Of course not. To look and listen around the IT industry these days one would think so, but there is actually more than one game in town.

• MOF from Microsoft is of course focused on their own Windows environment. It is a little different to ITIL but basically a variant (how unusual that Microsoft should create their own, slightly incompatible, version of a standard). Talk is that future versions will ‘return to the fold’.
• itilBOK and ITSMBOK from the IT Service Management Institute (shades of the Judean People’s Liberation Front: ITSMI is unrelated to – and at times at odds with – the itSMF)
• “Implementing Service and Support Management Processes: A Practical Guide”, Higday-Kalmanowitz and Simpson Ed., HDI, 2005 from the Help Desk institute is, not surprisingly, a callcentre slant on ITIL. If you look around it can be downloaded for free by registering with some vendors ;-)

If you just want to assess your capability, i.e. measure/benchmark your business, then there are several better alternatives. “Better” because there is no agreed standard for measuring ITIL: every consulting firm, including the OGC itself, use a different methodology to get different answers. ITIL is about defining “how” not “how well”.

• ISO20000 (and its ancestor BS15000). Despite some impressions given to the contrary, these are not 100% the same as ITIL. There are major extensions to ITIL and some differences. But it is the closest thing to an “ITIL assessment standard”.
• COBIT (or the lighter COBIT Quickstart) is very comprehensive and widely embraced, especially for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit, and it is free for download along with an extraordinary amount of other material.
• The IT Service Capability Maturity Model uses the CMM maturity measurement model. It seems to be a very good model but has had little uptake since its release in January 2005.
• For Very Small Enterprise (VSE) look at NOEMI

…and other new approaches are emerging all the time. This is still a maturing area.

If you are looking for something simpler than ITIL, then there are several options:

• Check out the much anticipated “ITIL Lite”: ITIL Small-scale Implementation, Office of Government Commerce, The Stationery Office Books, 2006. it looks useful but the proof is not in. The 1998 version (IT Infrastructure Library practices in Small IT Units, Office of Government Commerce, The Stationery Office 1998) seemed to me to be good but it got very little attention; it remains to be seen how this one goes or what the results will be. (BTW, what a great name the old book had: "ITIL in SITU" - how could they not reuse that?).
• FITS does not get near the attention it deserves. Developed for UK schools, it is a nice simplification of ITIL
• Core Practice (CoPr or “copper”) is an interesting new development that bears watching. The premise is that we have a fixation with Best Practice. It should be limited to areas where there is a business case for it, and in other areas there should be no shame in just do the minimum necessary.

So don't get swept away on a tide of ITIL. Take a look at what best suits your business. ITIL is very good at what it does. It may be the right thing for you. Or not.