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Even now, almost 20 years since ITIL was first created, there are still huge misconceptions about it; what it is, what it can do and what the benefits are. One of the most common fallacies is that ITIL is an ‘all or nothing’ endeavour and that to take advantage of the ITIL approach, an organisation must implement all elements across all aspects of the Service Desk. Not true! Having implemented over 500 ITIL-compliant service desks, I’m here to tell you that even a little bit of ITIL does you good.

ITIL is such a helpful, logical and systematic approach to dealing with IT service issues that even adopting single elements can bring significant benefits. In fact, this is the most common and successful approach for many companies who choose to pick off the ‘best bits’ according to what may be most relevant to them; incident, problem or change management for instance.

The groundswell of support for ITIL is growing internationally, but for many ITIL just sounds like hard work, a lengthy process working with a dusty engineering approach with dubious payback! It’s true that the IT Infrastructure Library was originally collated for an engineering community, but it has moved on massively since then. All public sector organisations across the UK are working towards adopting the framework over the coming months.

For other organisations, it’s usually pain, or even a disaster, that forces the change. A company may find that it can’t restore files from a back-up as either they weren’t done, or they weren’t tested appropriately for instance. Or they may find that support demands have outgrown their current infrastructure and documented processes of some kind are called for. The service desk consultants may find that they’re spending all their time providing reactionary support, and are unable to be proactive, to analyse the root cause of problems and fix them, let alone work on interesting and challenging projects.

But, the ITIL path cannot be embarked upon lightly; it does call for commitment from all staff and certification can be a considerable expense. One of the most common reasons for ITIL to flop is that companies fail to allocate sufficient time or effort or have unrealistic expectations. We’re all still waiting for that magic wand that can cure all IT woes; ITIL isn’t it.

But it is undeniably the key to multiple benefits. In my experience effective processes for problem management can result in around 60% improvement in service, as the time to resolve issues is slashed and it becomes possible to recognise trends and patterns to avert future incidents. Getting a grip on change management can be equally dramatic as the number of successful changes increases and roll-back procedures are laid out in advance rather than being developed on the fly.

Configuration management will provide an understanding of the entire IT estate; hardware, software, cabling and peripherals. This information clearly benefits change management and improves performance there, but also gives greater control in terms of software and asset management as well as a host of other compliance issues.

As all the different ITIL areas dovetail, it’s quite easy to start with a discreet implementation in either incident or configuration management and these are the most common starting points. Once organisations get a feel for the benefits that ITIL can bring they often continue to adopt more and more elements across their operations. Once an organisation has invested in getting an ‘ITIL mind-set’ further elements are easier and quicker to adopt.

Indeed, ITIL is not just for IT, the approach of documenting and agreeing processes and language can help many other operational areas, such as facilities management or logistics. So whether you run a two-man help desk or a large data centre service desk, think again about ITIL.

At the end of the day ITIL exists to lessen the strife in a busy IT service environment, improve service and make your job more rewarding. And who wouldn’t want a little bit of that?