The comments and correspondence on ITIL (the "best practices" framework for managing IT infrastructure) have been illuminating. Based on what I've learned since the last posting or two, here are what I hope is a somewhat more sophisticated critique, which I hope helps you decide whether and how to go about dealing with the subject: * ITIL is, I was told emphatically, a framework, not a methodology. The The comments and correspondence on ITIL (the “best practices” framework for managing IT infrastructure) have been illuminating. Based on what I’ve learned since the last posting or two, here are what I hope is a somewhat more sophisticated critique, which I hope helps you decide whether and how to go about dealing with the subject:* ITIL is, I was told emphatically, a framework, not a methodology. The difference, by the way, is somewhat subtle, but important. Methodologies provide specific steps; frameworks provide a way to think about a subject.* ITIL isn’t based on service level agreements with internal customers, although the internal customer concept is, so far as I’ve been able to tell, built into ITIL’s underlying assumptions and SLAs are a significant component in the framework. * ITIL provides a body of knowledge, but not a test for compliance. Which is to say, there isn’t (yet) an objective way to determine whether your ITIL implementation is any good, other than your own success and the opinion of experts. There is an effort under way (I’m told) to harmonize ITIL with CobiT (the framework/methodology for performing IT audits) to remedy this.* ITIL is a process-oriented framework. As such it’s inherently incomplete, since many of the most important factors driving IT success – management of internal relationships, practitioner skills, corporate culture among others – aren’t processes. This doesn’t make ITIL wrong or deficient, merely incomplete.* Just an opinion: ITIL’s treatment of personal technologies as nothing more than another piece of the overall infrastructure is, while academically accurate, a bad choice. The social dynamic of personal technologies in an organization is entirely different from the social dynamic of host computers, servers, and routers. You need to think about them differently. * Nearly everything you read about ITIL focuses on Service Management. This is one of the major reasons for ITIL’s undeserved reputation as an ivory-tower approach, since those who live in the trenches of managing the IT infrastructure spend their time dealing with prosaic matters like job scheduling, tape management and output distribution … in a word, operations, whose connection to Service Management might seem unclear. ITIL doesn’t ignore this stuff – it’s in a less-often-mentioned part of the framework called “ICT Infrastructure Management.” (Information Communication Technologies). If you’re interested in ITIL, you might even consider starting here instead of the more traditional Service Management module.One correspondent asked about ITIL and Sarbanes-Oxley. From what I’ve been told, ITIL is a decent inoculant against a Sarbanes-Oxley audit – since it’s widely recognized as the “best practices” way to manage IT, implementing it helps persuade outsiders you’re serious about having the right IT processes in place to protect investors.– Bob ——– Technology Industry