How long is a piece of string?

One answer to this is 'never'! ITIL is a quality process that is based on continual improvement based on Business needs. Since Businesses change continually, so their needs change, so, together with the continuous improvement process, ITIL is never complete.

If that is too depressing an answer, one company in South Korea implemented the 10 core ITIL processes + Application Management + Security Management + ICT Infrastructure Management in 6 months! OK, it was a pilot - it was implemented in one company out of 36 - and the culture in South Korea is very well adapted to rapid deployments of this nature. It is certainly not to be recommended to anybody! It is worth mentioning that this project worked because of extremely strong, sustained commitment from both the Board of Directors and the CIO. Without these powerful Executive Sponsors, this effort would have failed!

Most companies deploy ITIL in stages. This makes lots of sense as it allows 'picking low hanging fruit' first - do things that are relatively easy and show the greatest improvement first. It would be normal to have three or four quarterly projects to implement the core processes.

It does, of course, depend on the size of your company. A major multinational may take considerable time to deploy ITIL across many countries and cultures - a small IT shop can, with energy and willingness, get most of it in place in six months.

You can implement both ITIL and Six Sigma, as well as other quality standards, such as COBIT and the Telecoms eTOM. There is documentation showing how these standards intersect and highlighting major differences. Six Sigma describes a model of defects in manufacturing. This doesn't translate directly to an IT model - imagine if you defined Service Calls as 'defects' and tried to drive those down to zero! With proper implementation of metrics and a sympathetic integration into the Six Sigma programme, it is possible to integrate these important quality initiatives.

PRINCE®, which stands for Projects in Controlled Environments, is a project management method covering the organisation, management and control of projects. PRINCE was first developed in 1989 by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), now part of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), as a UK Government standard for IT project management. PRINCE® is a registered trademark of the OGC, and PRINCE2 is their intellectual property.

The ITIL v3 is the current release of ITIL, published May 2007. It is also known as the ITIL Refresh, an effort to improve ITIL v2.

We are currently creating one as an open project on this site. Please feel free to contribute: The ITIL Glossary

Note: This page temporarily locked due to vandalism