Best Practice in IT Service Management: Experienced Strengths and

Weaknesses of Using ITIL

Stefan Cronholm1 and Linda Persson2
1
University of Bors, Bors, Sweden
2
Tregamma, Gothenburg, Sweden
stefan.cronholm@hb.se
linda.persson@3gamma.com
Abstract: This paper focuses on the management of IT services and especially on best practices in the IT sector.
Successful organizations must continuously improve their business management, including their IT
management, in order to retain competitive advantages, and thus they need to reflect upon and improve their
ways of working. One important aspect of this is usage of best practices. Best practices are toolsets or
frameworks for the management of business and IT alignment, and their purpose is to improve the quality of
IT services through delivering superior results compared to other frameworks, time after time. The most cited,
globally recognized and adopted best practice is Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The
problem we address is that there exist contradictory claims concerning the usefulness of best practices. Due to
these contradictory claims, the purpose of this paper is to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of
ITIL. To fulfill the purpose of this paper, we have conducted a qualitative study where we have collected
empirical experiences from use of ITIL. We have interviewed 15 IT managers and IT consultants about their
experiences of using ITIL. We can conclude that previous findings are fragmented and thus we have presented
a coherent and structured collection of empirical experiences categorized as strengths and weaknesses. The
identified strengths are: high reliability, improved cost efficiency, a tool for communication and support for
structured work. The identified weaknesses are: lack of concretion, adaptation difficulties, being too
comprehensive and having high costs. These strengths and weaknesses have to be managed in accordance
with the situation at hand. We believe that our findings can contribute in two ways: 1) they consist of a
coherent and structured overview informing about both strengths and weaknesses, and 2) the weaknesses can
be used as requirements for a redesign of ITIL. Our study has in a cumulative way advanced the state-of-theart by adding new knowledge based on empirical data.
Keywords: IT Management, IT Service Management, Best Practice, ITIL.

1. Introduction
Management is often seen as an attempt to govern, control and coordinate an organization or a group of
people with the purpose of accomplishing a goal (e.g. Ayat et al., 2009). This paper focuses on the
management of IT services and especially on best practices in the IT sector. ^ et al. (2008) claim that
successful organizations have to manage the IT function in the same way that they manage their other
strategic functions and processes. This in particular means to understand, manage and systematically measure
the quality of IT performance. Management of IT services is often related to the concept of IT Service
Management (ITSM), which is a key issue in business and IT alignment, since organizations are highly
dependent on their IT services. Nowadays, ITSM is an implemented strategy in most organizations and the
usage of best practices is common (Marrone et al., 2010). The purpose of best practices is to improve the
quality of IT services by delivering superior results compared to other frameworks. A quote from Szulanski
(1996, p. 28) reads, It [best practice] connotes the firm's replication of an internal practice that is performed
in a superior way in some part of the organization and is deemed superior to internal alternate practices and
known alternatives outside the company.
The problem we address is that there exist contradictory claims in the literature concerning best practices.
Examples of positive claims are: facilitate the delivery of high quality IT services at a justifiable cost (Galup et
al., 2009), streamline and make work-procedures more efficient (Galup et al., 2009), time saving (Chen et al.,
2012), and provide competitive advantages (Marrone et al., 2010). Examples of negative claims are: best
practices cause high expectations that are seldom fulfilled (Bardach, 2011), best practices are too general and
thus hard to transfer to new unique contexts (Szulanski, 1996), best practices take a solution to a problem out
of a specific context and apply it across the entire spectrum which essentially can invalidate the whole purpose

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(Neward, 2010), and the transferring of best practices is slow, costly, and prone to failure across all industries
and public services (Elwyn et al., 2007).
Due to these contradictory claims, the purpose of this paper is to learn more about empirical experiences
concerning best practices in terms of strengths and weaknesses, and especially concerning Information
Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which is the most internationally recognized best practice (Mesquida
et al., 2012). According to Marrone (2010), it is important to analyze what effects best practices have on the
business. That is, it is not enough to analyze the technical aspects, but necessary also to examine if they
support greater alignment between the IT management and the business management. Research on best
practices such as ITIL in the ITSM field is scarce. McNaughton et al. (2010) claim that the benefits of
implementing and using ITIL processes have been predicted or assumed with very little research and minimal
evidence. Cervone (2008) reports that academic research on ITIL is in its early stages, despite its numerous
appearances in the popular press and practitioners magazines. Thus, we have conducted a qualitative study
where we have collected empirical experiences from the use of ITIL. Section 2 includes related work. In section
3, we briefly discuss the main concepts of ITSM, best practice and ITIL. Section 4 contains the research method
and in section 5 we present the findings. Finally, in section 6, we draw conclusions.

