Over the last couple of weeks I am seeing an increasing amount of articles and communication that speak about the "complexity" of ITIL V3. And this is keeping the ITIL community busy as I recently learned from talking with different people at several events, such as the "Battle of the Frameworks" roundtable organized by itSMF NL. 

This post contains several of my findings and conclusions as I have been trying to get my head around the perceived vs real complexity of ITILV3.

The first thing I tried to do is to get a better understanding of how people measure 'complexity of ITIL V3' . Unfortunately there is no commonly agreed standard for measuring complexity. In other words: what is complex fo you, might be simple for me (and the other way around of course). Many factors such as background, experience, structure, etc. contribute to perceived complexity.

People that speak about the complexity of ITIL V3 often try to compare with previous versions of ITIL, other industry best practices (e.g. COBIT, CMMI etc.) and/ or international standards (e.g. ISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 27001, etc.)

So, what metrics are being used to measure complexity with? The first answer I got to this question was: number of books/pages. As a participant to the "battle of the frameworks" was saying: 'ITIL V3 is more complex than ISO/IEC 20000 because ITIL V3 is 5 books of over 300 pages each and ISO/IEC 20000 is "only" 25 pages'. I've also heard someone say that ITIL V3 is less complex than ITIL V2 because ITIL V3 is only 5 books, while ITIL V2 is 9 books... Difficulty with this metric is that it assumes that all documents and standards that are being compared cover the same (reach and depth of) information, which most (if not all) of the time is not the case.

Another comment I have come across is that the increased scope of ITIL V3 (from operations department in V2 to en entire IT organization in V3) is adding complexity. This comment - I think - is true by definition, because an increased scope in this case means more components and interrelationships. On the other side ITIL V3 can be seen as a recognition of the fact that IT organizations do consist of more components and are indeed more complex than described in standards so far.

Last but not least the accessibility and structure of the ITIL V3 books is used as an indicator for complexity. In other words; it takes more time to find what you need compared to other standards. Now I can relate to this when you only look at the 5 core books in paper format, however with the ITIL online subscription service, complementary guidance and the change management process around the core books (as mentioned in my earlier post), you can expect to see an improved structure and associated ease of navigation (over time).

Reading back my findings above, I conclude that in many cases the perceived complexity of ITILV3 cannot be substantiated very well. So my impression is that we are often talking about gut feelings that perhaps are caused by resistance to change...?

Regards,
Jeroen Bronkhorst.