ITIL v®3 has been with us now for almost 18 months. 3 times in the last 3 weeks journalists have asked me what level of v3 adoption I am seeing. I thought that I would share some of my findings based on discussions with customers I've visited around the world.  

The adoption of ITIL v3 globally is increasing, not necessarily in the adoption of all the processes at once, rather in the growth of selected processes as organizations travel their IT Service Management journey. In essence, organizations that have invested in v2 are leveraging the enhanced guidance in v3 to grow their implementations and enhance business value.  

I have seen extensive growth in the following ITIL v3 ITSM processes:

•·  Service Catalogs - We are seeing organizations look to use Service Catalogs to define their IT service offerings in business terms and provide a shopping cart-like metaphor to their customers to manage demand. Many organizations are managing expectations of cost and service levels by incorporating this into the catalog and then reporting against these to their clients.

•·  Automation of Event and Request Management - Using technology for requesting commodity services and the identification and resolution of infrastructure events with the information automatically collected and recorded for later problem determination. This allows for better support of business-related service levels.

•·  Supplier Management - Establishing metrics to manage third party suppliers and reporting service level violations and reporting these to IT management for better management of third party supplier contracts.     

•·  Service Asset and Configuration Management - Especially with the current financial climate, organizations are looking to leverage the assets that they have invested in to maximize return and also appropriately retire assets, a natural extension to organizations' current investments in asset management and the CMDB.

•·  Service Level Management - IT organizations moving from IT-focused to customer-focused metrics.

•·  Financial Management - Especially with the current focus on financial management and the growing use of outsourcers.

Remember ITIL is not a cookbook, it's a framework of good practices. Take what you can use to add value to your own organization.