It's been a long time coming. IBM had yellow books for data center operations decades ago. The world got much more complex as we moved to laptops, mobile devices, IP infrastructures. And now back to SaaS and other centralized models.
So it is good to see ITIL gather momentum across a wide range of IT disciplines:
Service Level
Management
Security Management
Financial Management
Incident Management
Availability
Management
Problem Management
Capacity Management
Change Management
Continuity
Management
Release Management
Service Desk
Configuration
Management
These standards homogenize expectations around processes and service levels and form a fundamental building block for utility computing. Now if outsourcing vendors - including IBM - would just resist temptation to customize rather than deliver the scale from their plants and grids, the real payback from ITIL will really come through.
