While just about everyone can agree that aligning IT with the business is important, few folks seem to know how to make it happen.  And while the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) does promise improved alignment, it doesn't offer a specific set of instructions on how to achieve it.

The third and latest version of the best practices framework for IT management, released in late May, does "provide a more practical approach" to ITIL implementation, says Mark McManus, vice president of IT Research at Computer Economics and author of a recent report on ITIL.

The basic idea behind ITIL is to manage IT operations as a set of services. The new version provides content specific to the business, which was lacking in previous versions. McManus says:

One of the things that was lacking was a good understanding from the business side of what ITIL was all about. ITIL looked too much like a methodology that was centric to IT and did not have a lot of benefit to the business. That's not true --but it was lacking that understanding.

• Read our full IT Business Edge interview with McManus: ITIL: Change Is Gonna Do You Good

Adoption of ITIL in Europe, where it originated, is "nearly ubiquitious," says McManus. It is less entrenched in other parts of the world, though interest in it has been growing steadily and Computer Economics expects to see a big jump in adoption among U.S. companies next year. The firm estimates that 26 percent of U.S. companies had implemented at least one of the five ITIL disciplines in 2006, with the adoption rate rising to 33 percent this year and 45 percent in 2008.

ITIL is more about changing business culture than about technology, says McManus. While this is never an easy task, it helps to have senior management buy-in and a committed champion to advance the effort. A well-defined organizational planning process is also important.

You really need to sit down and do an assessment of where you are today. You can't fix it if you don't know where you are today. Companies that have been successful have done a good assessment of their current IT and business processes, and identified the most serious deficiencies so they can tackle those in a prioritized manner. Lacking that good planning and project management will be a killer.

Rick Firth, an executive with Parity Group, an IT services firm, says in a Computerworld article that his company's recent survey of IT service managers in the UK shows that many ITIL initiatives lack a business focus. Just 27 percent of the survey respondents had directly measured the return on investment from their ITIL implementations, and less than half measured the value that IT service management delivers to their business.

In an interview with GCN, ITIL expert Ken Turbitt lays out an example of how ITIL v. 3's guidance might work in the real world:

...You may have an ERP system, perhaps SAP or Oracle Financials, running critical business processes such as finance, human resources, payroll and distribution. Once you've automated those, you're dependent on IT, so ITIL recommends linking the business and processes and how they are supported with IT. So whenever there is an incident, you're not looking at the component impact of that -- you're looking at the impact on that HR process or payroll process. You will make the appropriate decisions on what the business wants, not on what IT wants.

While this can all seem a bit overwhelming, McManus says, the key to effective implementations is to start small.

You can't go in and try to make all of the process changes throughout the entire set of best practices happen at once. Probably the most logical starting point is to look at the change management side of things, and the incident and problem management support processes that have to be in place. Change will introduce problems within an organization; those are interrelated processes. So if you start from that perspective, you have a lot to gain just from doing those, even if you don't take it any further.