‘ITIL is Extremely Valuable’ – IT Industry

Axelos, born out of the amalgamation of Capita and UK Project Office last year sponsored a survey to find out where ITIL stands and how it is being viewed.

They surveyed 380 IT professionals who used ITIL in one way or another. The study was carried out for a period of six weeks, spanning across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Australia. A handful of certified ITIL trainers were included too.

About 75% of the respondents interviewed were leveraging on ITIL V3 2011 version and the remaining were either on ITIL V3 or on ITIL V2.

Here are the highlights of the study:

• ITIL was positively viewed as growing in importance, or at least holding its own, in the face of trends like cloud and agile—46% viewed ITIL as increasing in importance; 49% viewed ITIL as staying the same in importance; and only 5% viewed ITIL as declining in importance.
• When it came to valuing ITIL resources, 68% found ITIL “very valuable” or “exceedingly valuable.” Only 4% found ITIL “not at all valuable.”
• When asked about reasons for value, “ITIL helps me work with others in unified processes” came in first, followed by “ITIL helps me do my job with added context and insight.”
• Latin America and APAC showed a yet stronger faith in ITIL’s growing importance than did EMEA and North America. This suggests a promising opportunity for growing ITIL’s value globally.
• The trend to unify processes for managing IT and enterprise services together is a clear opportunity for growth for ITIL best practices—where a mature and consistent approach to service management can bring new levels of effectiveness across the broader business or organization.
• The impacts of cloud on ITSM initiatives show that respondents view cloud first and foremost as a means for expanding ITSM capabilities, in part through the growth of SaaS-delivered applications. Only 10% saw no impact from cloud.
• Those with established BSM teams uniting business and IT stakeholders were more than twice as likely to view ITIL as growing in importance.
• When asked about how they would like to see ITIL evolve, 55% preferred modular changes surrounding ITIL’s core to minimize disruptions, but still bring added levels of currency—versus 45% who believed that changing ITIL’s core was preferred.