Not blasting ITIL, I like it, but.. "why most IPM sales pitches talk about the great return on investment" - because it is a sales pitch, I would think? Performance - what performance? ROI, system performance, infrastructure performance, getting new business, development performance, stock, and so on - related? How to measure? After 30+ years in this business I think "incident, availability, capacity and service level" has one problem - the word capacity already covers these, and many more, areas. Capacity planning and management has been forgotten a long time - it used to be one of the main focuses in IT (and corporate) strategy covering everything in planning and not just IT technology. Maybe this is part of IT crises today - to run IT you need people, premises, power, locations, support infrastructure, water, coffee, ISPs, software / hardware vendors, short/long term sustainable business plans, cost of contracts, user acceptance, growth control, etc - all part of your capacity. Now - there is no one software, architecture or any other system which alone can manage all that - you need people. ITIL is very good covering the technical aspects but it is no miracle cure, it is just a framework to manage some needs in modern IT.