Information technology service management is the practice of managing an IT infrastructure by employing a service-oriented perspective. A best practice framework known as ITIL offers guidelines on how to manage an IT portfolio by viewing it as a collection of services that provide value to customers. ITIL orients its guidance around the lifecycle of a service beginning with conceiving a strategy, followed by designing the service, and subsequently transitioning the service into an operational mode.

Some organizations have great IT Service Continuity plans--e-commerce companies like eBay, hospital IT shops, and the military, for example. Others don't have such great continuity plans, and only prepare plans as a response to recent events e.g. Hurricane Katrina.

In Computerworld Magazine, Paul Ingevaldson recently wrote an article called "Top 10 qualities of a great IT shop." These qualities include the CIO reporting to the CEO, an executive steering committee, and a focus on the software development lifecycle.

A couple of the qualities relate to ITIL, such as having a security team (loosely Security Management), a disaster recovery process (IT Service Continuity Management), SDLC focus (very loosely Service Design), and participating in the long-range planning (Service Strategy).

The list looks OK to me, so I'm wondering: why don't ITIL concepts show up more often in Paul's list? Here are my guesses: