One of the most damaging trends i've seen in a long time in ITSM is the propensity of some users to treat ITIL more like a religion than a set of best practices.

In some sense, it's almost like the creators didn't realize the beast they've unleashed.

I've been in discussions at multiple IT organizations where various processes, tools, changes are being made not because they make sense for the organization, but because of a misguided belief that "ITIL Says we should....."

I've seen shouting matches over trivialities such as the meaning of Service Level Management, Help Desk vs Service Desk, Ticket vs Incident and many more.

Overall, despite some of its shortcomings, I like ITIL and would advocate that IT organizations should use it as a valuable reference point, and at least at a conceptual level some guiding principals.   But to take a fundamentalist approach to ITIL implementation simply makes no sense and is somewhat of a cop-out in terms of thinking about what problems the organization might have, and how they can be solved.

Instead of rigidly implementing what the books say, why not take a more general approach to ITSM and think of some of the core principles that good organizations embody, for example:

• Focus on business services, not the infrastructure
• Managing Change
• Measuring and reporting on success/failure
• Separating out getting a service working from the process of fixing root cause
• Understanding the lifecycle of services

From there, organizations can cherry pick the various parts of ITIL, other standards and things that they are already doing well, even if they don't fit the ITIL approach.