ROI

We can do without all this angst about "Should we do ITIL?" That is the last question we should ask ourselves.

Research on ITIL ROI would be a useful thing for the general information of the industry, but if you are considering whether or not to adopt ITIL, any ROI information you can find now is useless.

There is much discussion of which processes to start with in ITIL, or what order to do them in, or whether to do them at all, or how to decide. If the decision on which processes to reengineer is driven by a business case then the right ones will be chosen: those where ITIL will yield a return to the business.
FTM: Find The Money.

When you are building a business case for ITIL (or anything), it doesn't matter if it is intangible Value or $$$Return that the proposal is offering if that is not what the business wants at this time.

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An insightful remark at the IT Managment Forum set off today's train of thought:

I have been discussing ITIL ROI with the Spanish ITIL community, via Antonio Valle's blog with the magnificent name "Gobierno de las TIC. Conocimiento Adquirido". I was asked the question “How is the relationship between an architectural project and a house?”.

Unless one is setting up a data centre from scratch, I don't think the architect analogy fits. An ITIL adoption is usually more like renovations.

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Perhaps the saddest sight in the ITIL world is organisations that adopt ITIL processes when the old ones were working OK. Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.

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Since this is a skeptical blog, it is high time we examined the evidence. Where is the evidence for the benefits of ITIL? There isn’t any. Not the kind of hard empirical evidence that would stand up in, say, clinical trials. There is more evidence for quack alternative medicines than there is for ITIL.