ITIL was "crowd sourcing" is it still?

ITIL V1 was a collaboration of industry experts leveraging their best practices and current organisation to produce a library of "best practices".

Interestingly ITIL was not a dive into how these experts came to these decisions, it was merely a definition of what you should look like if you were following best practice.

Did we miss out?

The benefit of learning how a conclusion was reached is that it allows others to build upon this discovery, you don't say e=mc2 and leave it at that, you need the working, the story of how you proved that this was indeed true.

The problem with ITIL is that we not only don't have the story of how these IT experts determined that these best practices were indeed best, what methods they used to get there, the pitfalls and successes that shaped the final result. We also have no description on how to implement it from a standing start.

There are reasons for this lack of the "how" the main one being that every IT organisation is assumed to be sufficiently different that it would have to be too broad to be useful.

Where does this leave us?

I have written before about where ITIL is heading but I think it's worth reiterating, the IT industry does not need another "this is how you would look if you were perfect" book from a library. We need tools, methods, Etc.

There are many of these out there, LEAN, 6Sigma etc. none of them are perfect, but at least they try to get you to the goal.