In times of social media like Twitter, Facebook and others, people have started to come together around an idea, a feeling to belong to a community, or even brands. In times of globalized sharing of knowledge, large-scale intersubjectivity has helped to come closer to objective insights in common challenges than ever before. The internet and other new media have created a platform to unleash the power of the community to improving results. This can be a community linked to a commercial position, like a commercial company that operates in a market place against competing propositions. It can be a public community like those for free and open source projects, it can be a scientific community like from research institutions at universities. Some information is offered at a commercial price, other information is available for free. Some alternatives have emerged on the Web next to pure traditional copyright based exchange of information.
So where is the community for getting ITIL to become a living concept or at least a living brand? How can ITIL evolve towards new trends in society in IT and beyond IT? The current evolutionary model for ITIL and related content from the English government is a well-respected structure for stability and protection rather than a platform for aggressive evolution and sharing of concepts. The books are too expensive for individuals to buy and copyright is heavily protected. Sharing or copying the books in paper or electronic form is forbidden and therefore rightfully technically hindered. Using the concepts from the books in training material and related services is subject to procedures and regulations, and again comes at a price. Electronic platforms from the corporations licensed to exploit ITIL and related frameworks focus on protecting the proprietary status rather than opening up for input from the community. Even wide-spread user groups like ITSMf are perceived as having limited bottom-up involvement in the contents and evolution of the core materials.
That makes that the change model for the ITIL books is subject to the same potential perception of rigidity and lack of sexiness as the way of working ITIL promotes. Unlike the very idea of the best way to bring a de facto market standard or best practices approach to its full potential, ITIL is relatively inaccessible to most of the users and is not driven or lived bottom- up by a community. That also means that its potential to grow with today's needs is limited to the potential of the well-defined group behind the ideas, in combination with the commercial motivations of the community that applies and propagates these ideas. Especially with the challenge to separate proven facts from wide-spread understandings, the benefits of having a strong community would be clear.