2. Related work
In our literature research, we have not found any publication that presents a structured overview of strengths
and weaknesses based on empirical experiences. However, we have found fragmented findings and other
relevant information. Galup et al. (2009) have conducted a study that presents an overview of ITSM. Since this
publication presents an overview, findings concerning the strengths and weaknesses of best practices are
expressed in more general terms. Examples are: The ITSM Industry as a whole can apply ITSM best practices
to optimize IT services (Gallup et al., 2009, p 127); and The focus is to provide specific processes, metrics,
and guidance to enable and manage the assessment, planning, and implementation of IT service processes to
optimize tactical and strategic IT asset use (Gallup et al., 2009, p 127). All these quotes consist of valuable
insights but they are not based on experiences from real use of best practices. The key benefits that an
organization expects from best practices are: an alignment of IT services with current and probable future
business needs, improved quality of IT services, and a reduction in the long term costs of service provision
(McNaughton et al., 2010). According to Barafort el al. (2002) and Hochstein et al. (2005) these benefits have
not been demonstrated through empirical research; they are rather predicted or assumed.
Winniford et al. (2009) present a list of barriers to adopting best practices, which is relevant to this study since
they can be seen as weaknesses. The highest ranked barriers are: lack of information; my IT is good enough
already; no push for service management; and it costs too much. Marrone et al. (2010) report from a survey
that focused on the operational benefits and strategic positioning of IT organizations. The results indicate that
as the adoption of ITIL increased, the number of realized operational benefits increased, as well as the levels of
maturity of the Business-IT alignment. In turn, this indicates that the further the implementation of ITIL, the
greater the operational and strategic benefits to the organization. Capps (2009) also criticizes best practices
and argues that there is a need for services that are good enough and fit for purpose. This claim is based
on that best practices are too costly to implement and that there is a risk for over-engineering. Johnston et al.
(2002), criticize current best practices for being over-structured and state: A more structured approach driven
by models and frameworks is leading managers to become swamped with measures and information such that
they spend their time feeding measuring systems rather than focusing on management and action (p. 261). In
order to advance knowledge, we will build further on these findings and analyze empirical experiences in more
detail. The need of empirical evidence is especially important in cumulative approaches, since to build further
on something that is not properly empirically grounded means to take high risks (Cleven et al., 2009).

3. Briefly about ITSM, best practice and ITIL

ITSM is a subset of service science that focuses on service delivery and service support (Galup et al., 2009).
ITSM is a key issue in business and IT alignment, including business-oriented service support, in which IT
services are planned and managed according to their contributions to required business processes
(McNaughton et al., 2010). One common definition of ITSM reads: The implementation and management of
quality IT services that meet the needs of the business (Axelos, 2011). A common definition of best practice is
A method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means
(Heron, 2012). The purposes of a best practice are (Zairi, 1998): eliminating deficiencies from the process,
meeting customer requirements, pointing out areas for improvement, relating to leverage points, giving

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feedback for driving improvement efforts, assessing and evaluating performance accurately, and being
designed, developed and maintained by people who own the process concerned. A best practice can be
viewed as general and standardized frameworks which can be used to maintain or measure quality that often
is based on self-assessment or benchmarking (Bogan & English, 1994). According to Zairi (1998), the most
common arguments for using a best practice are: you cannot manage what you cannot measure, to determine
what to pay attention to and improve, to give an indication of costing to poor quality, and to show a standard
for establishing comparisons. ITIL is an example of best practice and is built around a process-based
perspective of controlling and managing IT operations, including continuous improvement and metrics (Gallup
et al., 2009). Moreover, ITIL proposes a set of uniform processes to deliver IT services. ITIL is a de facto
industry standard and the main purpose is to create customer value (e.g. Gbel et al., 2014). The ITIL
framework is based on five stages of the service lifecycle: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition,
Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement (Cannon et al., 2011). Each stage consists of several
processes for managing customer value (Winniford et al., 2009)

