John Willis asks whether ITIL still matters in the world of Amazon and Google (what I once referred as "[best in class infrastructure providers|http://www.ifountain.com/blog/Arebestinclassinfrastructureprovidersaviablealternativeforcompanies]"). ITIL skepticism is not new; there has been skeptics since the beginning for variety of reasons; some more valid than others. John is raising the issue from a different perspective. He stipulates that ITIL may not be required if majority of the services are provided by external giant service providers like a utility.

From my perspective, the availability of these services from the likes of Google/Amazon make ITIL and ITSM more relevant and necessary in the enterprise, not less. One of the core ideas of ITIL/ITSM is to have a service perspective and managing the dependencies of the services to the infrastructure used to provide these services. The fact that some of the infrastructure components are provided by external providers who supposedly have great availability numbers does not change the fact that enterprises still have to manage the "service".

As I stated in a previous post the question we should be asking is how we can you end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service relies on combination of multiple internal and external service providers.

ITIL/ITSM offers some guidelines on how to cope this complex world. How should the enterprises troubleshoot problems? What should the service desk processes be like? Business/end users have never cared much about the availability of the servers, they care about the service. The services as perceived by the users are rarely provided in their entirety by a single provider. Most of the mission critical services have multiple components provided by different internal and external entities. What should be the operational processes to manage these services?

A typical scenario that exposes the cleavage between different silos in the enterprise is the "blame the network syndrome" where users complain about the performance of an application, and every group (silo) blames another and the network group gets stuck with proving their innocence. How do you "convince" all parties involved -the connectivity providers (LAN/WAN/Security, etc), application providers, platform (server) providers (internal or external) - to cooperate in order to resolve problems quickly? This has always been difficult, and rise of giant service providers don't alleviate the pain. Processes are still needed, guidelines are still needed, learning from the experiences of other still needed.

This is not to deny the significance of the change in the field . No doubt the game is changing as stated by John, but the implications of these changes are not so apparent. The rise of service providers that promise 99.99% availability may mean enterprises will more and more use the services provided by these external providers, instead of keeping them internal. If that's the case, enterprises will need to learn how to manage services that are not under their direct control. It may also mean that if they do keep them internal for whatever reason, management of these services can no longer be an afterthought as it often has been.

The game is changing and we must figure out how to adapt. Unfortunately, enterprise (IT management) users are not out on the web sharing their thoughts with each other in mass. As the web 2.0 culture infiltrates the enterprise, who knows may be the enterprise folks come out to play and we can come up with an ITIL that is developed like an open source application, out in the open with participation of hundreds. Who knows, may be OMG will be the catalyzer for wider discussions, once can only hope ...