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Can the five core ITIL V3 books be compressed into one without significant loss of content? Yes it would seem so, looking at the itSMF's ITSM Library book Foundations of IT Service Management Based on ITIL V3. How useful is the result? Worth having but still not an all-out replacement for the Five for the simple reason that it isn't the official version.

Who left the IT in itSMF? Service Management can be about so much more than IT. What a shame we have kept our focus narrow. Perhaps one day Service Management will become a universal discipline.

There are a large number of ITIL forums on the Web these days, of varying levels of participation and insight. The IT Skeptic thinks their value is strictly limited but for what it is worth here are a dozen of them.