4. Research method
As mentioned in section 1, the purpose of this study is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of best
practices in the field of ITSM. A best practice is an umbrella term including frameworks, methodologies and
models. That is, we had to select a representative framework as our analysis unit. We have selected ITIL as an
example of a best practice. The reasons are: 1) ITIL is the most cited and globally recognized, and thus has had
a large impact on the ITSM field (McNaughton, 2010); and 2) it is the most widely adopted best practice in the
field of ITSM (e.g. Ayat et al., 2009; Cannon et al., 2011) and consequently there should be good conditions to
collect a rich set of experiences.
In order to collect empirical experiences, we have used a questionnaire. The questionnaire was sent to 15
ITSM managers and consultants with several years experience of using ITIL. We received 11 questionnaires in
return. The reason for sending the questionnaire to both managers and consultants was that we wanted to
collect empirical data from both a strategic and an operative perspective. We have used a semi-structured
questionnaire that supported structure and at the same time allowed flexibility (Silverman, 2013). The
questions asked were open-ended and answers were expressed in a free format. The reason for using a free
format was that we preferred to gather the experiences concerning strengths and weaknesses on as broad a
spectrum as possible (Cronholm and Melin, 2006). Thus, the first question was simply formulated as: What
strengths and weaknesses are experienced from using ITIL? The following questions can be seen as subquestions: How adaptive is ITIL according to your experience?, What level of pre-knowledge do you think is
required? and What is your experience in implementing and maintaining an ITIL when it comes to costs?
The answers were categorized into strengths and weaknesses according to the grounded theory method
(Corbin and Strauss, 2014). That is, we have conducted open, axial and selective coding in order to find
patterns and main categories.

5. Empirical experiences open and axial coding

In section 5.1, we present experiences viewed as strengths and in section 5.2 we present experiences viewed
as weaknesses. Each table below corresponds to a main category and consists of two columns. The first
column consists of sub-categories and the second column consists of empirical quotes. The purpose of the
quotes is to support transparency and traceability of the induced categories.

1.1 Strengths
The identified strengths are: high reliability, improved cost efficiency, a tool for communication and support
for structured work. It is not surprising that reliability has been identified as one of the strengths, since one of
the foremost reasons for adopting best practices is to reduce risks and unwanted effects (Cannon et al., 2011).
That is, to use a best practice is a safe choice, since it is based on positive experiences from real use and it is
proven to work (see table 1). One of the major considerations for a business is to reduce the costs of IT
services (see table 2). We have identified several experiences that ITIL supports cost efficiency, including:
budget control, cost transparency and elimination of unnecessary work in processes and procedures. Cost
efficiency is often viewed from a control perspective. According to Cannon et al. (2011), cost efficiency should
also be seen from the perspective of adding value to an organization. For example, unplanned labor and costs
for both the business and IT can be reduced through optimized handling of service interruptions and

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identification of their root causes (Steinberg et al., 2011). According to Bozkurt (2007), it is cost efficient for a
customer to let service providers develop and maintain IT services, since they have better management skills
and higher productivity per employee.
A tool for communication is probably one of the most important identified strengths (see table 3). Successful
business and IT alignment is about communication quality. It is not uncommon for there to exist
misunderstandings or communication breakdowns in IT management (e.g. Goldkuhl et al., 1998). A common
and shared language will reduce misunderstandings caused by different understandings of procedures or
different use of terminology (e.g. Cronholm and Goldkuhl, 2005). We have found empirical evidence that ITIL
supports communication by offering a common language. According to Galup et al. (2009), ITIL is both a
glossary to ensure a uniform vocabulary and a set of conceptual processes. We agree with Cannon et al.
(2011), who claim that it is of great significance to facilitate communication between the customer and the
service provider, so that there is a consistent understanding of what is required and how it will be delivered.
The experiences related to support for structured work emanates from a positive view of a process
management perspective (see table 4). Becker et al. (2013) claim that process management is a necessity for
every organization and that it is important that companies are focusing on challenges of business and IT
alignment, instead of the complexity of software solutions. Cannon et al. (2011) mean that this strength has to
do with ITILs universal appeal that includes a set of processes and procedures that are efficient, reliable and
adaptable to organizations of all sizes. As mentioned in section 3, ITIL includes a number processes that
support standardized ways of working and thus secure the quality of what is delivered.
Table 1: High reliability
Attributes

