Just as good science is a balance between brilliant theory and focused laboratory work, a good IT Infrastructure Library implementation requires a balance between theoretical training and hands-on IT experience. This seems like a simple and obvious concept, yet examples abound of large companies, filled with bright people, falling off the bridge as they attempt to walk the narrow path of ITIL implementation. To illustrate some of the pitfalls, we have a valuable ITIL lesson from the trenches to share.

Our story involves an international telecom company with more than 6,500 employees and annual revenue of $4 billion. The organization was built very quickly via a grass roots effort of doing whatever it took to grow the company, provide new services to its customers and expand quickly into new technologies. The company also made a number of acquisitions while allowing existing IT groups to remain intact without much consolidation. As a result, the company's infrastructure was very large, complex and diverse. There was little centralized control, communications between technology silos was poor, and redundancies abound.

About two years ago, the company decided to embrace ITIL in a significant way. The company had dabbled in ITIL on several previous occasions, but the frantic pace of growth had eventually steamrolled those efforts. This time, the company created a 12-person ITIL team, mostly new hires with ITIL certification and line of business analysts, directly reporting into executive management. A conscious decision was made to separate the team, both managerially and operationally, from the IT organization. The company brought in professional ITIL trainers for the effort to ensure that each team member was certified. The ITIL training team was retained after the initial efforts to help "jump start" the effort and provide guidance.

After 12 months, the ITIL team and the ITIL training consultants introduced their plan to the company. Their plan was quite comprehensive as they followed all of the ITIL guidelines and carefully attempted to customize the plan for the company's ideal operations. In short, it was exactly what a theoretical ITIL implementation should look like. As the plan trickled down to the IT trenches, it quickly became evident that the plan illustrated the ideal model for telecom workflow but was completely incompatible with the real-world workings of this IT organization with its complex, patchwork infrastructure and non-standard structure.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.