For any service management framework or approach to remain relevant, their core focus must be to help shift and reorient organizations away from systems-centric or even service-centric operating models to customer-centric ones.
You probably missed it, but earlier this month something significant took place. Its significance is less about what happened, but rather because of what didn’t.
At FUSION 17, one of the industry’s largest IT Service Management conferences (produced by itSMF USA and HDI), AXELOS announced its planned update of ITIL in 2018.
And the industry gave a collective shrug.
According to AXELOS, owner of the framework, ITIL is “the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world.” The company reports that there are millions of worldwide practitioners and that it used by the vast majority of large organizations to help guide and direct their IT operations.
So you would have expected the news that the company will update the framework to be met with lots of press and industry chatter. But as you probably guessed, it was not.
The reason for the lack of interest is the same reason that the company is updating it: ITIL appears to be rapidly reaching the point of irrelevance in a dynamic, agile world that looks very different from the decades-ago world in which it was originally created.
New architectural models, new management approaches and the broader digital transformation of organizations seem to have rendered ITIL a relic of the past.
Still, the substantial investments that organizations around the world have made in certifications, the vast number of technology vendors that have been built up around the framework and the large network of consultants and training companies would suggest that this framework will not pass quietly into the night.
But will this update be enough to keep it from falling into the trench of irrelevance or will this be ITIL’s last gasp?
Quite an insightful read on what the future has in store for ITIL..