This paper focuses on the management of IT services and especially on best practices in the IT sector. Successful organizations must continuously improve their business management, including their IT management, in order to retain competitive advantages, and thus they need to reflect upon and improve their ways of working. One important aspect of this is usage of best practices. Best practices are toolsets or frameworks for the management of business and IT alignment, and their purpose is to improve the quality of IT services through delivering superior results compared to other frameworks, time after time. The most cited, globally recognized and adopted best practice is Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The problem we address is that there exist contradictory claims concerning the usefulness of best practices. Due to these contradictory claims, the purpose of this paper is to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of ITIL. To fulfill the purpose of this paper, we have conducted a qualitative study where we have collected empirical experiences from use of ITIL. We have interviewed 15 IT managers and IT consultants about their experiences of using ITIL.

We can conclude that previous findings are fragmented and thus we have presented a coherent and structured collection of empirical experiences categorized as strengths and weaknesses. The identified strengths are: high reliability, improved cost efficiency, a tool for communication and support for structured work. The identified weaknesses are: lack of concretion, adaptation difficulties, being too comprehensive and having high costs. These strengths and weaknesses have to be managed in accordance with the situation at hand. We believe that our findings can contribute in two ways: 1) they consist of a coherent and structured overview informing about both strengths and weaknesses, and 2) the weaknesses can be used as requirements for a redesign of ITIL. Our study has in a cumulative way advanced the state-of-the-art by adding new knowledge based on empirical data.