Dear Bob ...About a year ago I launched a serious attempt to institute ITIL throughout the IT organization I lead (to give you a sense of scale, we have about 250 associates). The short version: We've had a very hard time making it stick. Employees give it lip service, but that's about it, and our front-line managers haven't been much better.When I'm able to get anyone to talk about the situation candidly, I get Dear Bob …About a year ago I launched a serious attempt to institute ITIL throughout the IT organization I lead (to give you a sense of scale, we have about 250 associates). The short version: We’ve had a very hard time making it stick. Employees give it lip service, but that’s about it, and our front-line managers haven’t been much better.When I’m able to get anyone to talk about the situation candidly, I get some variation on, “We don’t need ITIL to tell us how to build a server.” And to be fair, they don’t – like most IT organizations, ours is made up of a lot of highly skilled individuals who know how to do their work. What that means is that on top of everything else I’m having trouble articulating the benefits. Got any magic bullets?– Proponent of ITILigent designDear Proponent … No magic here. Besides, I’m ambivalent about ITIL for a couple of reasons – skepticism about the concepts of internal customers and service level agreements in particular, which are core premises for ITIL so far as I can tell.But that doesn’t help you. What might is to explain a change in how we’re handling process consulting at my consulting company, IT Catalysts. We used to approach it in the standard fashion – by documenting the current state, designing the future state, plotting a migration path, and chartering one or more projects to follow it.The results were sometimes successful, but always like trying to play pool with a rope. What we finally figured out is that the last thing most organizations need is improved process design. Literally. What they need first are two linked changes. The first is for managers to change their perspective – from managing the work to managing the process that manages the work. The second is a change in culture on the part of all employees, so they think in terms of solving every problem once – that is, figuring out how to do each job the best way possible, then doing it that way every time. Which is to say, instituting a “culture of process” throughout the organization.If your managers think of their responsibility as managing processes and organize their time and effort accordingly, and employees think of their responsibility in terms of “this is how we do things around here,” you’ve won the battle – they’ll figure out the rest, with our without ITIL to guide them.– Bob Technology Industry