Absolutely
ITIL does have it's places and is good for managment types and reporting to customers and control wth regards to know issues/role outs and the like, heck the Telco industry love it and for the amount of inter-business interworking involved something like ITIL is essentual.
The problem is that people in upper managment take it as gospil and as such force it as a template that if it don't fit then it was never an issue to start with and as we all know this prevents any form of proactive initiative towards problems.
One example would be that I walked into a server room once and I have a extreemly keen nose and could smell a hint of electrical burn (like solder melt), anyhow I tracked it down to a server in a rack and thought this box is goona die. Now all the system monitoring/operations on that server was fine, nothing indicating any form of fault and it was all running perfectly. I wanted to get a spare reimaged ready to replace it as I just knew it was goona die from instint but wasn't able to as it wasn't a issue and as such no fault could be raised. Two days later that exact box died a glorius death, impacted the entire rack to some degree and upshot was it took half a day to get a replacement. In hindsight this could of been avoided all due to the ability to get a charge code issues/athorised but ITIL don't deal with hindsight or experience, its a procedural flow with exacting control and for know issues and other area's outlined above it is fantastic. But becasue it afords no scope for catering for anything proactive it can and generaly always does by managment to be the written in stone approach to everything.
I have noticed that this is more the case with managment types who have very little technical ability and no history of working in the trench's so too speak, as apposed to those who migrated thru the racks up the ladder. I'm not saying that all managment shoudl be technicaly compitent as there staff but it helps, A good manager should need to be as they have staff for that and they can trust there ability and they inturn can trust there manager to deal with there part. They buffer the manager from the technical detail beyond it can be done in X time and the manager inturn buffers the It workers from the likes of HR and other upper forms of meeting the time away type affairs. But there needs to be that level of trust and if the manager knows ITIL then they also tend to shit and breath it and nothing else. Thing is with shit you can get nuts in it and without hindsight you would never know or even be aware that somebody didn't chew there nuts.
No solution is perfect, but if you know and can accept that then you will do fine with ITIL, just don't take it as gospel and rememebr it is only part of the picture and not the frame limiting your canvas space.
I hope managment learn and adapt without costly mistakes of poo pooing hindsight from there staff who know the IT aspect best with regards to what the company actualy does as apposed to what the any paper percspective.
But hey, when companies are measured performance wise on a shareprice controled by outside perspective you can see why for some it dosn't matter what you actualy do but what your perceieved to do and happily pretend that there are no exceptions to any rules. Sadly though most companies worship there share price over any people resource or asset and in that they are nothing more than chips on a roulette wheel.
I hope one day that I work for a company that has ITIL running in a way that caters for initiative and proactivity, but ironicly in a way ITIL does that as we would never have the 5 9's service agreements aas they would all be 100% uptime instead, were do you thing the differences come from, yip excceptions to the rule. Shit happens, but if your not allowed to buy a shovel until the shit appears then you have already lost valuable time, which sadly the IT staff get blamed for dispite that fact they haev no scope to operate in preventing it, even were they could.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
