How ITIL Is Like A Restaurant - An Interesting Analogy

Are you hungry for better service and value for your enterprise IT? Well, imagine having dinner at a restaurant run by grocery store managers. The baker brings out the souffl first, then when it's done, brings out the dinner rolls last. What about if a waiter delivered your baked potatoes while your steak was still raw. In both cases, the service staff provided everything you paid for in a meal, but it's definitely not the service you paid for.

IT departments frequently operate like this. They use the old service, operations, and practices for information technology models. Desktops, servers, networks, like grocers, with ingredients. They budget tech, think tech and talk tech. They manage technology ingredients, while business needs information services that deliver business value.

There is a framework called ITIL (The IT Infrastructure Library) that solves this problem; lowering IT costs, and improving service. It's globally accepted as THE blueprint for IT to deliver business value. It redefines IT to deliver information services. Following are the five key service cycles.