December 2nd, 2004
ITIL not a panacea for management tools, warns analyst
The British have given us much to be thankful for: The Beatles, Shakespeare, crumpets, and if you haven’t heard, ITIL (Information Technology Information Library), a framework of best practices for aligning IT services with business requirements. The UK government came up with ITIL in the late 80s in an effort to improve IT service management, and now it’s embraced by industries worldwide. According to Forrester "2005 will be the year when ITIL goes mainstream." This means that IT managers considering ITIL compliance will be shopping around for tools that provide a broad set of management solutions necessary to support the best practices. But they’ll have to be careful. While the ITIL processes are distinct, the tools you use to manage them overlap: they are not in synch, says Meta Group (client reg. req.):
Process overlap is likely to continue even as increasing global interest in the adoption of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) helps drive IT organizations toward process standardization. This is due to the open-ended nature of the ITIL framework, particularly in relation to management tools. In other words, increasing adoption of ITIL will not significantly reduce the tendency for overlapping functionality of management tools. Nor should organizations assume that ITIL projects will magically cure their management tool headaches.
