That is where the framework comes in.

"The trick with ITIL is that it requires understanding — both of it and the organization it is going into," he says. "People with limited knowledge in either area will have less than ideal results. The problem isn't ITIL — it's really an issue of management."

As the business provisioning process of IT, Jones says, ITIL is designed to stabilize the IT domain and then improve it, while actively supporting business operations. Success in today's competitive and global markets depends on organizations having a stable but agile infrastructure from which they can launch. The ITIL processes provide this stability within the IT domain, supporting enforceable and repeatable processes that can improve the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of the business services they deliver, driving compliance with regulatory requirements and reliably supporting key business needs.

However, Jones says it is a mistake to see these processes as an end in themselves rather than as a powerful agent to help the organization achieve its goals.

"The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices provide a standard basis for operations and deployment that maximizes the business value of IT, as process excellence alone is not sufficient. Maximizing business value requires continuous process improvements, business-to-IT alignment and optimized application quality across the entire product lifecycle," he says.

"For these processes to aid in the transformation of the business-IT relationship, both the business and IT must be able to articulate what they need and require from the other. Where this articulation has not occurred (or occurred inaccurately), functions and interfaces will fail, leading to accusation, mistrust and brick throwing between the departments — ultimately leading to failed projects, wasted opportunities, frustration and fiscal loss. This relationship and IT transformation must be carefully performed, as no two organizations have the same profile or requirements."

Resource Creep

When it comes to ITIL, issues of management are letting too many organizations down, and resourcing can be a killer. In fact, says Kenilian IT Consulting principal consultant Ken Briscoe, often enough the initial project is adequately resourced but the team struggles to win the resources needed to support the ongoing operation.

"Typically ITIL introduces additional overhead [and] formality in day-to-day work before the long-term benefits are realized," he says. "That makes it vital to allocate resources for change administrators, configuration administrators and problem coordinators. Trouble is, these are often the first to be cut when cost savings are needed."

When Hewlett-Packard joined forces with IT Service Management Forum Australia (itSMF) last year to survey IT organizations about ITIL adoption rates and maturity levels in Australian organizations, it found best practice IT service management (ITSM) improvement programs have become a key focus for medium-to-large IT organizations.

Many Australian organizations have implemented or are in the process of implementing foundation processes within the ITIL best practice ITSM framework. But the results of the research — into 259 organizations across a range of industry sectors — highlight the fact that the journey to ITSM maturity is long and the hurdles are many, says Peter McInnes, HP's Australia and New Zealand software marketing manager.

"You can define the major challenges in three broad areas," McInnes says, "the main one being staff and management buy-in: that it was very important to achieve or to gain that buy-in prior to any IT service management project. The next one was having adequate funding for any project, and the third one was staff knowledge and training — making sure that the staff who were undertaking the process improvement were adequately trained and had adequate knowledge to assess the improvement framework that they were deploying.