As an IT service consultant / contractor, I was intrigued by a question I saw popping up recently, and I wanted to know more about it. Is there such thing as an ITIL bubble? Is this apparent rush towards Service Management, and ITIL more specifically, something that is meant to pass?

I won't deny the fact that there could be a bubble, but I am not fully convinced yet. It could simply be a shift in the Industry; one that drives us towards a new paradigm, instead of back where we started. It seems that the corporate governance drive in the US has awaken this trend around 2002. Following the series of corporate scandals, people have turned to ITIL among other frameworks and methodologies. But ITIL has been around since 1989, so ITIL in itself is not the bubble.

A study in the UK has shown that requiring ITIL as a skill in job descriptions has grown 100% in 2005 from 2004. The UK being one of the most mature markets for this skill, you can argue that it is being commoditized. Therefore, the comparison of the number of people holding the manager's certification compared to the number of available positions merely reflects the saturation of the market, not the presence of a bubble.

If you refer to the bubble effect such as the Internet in 1999, you cannot call this trend a bubble. The Internet bubble was created by speculation and hype about something that was more promising than delivering. Delivering value is what ITIL is all about. ITIL is not a product. And I am not seeing huge buyouts of consulting firms either. What we are seeing, instead, is the rationalization of technology and a definite drive towards quality, efficiency and governance. Companies are using ITIL to get more bang for their buck. And that is not going away any time soon, as long as ITIL will continue to deliver.

The movement is also actively sustained by regulators in a number of countries and industries. That did not happen for the Internet, besides the moratorium on taxation, which actually contributed to the bubble effect at the time.

I am not going to require you to believe the Gartner Group because they got it wrong about the web in 1999 so their analysis should not influence the making of your own judgment about this, but the penetration of ITIL among $1Bil+ companies in the US and EU today is at approximately 35% which, by any standard, is remarkable as an adoption rate over the last 5 years.

But let us be realistic about this too. We all know ITIL is not the answer to all the questions. Other components, such as CoBIT, eTOM, CMMI, PMBOK, PRINCE2, Six Sigma and more are all bringing pieces of the puzzle together.

Let me make a prediction. ITIL V3 is going to be a success for two main reasons: (1) because consultants are dying to put their hands on it and (2) because the lifecycle is an angle that fits more businesses today. ITIL V3 will have a shelf life of at least 3-4 years. From now til then, trends surrounding ITIL will come and go.

In the meantime, there will always be people who come out of school knowing a lot about computers and nothing about business. Those people will continue to fill the ranks of IT departments across the planet. There will therefore be business people frustrated by what the geeks deliver, and there will always be a need for someone to come in and figure out how to make those two world talk. Will it be called ITIL in 20 years? No-one knows.