1. ITIL is an instructional manual for improving IT operations.

Fact: ITIL is an industry approved set of best practices and leaves the ?how to? of implementation up to the practitioner.

2. ITIL and CobiT are pretty much the same things.

Fact: ITIL is best practices for IT process improvement. COBIT provides managers, auditors, and IT users with a set of generally accepted measures, indicators, processes and best practices to assist them in maximizing the benefits derived through the use of information technology and developing appropriate IT governance and control in a company.CobiT are controls to help ensure governance and compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX).

3. Implementing ITIL will automatically save your organization money and labor.

Fact: Implementing ITIL does not guarantee your organization will save money or labor. The type of ITIL project and the way it is assessed and implemented can vary greatly, and may or may not culminate in savings, based on how it is done.

4. Implementing Incident and Problem management at the Helpdesk is the best and easiest way to save money and labor using ITIL and will show the greatest results the fastest.

Fact: There are many ways to achieve greater operational efficiencies using ITIL, and incident and problem management are only two of them. Others, such as asset management, may yield even greater efficiencies in a shorter period of time.

5. Change Management will simplify your incident and problem management procedures.

Fact: Ultimately Change management will impact incident and problem management, but it is effective only when used in conjunction with a Change Advisory Board “CAB” for filtering and managing changes via set procedures. Change Management ensures that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes, in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality, and consequently improve the day-to-day operations of the organization.

6. Configuration management is a method of simply finding and defining all the service elements offered by IT.

Fact: Configuration Management is a process that tracks all of the individual Configuration Items (CI) in a system. Configuration management includes creation of a parts list of every CI, a definition of the relationship of the CIs in the system, tracking status and all requests for changes in the system and verifying and ensuring that the CI parts list is complete and correct.

7. CMDB will automatically automate and organize the utilization of all IT assets.

Fact: Configuration Management Data Base “CMDB” is the data repositories for the identification of all configured items (CI’s), their attributes and their relationships to other CIs and the related IT data that supports the service management processes. A CMDB ideally defines what IT has, who uses it, how CIs interact with and impact other CIs and which services and business processes the CIs support.

8. Discovery of assets can be achieved easily by using an automated discovery tool.

Fact: Automatic discovery can increase IT productivity by eliminating manual inventory and reconciliation, but requires some professional set up.

9. A Service Catalog is just a menu of IT elements offered to end users.

Fact: Service Catalogs classify services within families and then map those service families to customers and service expectations, such as service level agreements. Service Catalogs organize services in a way that is meaningful to end users and is relevant to the way they use the services.

10. It’s relatively simple to develop a business case showing cost and labor savings for ITIL.

Fact: Development of a business case justifying an ITIL project can be complex, especially one that directly isolates efficiencies to be gained, depending on the project and the organization. Business cases that show multiple types of gains (labor and cost savings, more time for IT strategic projects and improved asset lifecycle management) are most likely to succeed.

Also, check out our new White Paper on “Developing the Business Case for ITIL”.

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