ITIL Whitepaper, well I have come across a plethora of whitepapers that I have found to be interesting reading. Some of these have been interesting because of the insight the author has applied and others are interesting because of the total lack of understanding that the author has displayed.

ITIL Whitepaper – wheat or chaff?

First I’ll give you a poor example. I read one whitepaper recently that seemed very intelligently written at first glance, there was a well structured approach in describing the framework. It also seemed like he/she had some experience rather than just reading the books and having a bash at it.

Then I realized that within this ITIL Whitepaper, the author had missed Availability Management totally from the Service Delivery set and still wanted the Service Support set to have the Help Desk and Incident Control! I kid you not!

ITIL Whitepaper – where to find the good ones!

I hate to tell you this but, there is not one way to find them. Of course you can do the same things as everyone else, that is the old search engine trick which is fine, but I believe you also need to have some sort of a rating system for them.

I also realize that what I am imagining is a pipe dream at the moment because of the very nature of the internet, but to have someone pre-rate these things on a scale of 1-10 before I read them would save me a phenomenal amount of time. Alas I can but dream!

ITIL Whitepaper – wealth out there   

As a final guide, tend to limit your search to organizations who have a history of practical application over the purely theorists. ITIL should be applied on a case by case basis as there is no one pure version of ITIL in the real world.

My point is that it should differ slightly between organizations as the true business drivers are taken into consideration and the processes are aligned to the business need, so look to authors who have been there and really done it.

Those that have the skinned knees to prove it!