In its latest incarnation, ITIL is raising vexing questions for IT professionals contemplating adopting it within their companies. The problem? A lack of clarity as to the cost and extent of ITIL training and certification.

Implementing ITIL used to be more straightforward. When Jonathan Chapman joined London, UK-headquartered global packaging giant Rexam in November 2006 as group service delivery and operations manager, for example, a key objective that had been set for him was to shape the business's approach to IT service management around ITIL concepts.

"There wasn't a formal service culture within the company's IT operations organization," he recalls. "The advantage of ITIL was that it would force us to more formally interact with the business from a service point of view. Like many IT organizations, we were good at talking to users when creating a new system — but not so good at following up from a service perspective."

Clearly, training in ITIL concepts was required. Already certified to ITIL's "foundation" level when he joined Rexam, Chapman discovered that although a few members of the IT team had also received some ITIL training, the knowledge within the team was fractured and predominantly UK-based. Nevertheless, it was the starting point from which he could build to get the benefits of ITIL to the company's 22,000 employees. Little over a year later, Chapman can declare mission accomplished. There's still work to do, but a sea change in service delivery has taken place.

The Origins of ITIL Version 3

That rapid adoption timescale may be a thing of the past. Now over twenty years old, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library — to give ITIL its full name — is a set of best practice concepts and techniques for addressing the effective management of IT infrastructure, service delivery and service support.

Originally developed in the UK in the mid-1980s, drawing on work done in the 1970s by IBM and others and published by the UK government's Office of Government Commerce, ITIL has been widely adopted around the world; exact numbers are unclear since all one has to do is purchase the books and adopt whatever practices one wishes. Inside the UK's public sector — and for private sector companies operating government systems on an outsourced basis — ITIL volumes are like the Bible's chapters and verse for managing IT.