(By Info-Tech Analyst Refael Keren - Printed with permission from Processor magazine)
History teaches us that great empires’ overreaching growth is often responsible for their demise. Powerful armies, unable to defend distant borders, collapse while corporations with too many product lines face bankruptcy. Those who have witnessed the version to version growth of ITIL might wonder whether there is such a thing as too many best practices. Will a continual scope creep of IT process standardization lead to the demise of ITIL?
Keeping best practices fresh for new releases when the current best practice is already optimized can be challenging. So how do you add value to new releases? Well, if you’re ITIL you simply start covering more space. To be fair, ITIL is, by all accounts, more of a reference than a framework; hence the “L” for “Library.” The risk, I fear, is that the ever-growing nature of ITIL will lead to its demise. Specifically, by making the term “ITIL” synonymous with too many IT processes.