While Information Technology has become increasingly essential to continuing business operations, IT environments have simultaneously increased in both size and complexity. Individual hardware and software solutions to specific problems have, over time, created heterogeneous environments that require tremendous effort to manage. IT staff are resistant to changes, fearing unforeseen consequences. IT is viewed as a cost center, and there is very limited visibility into the Return on Investment for IT spending. At best, this is a recipe for friction between IT and the Business. At worst it leads to failure – of critical systems, of processes, or of the enterprise itself.

Failures are most often caused by mistakes in planning, provisioning, operations, etc. – in short: human error. In fact, Gartner Research shows that 80% of all mission critical application service downtime is caused by people or process failures. These failures are costly, and often preventable with the benefit of hindsight. Most organizations can learn from their mistakes and avoid making the same mistake twice, but what about all of the new ones? When it comes to mistake avoidance, many companies are at a loss. Improvements are made and expertise is gained as a byproduct of personally experienced pain (downtime, cost overruns, production delays, etc.).

As a solution, many organizations turn to consultants: it is often the only way to meet the need for expertise in a particular area – expertise derived from diverse experience. In this way, an organization can hope to benefit from the sometimes painful lessons learned by others.

On a much broader scale, the limited ability to effectively utilize the knowledge of others has arguably been the greatest historical constraint on the pace of human innovation. Prior to the advent of written language, scientific and technological advances were limited to what could be learned in the course of a single lifetime. Isaac Newton is most famously credited for saying, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” (it is his quote that appears on the British two pound coin), implying that his work was built on the efforts of those before him. Since Newton’s time, the pace of scientific discovery and technological innovation has quickened at an exponential rate; the “innovation curve” has steepened. Newton’s discoveries are now considered the “basics” of mathematics and physics, and have given rise to progressively more advanced applications of these principles (See: Wright, Orville and Wilbur).

Unfortunately, many businesses continue to operate under a paradigm in which they are forced to learn from their own mistakes, effectively limiting themselves to the same “one lifetime” constraints that individuals who seek to innovate freed themselves of long ago. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the domain of Information Technology.

Enter: ITIL.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL (pronounced EYE-till) is a series of books published by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in the UK. Each book documents an aspect of IT Management. The books offer a collection of industry “best practices” collected from a diverse group of IT professionals over the course of several years. ITIL books are descriptive not prescriptive, meaning they focus on processes and organizational structures that have been shown to be effective, rather than offering instructions on how to implement these practices. ITIL is not necessarily meant to be adopted in its entirety, but should rather be treated as one would treat any other reference book: rather than reading

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