ITIL best practices gain growing interest: survey

Interest in and adoption of the IT service management best practices outlined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library continue to grow, according to a recent survey, which shows the framework second only to in-house practices as the method used most often to manage IT service processes.

While about 60% of 195 IT managers surveyed by network consultancy International Network Services (INS) depend on homegrown practices to track service management, the balance have adopted approaches laid out in ITIL, coupled with their own practices, and technology standards such as FCAPS (which stands for fault, configuration, accounting or asset, performance and security management). Of those using ITIL, 86% say the framework is critical to achieving process management goals.

"Many IT processes are repeatable and adaptable to a number of environments," says Andrew Terranova, principal consultant covering network and systems management at INS.

Among the drivers for adopting best practices are ensuring the delivery of IT services, with 75% listing that as the top priority, and measuring how well they are supported, which ranked second with 67%. Other reasons include implementing a service quality framework and aligning IT management with business objectives.

IT service management incorporates several management disciplines, such as change, service-level or configuration management. The ITIL framework consists of a set of guidelines IT departments could follow to perform incident, change, configuration and problem management, and about a dozen other IT disciplines. ITIL helps network managers set processes and better document IT actions for audits.

Developed in the U.K. more than 10 years ago, ITIL didn't achieve overnight success in the U.S. Now under the watch of the IT Service Management Forum, with branches across the U.S., ITIL is spreading.

The INS survey also showed that more than 80% of companies polled are at least aware of ITIL, with about one-quarter saying they understand the framework at both a conceptual and detail level. And of those companies not using ITIL, just over half plan to adopt it, with about 20% intending to do so in the next six months.