When I read Greg Ferro’s infamous “Why I hate ITIL so much” blog back in 2015, I have to admit that I agreed with many (albeit not all) of what he said. Maybe it’s the issues that I have with authority in general, or maybe it’s my many years of working within the constraints of ITIL and ITSM in operating systems and services – but I truly believed (and still do) that well-educated, experience and consensus-based pragmatism is what actually gets things done.

As a former NOC engineer, I clearly remember my onboarding, and especially the deep-rooted fear I felt every time I encountered an alert that was new to me – particularly during a night shift. My only consolation was that I was never alone during training, so there was always someone I could ask that very awkward question: “I’m new here, what do we do with this…?”