Empirical quotes

Recognized

Internationally recognized
The model is well-known, which made it easy to implement and manage

Based
on
experiences
from real life

based on experiences from many real life scenarios hopefully means that it is actually a best
practice, i.e. a successful way of doing things

Low degree of
failure

Usually it works

Proven

It is based on active use in many organizations to prove what is effective or not

Developed by expert practitioners from the industry over a long period of time
good results are achieved
Proven successful way of doing things

Table 2: Improved cost efficiency

Attributes

Empirical quotes

Control

You are in control of your IT organization and with control comes the ability to have stable, cost
efficient environments and well defined ownership, including accountability

Table 3: Tool for communication

Attributes

Empirical quotes

Support for a
common
language

The key strength is that it provides a common language for all involved parties
Efficient processes are much about communication between different units and ITIL makes this more
easy
Provides a common terminology and understanding of basic concepts
The greatest strength is that it is a widespread framework which means that different organizations
can interact quite easily and speak the same language

Point
reference

of

a point of reference that most agree to

a benchmark

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Table 4: Support for structured work

Attributes

Empirical quotes

Structured
management

a very structured way to manage an IT organization

Process
perspective

one strength is the process perspective

Shows the whole architecture between the processes

a good framework to use as inspiration for how to structure your own processes
processes actually make things easier and more streamlined which in turn allows you to
spend more time to focus on other important issues

1.2 Weaknesses
The identified weaknesses are: lack of concretion, adaptation difficulties, too comprehensive and high costs. In
respect to concretion, the authors of ITIL clearly point out that ITIL provides guidance to service providers:
ITIL is not a standard that has to be followed; it is guidance that should be read and understood (Cannon et
al., 2011, p. 3). Despite this statement, there are several service providers that have experienced ITIL as too
abstract and want something more concrete that fits the situation at hand (see table 5). As mentioned in
section 3, best practices such as ITIL are per se a generalization of previously conducted successful actions.
That is, a concretion of ITIL would make it less useful as a best practice. According to Van Bon (2008), best
practices such as ITIL and CMMI constitute abstract simplified representations of reality. It seems as there is a
conflict between having access to all the advantages a best practice offers and considering each organizations
uniqueness. According to Bardach (2011), a key strategic talent required when applying best practice to
organizations is the ability to balance the unique qualities of an organization. Another related dilemma in this
respect is if every organization performs business in the same standardized way the competitive edge will be
lost. According to Porter (1996), the greater the usage of best practices, the more similar companies becomes.
Thus, in order to stay in the market, a company has to focus on continual improvement in terms of operational
effectiveness and strategic positioning (ibid.).
Another identified weakness is adaptation. Every organization that adopts ITIL has to adapt it to its own
specific environment. Taylor & Macfarlane (2006) claim that this is especially valid for small and medium sized
enterprises (SMEs) who often lack ITIL specialists. According to the collected experiences the service providers
fully realize and accept that ITIL has to be adapted. The weakness experienced is that ITIL provides no, or only
a little, guidance for how the adaptation process should be conducted (see table 6). ITIL is also viewed as too
comprehensive (see table 7). ITIL consists of five books which in total constitute almost 2,000 pages. That is,
service providers experience this extensive framework as having high learning thresholds and that the learning
is too time-consuming. Van Bon (2002) adds that ITIL is too complex. Of course, this huge amount can be a
learning obstacle for service provides, especially for SMEs, which do not have enough time or resources to
spend. Van Bon et al. (2002) add that insufficient investment in appropriate training and support will lead to
unimproved businesses. That is, to implement and maintain IT-processes (IT-services) according to ITIL might
be too costly (see table 8). According to the experiences, the high cost means that especially smaller
businesses will find it expensive to use ITIL. Cepeda et al. (2008) explain this by stating that small businesses
need to realize payoff quickly and cannot explicitly dedicate staff to work solely with process improvement
implementation. Another cost-related weakness is that ITIL lacks support for how to measure costs. Thus, it is
hard to market and justify ITIL implementations in order to convince customers of cost-savings.
Table 5: Lack of concretion
Attributes
Too abstract

