ITIL has been criticized on several fronts, including:
* The books are not affordable for non-commercial users
* Accusations that many ITIL advocates think ITIL is "a holistic, all-encompassing framework for IT governance";
* Accusations that proponents of ITIL indoctrinate the methodology with 'religious zeal' at the expense of pragmatism.
As Jan van Bon (author and editor of many IT Service Management publications) notes,
There is a lot of confusion about ITIL, stemming from all kinds of misunderstandings about its nature. ITIL is, as the OGC states, a set of best practices. The OGC doesn’t claim that ITIL’s best practices describe pure processes. The OGC also doesn’t claim that ITIL is a framework, designed as one coherent model. That is what most of its users make of it, probably because they have such a great need for such a model...[17]
CIO Magazine columnist Dean Meyer has also presented some cautionary views of ITIL,[18] including five pitfalls such as "becoming a slave to outdated definitions" and "Letting ITIL become religion." As he notes, "...it doesn't describe the complete range of processes needed to be world class. It's focused on ... managing ongoing services."
The quality of the library's volumes is seen to be uneven. For example, van Herwaarden and Grift note, “the consistency that characterized the service support processes … is largely missing in the service delivery books."[19]
In a 2004 survey designed by Noel Bruton (author of 'How to Manage the IT Helpdesk' and 'Managing the IT Services Process'), ITIL adopting organizations were asked to relate their actual experiences in having implemented ITIL. Seventy-seven percent of survey respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that "ITIL does not have all the answers". ITIL exponents accept this, citing ITIL's stated intention to be non-prescriptive, expecting that organizations will have to engage ITIL processes with their existing overall process model. Bruton notes that the claim to non-prescriptiveness must be at best one of scale rather than absolute intention, for the very description of a certain set of processes is in itself a form of prescription. (Survey "The ITIL Experience - Has It Been Worth It", author Bruton Consultancy 2004, published by Helpdesk Institute Europe, The Helpdesk and IT Support Show and Hornbill Software.)
While ITIL addresses in depth the various aspects of Service Management, it does not address enterprise architecture in such depth. Many of the shortcomings in the implementation of ITIL do not necessarily come about because of flaws in the design or implementation of the Service Management aspects of the business, but rather the wider architectural framework in which the business is situated. Because of its primary focus on Service Management, ITIL has limited utility in managing poorly designed enterprise architectures, or how to feed back into the design of the enterprise architecture.
The BOFH notes that “ITIL manuals are like kryptonite to enthusiasm."
