ITIL is dead
Well not quite, but it’s not in the best of health. It needs to evolve, or it will become irrelevant.
I’ve long believed that ITSM simply isn’t keeping pace with the world, and I’ve been thinking about why that is, and I don’t think it is down to just one thing. I’ve had several good conversations recently and certainly at the core of the problem is the pace of evolution of ITIL. Just look at how quickly it has, or rather hasn’t, developed since Marc Andreessen said ‘Software is eating the world’ in 2011.
But that’s not all.
Is it also a matter of diversity? So many of the thought leaders and key players in the ITSM world fit my demographic, white, male and Gen X! Are we listening to enough new voices – something I’ve written about before.
Is it protectionism? Are those of us from Gen X not as open to the pace of change and falling back to a comfort zone of knowledge as power, holding back the evolution?
I’ve heard lots of suggestions, Agile and ITIL, DevOps and ITIL, anything and ITIL.
I also wonder how many advocates of Service Management make the step up to C-Suite? Is that a sign of the growing irrelevance?
So, what can be done? Services, successful ones, are a hands-off experience now. We are already living in a world of digital natives, it’s time for ITSM to get out of the way.
Looking towards product management may seem the logical step, but for me it’s just a half step, we need to go further. It’s time to stop centralising functions, stop defining them as ‘specialisms’, time to stop isolated processes, put an end to cumbersome approval chains.
It’s time for the ITSM world to embrace Flow.
Where can Flow alleviate some of the pain points of ITIL?
Incident and Problem, decentralising resolution, removing handoffs, empowering teams to own incidents within their value streams.
Change, reducing the need for CABs and manual approvals processes. Turning towards CI/CD to maintain stability while enabling high velocity.
Service Requests, more decentralisation, using customer data that’s captured earlier than IT is involved, automation as standard.
Service Levels, tear up those SLAs, nobody wants to see that spreadsheet ever again! Real-time data for lead time, cycle time, customer satisfaction, act in the moment.
Capacity and Demand, control your workload management, gain visibility of your work types and intake, and match to team capacity.
Continual Improvement isn’t a specialism, it’s an expectation, it’s at the heart of every value stream by default.
Monitoring and Events, decentralise, remove the noise, embed into the value stream.
So maybe there is still time for ITIL to adapt but are we, as IT leaders, brave enough to take the leap away from what we’ve known for so long?.