Empirical quotes
In general best practice is on such a high level that they cannot be used as is
Basically the biggest drawback of ITIL is that it is academic

Too generic

Too generic to its nature. The IT organizations want off the shelf, pragmatic and
tested solutions with real life examples
Can become the answer to everything more than a guiding framework

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Stefan Cronholm and Linda Persson

Table 6: Adaptation difficulties

Attributes

Empirical quotes

No off-the-shelf
product

Have to be adapted and tailored to the organization

Lack of guidance
for adaptation

The challenges are to find the right level of implementation corresponding to each
organizations overall business need with its IT organization.

Do not contain any ready to use work-products such as templates, role descriptions etc.

It is an issue that tool vendors sell their products as ITIL compliant which makes
stakeholders think that there is something like quick fixes and standard approaches that are
great for their organization
Do not contain enough detailed guidance on Process Management as a discipline

Table 7: Too comprehensive

Attributes

Empirical quotes

Low degree of
support for fast
business changes

Not so good when addressing agile development

Too
extensive
framework

It is a very extensive framework and you need to scope your implementation and really think
about what is important for you. This can be a challenge sometimes if you are not experienced
in process development

High
learning
thresholds

There is a lot of documented knowledge to dig into

Too
timeconsuming

It requires a lot of overhead to make it work

Can be hard to be responsive to fast changing business needs

Takes significant effort to implement and manage

Seen as an administrative overhead that slows the process down

Table 8: High costs

Attributes

Empirical quotes

Not suitable for

small
implementations

It is relatively high, so the operation needs to be relatively big to harvest the

benefits.

Expensive

a full blown ITIL implementation is too costly

Hard to measure
costs

IT in general, is quite poor at measuring the cost of doing things

very hard to point to possible cost savings

6. Conclusions
Best practices are tools to manage, improve and maintain IT quality and the purpose of this paper is to learn
about the strengths and weaknesses of best practice, exemplified by ITIL, in the field of ITSM. We can conclude
that previous findings are fragmented and thus we have presented a structured collection consisting of
empirical experiences categorized as strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are: high reliability, improved
cost efficiency, a tool for communication and support for structured work. The weaknesses are: lack of
concretion, adaptation difficulties, too comprehensive and high costs. We can conclude that the strengths and
the weaknesses consist of contradictory views on ITIL as a best practice. No doubt, the strengths are oriented
towards attributes such as rigor and powerfulness, while the weaknesses are oriented towards lack of agility
and easy-to-use. From the perspective simplicity and easy-to-use, it seems as current best practices have
pushed organizations too far towards control and measures. This means that organizations spend too much
time on developing control mechanisms instead of focusing on management and business improvement. From
the perspective of rigor and powerfulness, it seems as best practices should provide more guidelines and be
more concrete. It is a well-known dilemma that it can be hard to retain simplicity when rigor and
powerfulness is in favor. We are not saying that structure and order should be abandoned. Rather, we claim
that best practices should leave room for a flexibility that address the situation at hand and be guided by
concepts such as good enough. The claim is based on a fundamental change in customer preferences. One
example of changed customer preferences is that many customers nowadays want their services or products

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Stefan Cronholm and Linda Persson

quick and simple rather than slow and polished.

We believe that we can learn from our findings in two ways: 1) they represent a structured overview and they
inform about strengths and weaknesses experienced in real use of ITIL, and 2) the weaknesses can be used as
requirements for a redesign of ITIL. Our study has in a cumulative way advanced the state-of-the-art by adding
new knowledge based on empirical experiences. As further research, we suggest: 1) a more extensive survey
that supports a wider generalization and 2) a study that investigates if and how it is possible to integrate the
concept of best practice with the concepts of agile methods and good enough.

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