What is it about ITIL that's so irritating? The possibility that it's right?

The headline startled me because it runs counter to my experience: "ITIL Irritates IT Managers." It appeared over a story in Byte and Switch that quoted several irritated IT managers who were conveniently clustered at an Enterprise Strategy Group conference in Boston.

I was more than a little irritated myself. I wrote a blog item a couple of weeks ago here about a Forrester Group research paper titled "ITIL Simulators Demonstrate The Value Of Process Models," about three computer simulations big systems-management vendors are making available to help IT manager sell ITIL to their non-IT bosses. (See that item for some background on ITIL, which stands for the IT Infrastructure Library, if you're wondering what this is all about.)

Why would IT guys be irritated by ITIL? I would expect non-IT managers to be far more irritated. But the quotes from these IT guys made ITIL sound like the next Sarbanes-Oxley -- one guy even used the phrase "It's going to get shoved down your throat." The author of the piece opined that "IT managers are already dreading the demands of ITIL compliance."

Then I realized that these guys have even less experience with ITIL than I do. At least I understand that ITIL isn't a government mandate. It's a set of best practices, beginning with IT service management. It gives you a framework for talking about the work you do with the people who write your paycheck. But these guys haven't tried it. They just know they're not going to like it.

I do understand part of their problem, though. ITIL is a tough thing to get a handle on -- and to take your first step into. While ITIL itself is literally a library of books, implementing ITIL is largely unmapped territory. Robin Yearsley, a British ITIL consultant, reminded me of that point in a comment he made on my first post. And he also offered some help. He mentioned a book by Randy Steinberg titled Implementing ITIL: Adapting Your IT Organization to the Coming Revolution in IT Service Management, and the transcript of a teleconference he and Steinberg had presented earlier this year. (You can get a PDF of the transcript from his Web site, www.asktheserviceexpert.com. You have to give him your e-mail address to get to it, and he implicitly threatens to spam you a little, but it may be worth it.)

I don't know Steinberg's book, but he makes some good points in the transcript. One I particularly liked came in a reference to a Gartner Research study on IT service outages. "They found," said Steinberg, "that around 70 percent of those outages were caused by some kind of a process failure. Ten percent of those outages were caused by a lack of skills, somebody not knowing how to do their job. And finally, 20 percent were caused by technology failures, meaning they got a bad piece of software or the hardware experienced some kind of a problem. So in essence 70 per cent were caused by process failure and you look at the IT industry today and they’re still focusing on the 20 percent, the technology failures."

That matches pretty well with my experience: "process failure" sounds like another way of saying "operator error." This process side of the equation, says Steinberg, is where the bigger benefits are going to be found, and ITIL, with its focus on process, is the way to get results.

It's no wonder those IT guys are irritated. They're being told they should forget everything they know, and change the way they do things to focus on a completely different set of problems. but I'm wondering, if ITIL could help with even part of that 70 percent of IT's problems, maybe it would be worth a little irritation, and learning some new tricks, to have a chance to be part of the solution.