How Small and Midsize Businesses Can Maximize ITIL Advantages

The founding of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was a landmark event for the IT industry. Based on the knowledge of thousands of CIOs, ITIL provided, for the first time, a cohesive set of IT best practices drawn from worldwide resources in both the public and private sectors. This allowed all organizations, regardless of their size, to benefit from the implementation of IT best practices.

With its detailed description of a number of the most important IT processes and its checklists, tasks and procedures, ITIL was intended to allow any organization to implement it to best fit the company's IT processing needs. Moreover, by enabling small and midsize businesses to utilize the comprehensive information resource to develop and manage their IT on par with larger players, ITIL would essentially level the global IT playing field.

But something happened on the way to industry parity: ITIL was tagged by many businesses as too comprehensive and complex, leading to a reality in which only large players were able to consider dedicating the resources needed to learn, absorb and then implement the fundamentals of ITIL.

So, while ITIL succeeded in becoming the IT industry's de facto standard for best practices, the "rich" continued to get richer. And the question evolved slightly, but importantly: How can SMBs implement and manage ITIL-based infrastructures without monopolizing the time and resources of their entire IT teams? Or, put differently, how could the industry take this powerful set of processes—originally designed to standardize IT best practices—and make it less complicated so that it would be practical for organizations of all sizes?

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