ITIL v3 Adoption rate

For those of you who could not find the link to the new whitepaper I referred to last week in my blog on “ Can you get ITIL out of the Box” check out this link

Now this week I was attending the HelpDesk Institute  (HDI) 2007 annual US conference in Las Vegas. With over 2,700 attendees the place was buzzing with excitement. This was my first time at an HDI event and I’m really impressed by what they have and continue to achieve, from education, membership, accreditations and qualifications through to awards for achievements in service and projects. Ron Muns the founder and CEO has and continues to do an outstanding job within this very critical IT service area, and at least 2,700 this week agreed!

What I continue to be amazed at as I talked to delegates is the continued struggle for these Service Desk and Help Desk’s to move up the maturity ladder. Many still operating in the Silo approach with little integration to the full IT Service Management processes, as described in the current version of ITIL. Why is this? ITIL has been around for almost 20years, many in the US discovered it more than 5 years ago, so does it really take 5years or more to move to a new standard? If this is the case then it will be very interesting to see what happens with the adoption of the new version of ITIL (v3) due out at the end of this month.

Ron was making the comparison with MS Vista, it’s been out for 6-8 months now, yet very very few have actually migrated to it, or even considering that migration project in the next 12 months. So will ITIL v3 take up be slow too? My personal view is yes. By the time people obtain the new books and then read through all 2,000 pages in 5 books, that will take several months in itself. Then the consultancy market needs to go through the training, and only the Foundation course will be available this summer. Finally they need to implement at some leading edge customers to gain experience for the mainstream to feel comfortable with migrating. With this in mind, it will take a minimum of 18months, and as ITIL v2 is still not mature in many many places, it may indeed take 5years or more for people to grab hold of the new life-cycle approach and starting implementing or upgrading to it. For those organisations that are already ITIL mature, it may be fairly easy, but for the majority still not mature and working in silos the journey may be slow and long.

So, whilst we all await the new books with great anticipation caused by all the hype and market noise, time alone will tell how soon we all start to adopt it. The good news for us here a BMC, is that Business Service Management is already ahead of the cycle, taking customers to maturity in ITIL v2, allowing for V3 to be more easily adopted. In fact many of the changes in V3 are already developed and in place within BSM today, with BSM being referred to as a best practice to follow within the Service Strategy book.

In the next few weeks I’ll release another new whitepaper co-authored with Sharon Taylor, Chief Architect of ITIL v3 to show the relationship between ITIL v3 and BSM, highlighting the main differences between v2 and v3. So yet again, watch this space!!