Is ITIL outdated and broken?

Is it? Or are the problems associated with ITIL due to poor implementation, poor execution and poor management?

Throughout my entire career, I have worked with a multitude of different companies of varying sizes and maturity, and the majority of them implemented some form of an ITIL model to shape IT operations. 

Some of these models were good, some poor, some worked, some didn't.

A surprising number were flawed in some way or just plain didn't work, they were also massively inefficient in terms of the effort being put in on a day to day basis and the benefits being realised. Who wants to spend 80% of their day writing documentation that is never going to be read by anyone else?

Are the broken models due to a broken framework or is it simply down to poor implementation? Over the years I came to realise it was the latter.

The processes and procedures derived from these models have always played a part in how I did my job, and now how my teams do theirs and although I now "own" some of these processes in my current role they were mostly dictated to us by another team in the business. Deviating from the process defined in the framework was genuinely frowned upon and met with a serious of tuts and sighs. After months going back and forth, mostly due to me having an issue with their approach, we now have an 80-page process document that satisfies all the requirements surrounding one single discipline within ITIL. Whose requirements are they? Not ours, that's for sure.

Do my staff fully understand and follow this process? In part is probably the fairest answer to that. The parts of the process they helped to define they buy into, the parts that were pushed upon them and cause them problems get ignored.

Can we fix it? Not if this sort of a culture persists, no.

Surely common sense dictates that you only implement the elements that are applicable to your organisation? Sadly, it seems, common sense is in short supply nowadays and there are companies that adopt ITIL word for word. Us included, apparently. 

Although ITIL is starting to look outdated, it is not to blame for broken IT organisations, it is the way that it is implemented that is to blame. 

People need to realise that ITIL is just a framework, Like TOGAF, Prince2 and Six Sigma. It is there to be moulded into what you need it to be, it is not a set of rules to be lived by. 

Educate and strive to change this sort of culture and these frameworks may just end up helping more than hindering.