The IT Skeptic's Crap Factoid Early Warning Service lists the following Crap Factoid as mild, so Chokey the Chimp is staying at "high" risk, but watch out you don't step in this one. Relatively harmless but still smells bad on your shoe.

The CF sighting said: "In a recent INS survey completed by 130 IT organizations either currently using or planning to use ITIL [so this is a consultant-solicited survey from a self-selecting sample]... Once ITIL has been adopted, its impact becomes obvious. Of the 76 respondents to the INS survey who are currently using ITIL, nearly half consider it very critical to achieving their goals for managing IT processes, and another 40% deem it somewhat critical."

Well duh! How many people will answer :"We spent all that time and resouces implementing it but we don't consider it critical". What is not in the data is how many organisations didn't consider it critical and therefore didn't do it, but they are not part of the sample. The real data might show that 90% of organisations consider ITIL not critical but INS managed to find most of the 10% who do.

By the way the article also said "One of the best pieces of news about ITIL is that the cost of implementation is relatively low because ITIL concepts are in the public domain. To get started, a minimal investment in documentation (which is copyrighted) and training is all that's required, although many organizations decide to go with a third-party consultancy to jump-start the process. " They should go to jail for that.