Can ITIL lite be implemented in a small business?
A recent enquiry and dialogue with a company who contacted me for help has started me thinking about the whole concept of "ITIL Lite". This is a phrase which is becoming more commonly used now to describe an approach to implementing aspects of the ITIL framework in a manner that either suits the company culture or addresses their immediate needs (especially when the organisation is classed as an SME)..
But how lite can you actually go? Is their an absolute minimum that you must adopt before you can truly be considered to be "doing ITIL" or does the whole concept of a "framework" give you the license to really pick and chose the processes that suit you best. Also what are the key processes that really add value and improve the service to your end users and demonstrate better value for money from your IT suppliers?
Now I accept that this topic will be a single persons view and if you put 100 IT Service Management professionals in a room you will probably get 101 different answers, so if any IT Service Management professional's read this and want to contact me to challenge or debate my viewpoints I would gladly welcome it because as DIKW explains, Wisdom comes after Knowledge and you can only truly gather knowledge by harvesting Information off of others.......
In answering this, I believe you can look at if from two dimensions. The Version 2 approach can look at the 11 ITIL processes (remembering that one of these is actually a function) and identify which of them adds the most value for the least investment (that being time, cost or resource). This is fairly straight forward as V2 was not really centered around a lifecycle and the dependences between the processes were more flexible. The Version 3 approach I believe is a little more difficult as the lifecycle starts to dictate both process flow and the mandatory element's, also recognizing that the dependencies between cycle phases and processes are much more embedded.
So answering my questions above:
Thoughts on an ITIL V2 approach
Thoughts on an ITIL V3 approach (the start of the debate)
Thoughts on an ITIL V3 approach (the second part of the debate)
I hope you have found the links above both useful and stimulating. If I can be of any help or if you just want to debate my viewpoint in more detail, please contact me.
