And what about IT itself? The king is gone, leaving no heir. A leadership vacuum emerges. No longer can IT managers utter the vicariously decisive sentence "We're going down the ITIL route" with solemn confidence, because ITIL has shown itself to have no particular route in mind. So what are we supposed to do for operational guidance now?

The IT Skeptic (http://www.itskeptic.org/node/94) is less pessimistic:

Perhaps I am a little less apocalyptic than Noel, but I feel the signs he sees [read the article] for ITIL being "peaked" are not signs of its demise so much as signs we are now hurtling down the slope of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Noel sees the wreckage of ITIL at the bottom. The Gartner model sees an eventual recovery to a calmer steady state after the hype wave, i.e. ITIL may not go away, just settle into whatever is its rightful place without all the hysteria. I have myself predicted ITIL's possible displacement by something else ...

ITIL may be replaced by something else but we are not talking about replacing alchemy with modern chemistry. The “son of ITIL” will still have to cover similar territory (managing changes, tracking patches, etc) and do it in a way that provides only a rough outline, just like ITIL. Whether we’re going to put COBIT or some ISO standard on the throne, we still need to think for ourselves. No “best practice” will turn IT management into a mechanical process. Stop looking for it.

There is no silver bullet. (I for one don’t see much purpose in complaining about the fact that there isn’t one.) There are, however, useful frameworks that we can selectively draw from. What do you think, is the debate about ITIL actually producing useful results or just a distraction from your real work?