Category Archives: ITIL

The Balanced Improvement Matrix

Two weeks ago I presented to a customer how their IT improvement program can be improved by adopting principles from ITIL. I used this slide to illustrate another way to think about the issue. Click to expand Recipient of Benefits The Y-axis who receives most of the immediate benefit of the activity. “Inside” refers to […]

ITIL Certifications for 2013

The ITIL Exam Certification Statistics for 2013 are out, and we are now ready to present the final results. All the images below may be expanded for higher resolution. All numbers are rounded to thousands (Foundation) or hundreds (Advanced) unless otherwise indicated. Foundation A total of 245,000 certificates were issued in 2013, up 3.6% from […]

ITIL Exams for Oct 2013

Axelos has updated their ITIL Exam Performance Statistics through October of last year. There are no major breakthroughs since the statistics were last reported here for 2012. I am providing only major highlights. ITIL Foundation 196,000 ITIL Foundation certificates have been awarded so far in 2013, out of 216,000 attempts, an overall pass rate of […]

2012 ITIL Exam Statistics

APM Group has released their ITIL exam statistics for the whole year 2012. I have compiled their statistics and present them with a little more context. 1 ITIL Foundation Over 263,000 exams were administered in 2012, up 5% from 2011. Over 236,000 certificates were issued.  This number finally exceeded the previous annual high which occurred in 2008 at […]

The Role of COBIT5 in IT Service Management

In Improvement in COBIT5 I discussed my preference for the Continual Improvement life cycle. Recently I was fact-checking a post on ITIL (priorities in Incident Management) and I became curious about the guidance in COBIT5. The relevant location is “DSS02.02 Record, classify and prioritize requests and incidents” in “DSS02 Manage Service Requests and Incidents”. Here […]

Improvement in COBIT 5

In a previous post I discussed starting your service or process improvements efforts with Continual Service Improvement (or just Improvement). I prefer COBIT5, and the issue is ITIL. The good news is the Continual Service Improvement is the shortest of the five core books of ITIL 2011. CSI defines a 7 Step Improvement Process: Identify […]

Starting With Improvement

At last week’s Service Management Fusion 12 conference, I attended a brief presentation on Event Management that left a lot of time for questions and answers. One of the questioners had an ordinary concern for organizations starting down the road of “implementing ITIL”: where should we start?1 In this case the speaker demurred using ordinary […]

ITIL Exam Statistics Updated for July 2012

APM Group has released their ITIL exam statistics through July 2012. I have compiled their statistics and present them with a little more context. ITIL Foundation Over 148,000 Foundation exams have been administered in so far in 2012, resulting in over 132,000 certificates to date. Passrate is 90% in 2012, up steadily from 85% in […]

Definitive Process Library? Huh?

This morning one of North America’s leaders in IT best practice consulting, PLEXENT, surprised me with a headline: IT Improvement: What is a Definitive Process Library (DPL)? Besides a marketing term they made up, it made me wonder, what exactly is a Definitive Process Library? My conclusion after research: it is a marketing term they […]