What The Pink Elephant Told Me About ITIL

Having spent the last week at perhaps the world's largest Information Technology Services Management (ITSM) conference, my eyes were opened a little wider to some pretty amazing transformations afoot across the IT landscape. I did come home feeling a bit uneasy about the future of my day job as an IT professional. I also came away with both an appreciation for the ITSM consulting and training company Pink Elephant and an equal part confusion about some of the mixed messages I heard at this most excellent of events. Given that much of what was discussed hits squarely at how mobile technology and its use is causing a sea change for IT, I feel compelled to share what I took away from the conference.

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of the event, let me establish both the setting and circumstances that led me to Pink Elephant's 15th annual IT management conference at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. The Bellagio is certainly awe-inspiring if you've never been, and it was a perfect backdrop for the impressive turnout of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) faithful from around the world. Most of those I mixed with in the various seminars were entrenched practitioners of the ITIL methodology, at various stages of implementing this best-practices framework of managing IT services.

Others, like me, were there to kick the ITIL tires and to learn whether there are elements of the ITIL methodology that might be leveraged to improve our own customer-facing support offerings. Regardless of where you came from or why you were there, the Pink Elephant folks made the conference fun, exciting and beneficial for all.

The opening video presented at the conference pushed a lot of my buttons, as it gave a quick run-through of where IT has been, where it is now, and what the future holds as social media and customer-defined applications pervade deeper into all of our personal and professional lives. As the video put it, "we've lost control" of not only our enterprise data as it gets farther flung into so many mobile devices but also, to a certain degree, of the hearts and minds of those we in IT support.

Where once IT dictated what applications were used and how support would be accomplished, now clients are driving what applications they demand. Social media increasingly finds a role in support, as our customers frequently bypass us as they help themselves by dealing with each other or directly with manufacturers that are also seizing the capabilities of social media in what is evolving into a new help model.

Statistics cited during the opening presentation are thought-provoking. According to Pink Elephant, 65 percent of all Fortune 100 companies have customer-facing Twitter accounts; 54 percent have Facebook fan pages; and 50 percent have YouTube channels. Social media doesn't need help from us in IT, and the less visionary among us try to fight the losing game of blocking it. Pink Elephant says that for many IT providers, it's still about control instead of using the new social networking phenomena as development and marketing platforms.

Given the prediction that notebook computers are dying as tablets continue their climb to corporate workforce dominance, the implications of users who rely less on a central IT group that refuses to evolve should stir some feelings of discomfort among us in the IT game, especially as the cloud continues to get mentioned repeatedly as where many businesses are going for IT. To that point, both Pink Elephant and Gartner predict that a number of well-connected companies will soon own absolutely no IT assets--getting them all from the cloud.

But here's where I start to feel conflicted in what I heard during Pink's opening video and during different seminars. I can swallow that IT support organizations need to start seeing themselves as more than just providers of up-time and that IT is morphing into a service. I get the huge impact that mobile devices, apps and social media are having on all facets of the business world, regardless of what "the business" may be. But despite that, I heard two panelists say that in their IT organizations, mobile devices needed to be disallowed and that employees would just have to deal with it because their IT shops weren't ready to handle this change in culture. Red flag, mixed messages. And the large, all-encompassing ITIL framework itself seems to lose some appeal (and requirement) as many parts of IT are outsourced to the cloud.

In one seminar, it was pointed out that applying ITIL doctrine to too many processes at once was a sure recipe for failure, and so "going to ITIL" ends up being a multiyear endeavor even for small organizations. Judging by the enormous turnout at the event, there is no doubt that many IT support organizations of all sizes have benefited from ITIL's best practices. But as a non-ITILer, I'm still not comfortable with the thought of a framework that takes years to get trained on and to implement, when we know that in a few years the very organization we seek to improve may have morphed into a completely different animal from the shaping forces described in the video. Put another way, in a couple of years, how much will be left on-site to improve?

Ah, well, I'm in no way bashing ITIL or Pink Elephant; I'm simply trying to get my head around how you might try to apply a very slow improvement process to an institution that is very rapidly changing. Regardless of my own head-scratching, I do recommend getting to know ITIL as a concept for those not familiar, and Pink Elephant as purveyor of ITIL.