"It's a big organisational change, and you forget that at your peril," said Alison Holt, acting general manager for services at NZ IT services company Synergy, which has been working on its own services management implementation.

"ITIL itself is just a framework, and it's a means to an end in terms of aligning business and IT," said Cross.

One explanation for the popularity of ITIL despite the challenges of finishing the job is its ability to allow companies to continue utilising legacy technology, rather than requiring the wholesale rip-and-replace of existing systems.

"Businesses are using ITIL and other processes to gain as much as efficiency as possible around it, but they're not spending money to move off [technologies like mainframes]," said Mike Davies, ANZ country manager for BMC Software.

Whatever the goals, such tasks require a serious level of management commitment to the change process, Cross warned.

"Without that commitment from the top down, the journey is a lot longer and projects tend to lose momentum."
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