In the late 1980s, the UK's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency developed a set guidelines to guide the management of IT in both the private and public sectors. Computing became more important and played a larger role in daily business. As a result, both government agencies and private companies began to create their IT management processes. This created a mess of different methodologies that often caused more problems than solved.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), was thus born. This framework describes a variety of tasks, processes, and checklists that can be used by any organization that has IT assets. It was an essential, if not innovative, step in aligning IT operations across an expanding industry and setting best practices. It provided a solution to a wide range of challenges for organizations all over the world.

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But like other popular trends of the time -- CD-ROMs, large desktop computers, and brick-sized cellular phones -- ITIL now appears to be an artifact of a bygone era when viewed through the lens of today's IT operations/service management (ITOM/ITSM).

This begs the simple question: Is ITIL still relevant in an era of DevOps, hybrid cloud, and other technologies?

ITIL is still outdated despite updates

ITIL has been a key part of the IT industry's view over the past few decades. ITIL prince 2 training courses manchester has helped to create a common workload-first philosophy. It is sequential, plan-oriented and focuses on setting up devices that can handle specific workloads first, then worrying about maintenance later.

This premise states that technology work can be divided, just like in a factory. Aligning infrastructure around key workloads will reduce costs and increase efficiency. This means that the current emphasis on IT infrastructure management is not aligned with the goal of modern enterprises to better manage services and provide a better customer experience.

IT's shift to DevOps has changed the rules of how organizations plan and manage their work in the digital age. This presents a challenge for the legacy ITIL framework. Organisations are adopting agile development instead of traditional ITIL-derived waterfall methods. This replaces a test-at the-end approach with more continuous integration frameworks.

ITIL's sequential nature is directly contradicted by the continuous and dynamic relationship between operations and development teams. ITIL's most recent updates (26 core processes and 4 core functions) still encourage data silos and IT's shift to more service-centric operations.

Three areas in which ITIL is lacking

Software-defined, service-oriented enterprise IT today is software-defined. It can be private, public or hybrid and it can also be multi-cloud. It is increasingly automated, virtualized, and containerized. It is fundamentally and significantly different than five years ago. Why should organizations trust management methods that were developed long before the industry's maturity and evolution?

Despite all the positive things ITIL has done for the industry, ITIL is not able to meet modern IT team demands in three key areas.

1. A shift to a service orientation. IT's increasing focus on customer experience requires it to devote more resources and time to application maintenance and development. ITIL-based IT operations are focused on component monitoring. DevOps should focus more on service-level management.

1. DevOps transition and continuous deployments. Customers demand what they want now. Waterfall's sequential software development lifecycles (Waterfall), which focus on testing and design steps, don't allow for the speed, agility or adaptability needed to bring products and services to market. This creates a huge competitive disadvantage for traditional dev shops.
2. The rise in enterprise complexity. IT has seen a radical transformation over the past few years. Microservices, containerization and cloud-native workloads are all more complex than the ITIL methods that were originally designed to handle them.

What's the new model?

ITIL was a great tool for preventing organizational change-related failures in its heyday. The most important performance indicator for IT teams in supporting roles was the ability to control change. This protected critical IT infrastructure from misconfigurations and other errors that could lead to system failure.

IT today is more than a support role. IT is an active contributor to the success of organizations. It is the driving force behind modern enterprises. ITOps today must be flexible, agile, and efficient enough to handle not only planned workloads but also modern IT environments that support continuous change, automated deployments, interchangeable components, and continuous improvement.

Forward-thinking IT companies have discovered that providing service and line-of business owners with a management system that is focused on maintaining websites, apps and portals and other customer touchpoints first is key to gaining a competitive edge.

IT is vastly different than it was in the past few decades. Cloud-based technologies have created a host of new challenges in managing and securing endpoints, devices, services, and other aspects that ITIL framework developers could not have imagined. IT leaders need to rethink their support models and adopt modern, service-centric operations. ITIL is now a thing of the past.