First - I have a bias in that I was part of the team that developed ITIL V3. But I am also in teams working on ISO Standards. here is my take: I don''t think the problem is with ITIL but in what people mistakenly think ITIL is and inappropriately hold it out as. When anyone holds ITIL out as "a standard" or as "something to be implemented" - they have just created a huge problem that will cost a lot of money and time before its solved.
ITIL is a library of books that contain a narrative description of many good and proven service management practices. But - It is not a standard. It is not something that can be implemented. (How could you objectively tell if it were implemented?).
The ITIL certifications show that the person understands the language of ITIL which is now the "lingua franca" of IT but not that they know what to do with it. Certifying 8 times to the same set of books is odd in my view even though I have the expert certification. A college degree usually means the person has studied many points of view and understands the language and a set of professional concepts from multiple angles. If this concept were applied to other professions would it hold water? Instead of "I am a dentist", would it not be odd to hear "I am an XYZ Dentist Expert, I have 8 certifications to this one set of dentistry books. I have foundations, dentistry life cycle, dentistry capability and dentistry expert.". I think I would rather have a standard dentist with happy customers and a stable practice.
ISO IEC 15504 series, or ISO IEC 20000 series or other ISO standards - are standards. They are written in a fundamentally different way - so that they can be used in an audit or assessment. You can use them to check your service management system to see if you have all the parts in place that should be there. You can do this objectively by way of an impartial third party or do it in house. But the key is that you can objectively know if you conform or don't conform. If you don't like the standard, you can adopt it for internal use and add or subtract the things that you need, or not, and use it in a modified form - but the end is the same - you can audit or assess against it because that is how it is written.
Pretending ITIL is a standard sets up an organization for playing a game of football with no goal posts, sidelines or rules. Lots of activity and running around but not really getting anywhere fast. Typical efforts are marked by bickering between enthusiastic and naive pedants on the one side and experienced people on the other. Bickering usually beats results and the projects usually fail to deliver measurable or even discernible business value.
I don't think the problem is with ITIL per se, but what naive but zealous people do with it once they have their sash filled with so many certifications to the same set of books.
I think the problem would go away of ITIL were used, properly, as a library of books with narrative descriptions of many service management practices, and that they form a part of a larger ecosystem of information available in the industry including COBIT 5.0 (also a service management framework, actually auditable and assessable too), ISO Standards, eTOM, CMMI-SVC, ITSQC eSCM-CL and eSCM-SP and other sources like USMBOK and etc etc. This approach forces organizations to take the focus off ITIL as the thing to implement and back on to enterprise goals and objectives first, with a secondary consideration for leveraging the multiple available frameworks as appropriate to help them achieve their goals.
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