Cheat Sheet: ITIL
Where most certifications focus on technology, ITIL is all about business. Steve Cassidy explores what it is – and what it isn’t
We explore the business-focused certification.
“ITIL is a very long way from the idealised cloudpowered fantasy where everything is predictable and instant”
ITIL? Don’t tell me – another meaningless acronym?
Well, it has a meaning: it stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. Admittedly, knowing that might not make things any clearer. It’s really just a set of principles that helps IT people align their work with the demands of the business.
How does it do that? Surely every business is different?
The ITIL approach is philosophical rather than specific. It’s also very broad, spanning five major modules, authored and owned by British bureaucrats. It’s good that someone has put all of this effort into documenting and regimenting the slippery idea of IT as a perpetual, unbroken service. However, ITIL isn’t something that can be easily summed up in a sentence, and some areas of the industry – notably recruiters – have a tendency to exalt it without fully understanding what it is.
Are you saying that ITIL is a worthless certification?
Not at all. In a field where careers generally advance through moving around, rather than being promoted, ITIL is just about the only qualification that – in theory – retains its relevance across diverse business sectors, pay grades and so forth. However, as a result, ITIL certification can almost always be used as an argument for picking one candidate over another, regardless of the specifics of the role.
How can ITIL possibly apply to such a wide range of situations?
As I’ve mentioned, ITIL’s five volumes aren’t day-to-day operations manuals. They talk about methods rather than implementations, and it’s down to your own staff to turn those into actual decisions and projects. If you want to manage those people effectively then there’s probably work for you to do too, in understanding what they’re talking about for your business and in IT implementation terms.
Five volumes of theory for an IT project? That sounds excessive.
You may not need to fully immerse yourself in the principles of ITIL. If your budget for the whole lifecycle of an asset – from design through purchase, construction, operating costs and disposal or replacement – is under £5 million then you’ll probably end up with similar results whether you follow the book or not. But ITIL can almost always help you plan better, avoid pitfalls and design systems that do the right job from the start. It can also help you understand and explain why – for example – aiming for 100% uptime might be an expensive and unnecessary distraction, or why the overall timescale of your project isn’t (and perhaps shouldn’t be) set in stone from day one.
Surely our projects should be aiming high, not making excuses and compromises?
The thing about ITIL is that it’s founded in objectivity. Not the objectivity of the red-hot on-demand pop-up entrepreneur, but the objectivity of real-world effectiveness and long-term fit. It’s a very long way from the idealised cloud-powered fantasy of the future where everything is predictable and instant. It raises questions that reality will often force you to answer anyway, sooner or later.
So should I prioritise ITIL as a professional qualification?
It might be smart: there are all sorts of leading-edge topics you can get certified in, but ITIL provides a dose of reality that helps you put it all into the context of a real business, where supportive managers and realistic project goals can’t be taken for granted. Technical qualifications might help you get the gig in the first place, but the ITIL mindset will serve you well when it comes to actually delivering the goods.
ITIL sounds like the antithesis of agility. Is that a problem?
If you’re talking about working in a fast-moving, reactive environment like the stock market, the ITIL approach can help you plan ahead. But ITIL starts with a conception of a specific service with a known lifecycle; if your business is so volatile that you genuinely can’t predict the lifecycle of your business units then ITIL can only be of limited help – which should perhaps be a red flag.