Is ITIL Dead? No. A Persistent Myth Explained and Busted (2020 Update!)

This article originally published Published on August 17, 2017. Update 1: 1/14/2019. Update 2: 8/4/2020.

ITIL is not dead. In fact, thanks in large part to the February 2019 release of ITIL V4, search interest for ITIL was at its highest in years prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

In this post, I’m going to provide analysis to back this bold statement by looking at trends in ITIL deployment, search interest in ITIL and competitive concepts, where the market stands today, and the history of asking if ITIL is dead.

What is ITIL anyhow?

ITIL? is a set of IT Service Management best practices that “focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business” as we describe in our ITIL Guide Introduction. ITIL stands for “Information Technology Infrastructure Library” – a mouthful - and is published as a series of books which explain processes, tasks, roles, procedures and more that are not specific to any single organization and can be applied near-universally to effectively manage IT services. Most businesses that use ITIL only implement it partially, and in conjunction with other frameworks and processes.

Well, is ITIL dead? I heard ITIL is dead.

No, not even close.

Back in 2017, BMC and Forbes Insight surveyed 261 senior executives worldwide and determined that ITIL was far and away the most popular framework or process supporting ITSM.

This survey found that 47% of sites use ITIL for ITSM, although they typically use additional frameworks or processes as well – survey respondents were to select all that apply.

The next closest frameworks in popularity were COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies), eTOM (Business process Framework), and MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) which all had around 35% rate of usage.

None of the buzzier frameworks like Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen, and DevOps – though they may get more press coverage – approach even half of the rate of deployment of ITIL to support ITSM according to that survey.

Search Trends Supporting ITIL’s Lively State

A good indicator of the rise and fall of the popularity of a given concept is to review Google search trends – using AdWords and Google Trends. In the below chart from Google AdWords, we can see that ITIL lost little, if any, momentum during 2015-2017 compared to the 2 years prior. This data comes from Google AdWords Keyword Planner, looking at worldwide search volume in all languages.

In this chart, we can also see that ITIL had roughly a quarter of a million searches worldwide every month – more than 3X its closest competitor. Moreover, “ITIL” is a far more singular and unambiguous initialism than “MOF”. A search for MOF yields a vast array of topics, starting with a Wikipedia disambiguation page - the Microsoft Operations Framework result is #7 of Google’s top 10 results (and its surely not due to Microsoft.com not having enough inbound links). A search for ITIL, meanwhile, has results and ads that are 100% for and about the ITSM framework, with no ambiguity whatsoever. Meaning that ITIL is likely far more than 3X its closest competitor for true ITSM frameworks.

DevOps is an interesting topic that was (and continues to be) on the rise, but it isn’t really a service management framework, so its a bit of a stretch to compare with ITIL, COBIT, eTOM, or MOF. However, we can look at it anyhow. Keyword Planner shows that “DevOps” as a term rose quickly from 2015 to 201, yet it still didn't have the overall volume of “ITIL”.

The ITIL vs DevOps inflection point: September 2018

Much has changed in the years since this LinkedIn post was originally published. September 2018 was the month when DevOps surpassed ITIL in Global Search Volume, according to Google Trends. In this type of analysis, its usually quite clear to see the December holiday season causing dips. In 2020, we had an unusual new dip in search volume across a variety of phrases. This occurred in March as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we've yet to see a full recovery.

Adwords Keyword Planner no longer allows for date vs date comparison, but nonetheless we will examine the changes over time from this tool as well.

Here we can see quite clearly that COBIT is on a slight rise, DevOps continues to see explosive growth, and ITIL has remained relatively flat over time.

Looking at current global search volume, in the most recent month available (June 2020), DevOps has about 450,000 Monthly Searches while ITIL has about 246,000 Monthly Searches.

Is asking “Is ITIL dead?” dead?

Great question, and a resounding "no". Asking if ITIL is dead and claiming ITIL is dead is most certainly on the very slow rise and I predict it will continue to rise very slowly, as the rate of ITIL deployment also sees a very slow decline into the distant future.

Using Google AdWords Keyword Planner, we can see that the instances of people asking or telling Google that “ITIL is dead” is a very low number that is on the slow rise.

“ITIL is dead”, though, is small potatoes compared to the phrase “DevOps is dead”. Apparently, DevOps is dying at a swifter pace than ITIL.

If you arrived at this post by Googling “Is ITIL Dead?” then congratulations, you are one of the roughly 500 people around the world who asked Google this question every year during the last decade.

The oldest example I can locate of someone on the web claiming ITIL is dead (or asking the question) is from 2005 in which the author answers “No”. Interestingly, this same article points to a BMC-sponsored white paper from that era in which it is noted that:

ITIL has made significant in-roads into the enterprise: In 2003, only 26 percent of organizations were familiar with ITIL. Today, 73 percent are in various stages of implementing the framework. In just two years, a general lack of awareness has leap-frogged into implementation, although only 1 percent have reached the highest level of maturity.

This quote from BMC, along with the recent survey data, does suggest that ITIL could be on the decline from its peak. This hypothesis is confirmed by Google Trends, which shows Peak ITIL occurred around 2007.

By 2006-2007 it began to become popular to opine on the death of ITIL. Yet here we are, a decade in the future, and ITIL remains the most popular ITSM framework due to its flexibility and extensive capabilities.

Asking "Is ITIL Dead" on Google seems to have peaked back in January 2019, just a month before ITIL 4 was released. The release of ITIL 4 perhaps quieted the crowd!

Meanwhile, peak "Is DevOps Dead" seems to have occurred around July 2019 and been in decline since.

While DevOps isn't truly an ITSM framework, there is little reason to believe it is becoming less popular, except perhaps with chance that Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) displaces the phrase.

Conclusion: Things change, slowly, and for good reason

Bloggers and others have been discussing the decline of ITIL since before the trendy “DevOps” was even introduced. The idea that we are in a post-ITIL IT landscape is not backed up by evidence, and recent survey & Google search data indicates the framework has true staying power.

The reality is, there are not that many true competitors for ITIL as a set of universally applicable IT processes. The IT world has accepted ITIL as a great standard, and though the rate of implementation may not be what it once was, and while most companies only utilize the parts of ITIL which are critical for their organizations, ITIL will likely be a dominant force in IT Service Management for many years or decades to come. There is no doubt that new technologies and approaches will eventually displace ITIL’s reign but we’re nowhere near that point just yet. 

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This post is my own and does not represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.