Dear Bob ... I don't believe you have ever written an article/opinion on ITIL. This process has obviously been around a long time. It popped up at a meeting the other day, and I immediately thought of you. You've shaped the way I help my company through IT operations. You have long championed the idea of not using internal customers or similar methods. It tends create a divide between operations/production and t Dear Bob …I don’t believe you have ever written an article/opinion on ITIL. This process has obviously been around a long time. It popped up at a meeting the other day, and I immediately thought of you.You’ve shaped the way I help my company through IT operations. You have long championed the idea of not using internal customers or similar methods. It tends create a divide between operations/production and the IT department, and in many cases creates a situation where IT bills departments for their time. Counter-productive if you ask me. Instead, I have always encouraged the department to be a part of the company … and part of the process. Think through the employee’s question, and make the company’s client your client too … i.e. if an employee asks “How do I change this Excel cell yellow?” If a help-desk person thinks of that employee as their customer or client, then they tell them, then hang up. I always take the approach of looking deeper. “What are you trying to accomplish with this yellow cell?” Perhaps they want to highlight every project that is over budget … a better solution may be to show them conditional formatting so Excel turns the cell yellow automatically when it is over budget.I don’t know much about ITIL. I was hoping you could share your thoughts. When it was first described to me as a ISO9000-type documentation process, it seems to be a fair idea, but I’ve heard it described as a “the customer is always right” process, sounds to US vs. THEM to me.– Curious about ITIL Dear Curious …I have written about ITIL before. The most complete rendition was here. If you understand that ITIL is a framework and a body of knowledge, not a prescriptive set of processes, you’ll stay on the side of truth and righteousness. If you also recognize that it’s purely a process view of things – which is to say it’s an incomplete account of the factors that make IT work – you can the American way to the list.And if you’re able to be humble enough to recognize that lots of other smart people have looked at a discipline and have useful things to say about it while remaining confident enough to figure you do too … then you’ll be in a position to optimize your own processes and practices without wasting a lot of time either starting from scratch or being paralyzed by trying to make someone else’s self-asserted best practice work in a situation for which it was never designed. And yes, ITIL is firmly rooted in the internal customer/service level management way of thinking, which means you should view it skeptically. Customers and service levels work fine for outsources, because their customers really are customers, and service levels – definitions of what constitutes just-barely-acceptable delivery and how often you have to achieve it – is just the ticket for contractual relationships, but a very bad idea for strategic partners to use.– Bob Technology Industry