Is ITIL Dead?

The Answer Is More Complicated Than You Think.

Servinomy | June 2026 

Forrester Research's "ITIL Dilemma" report landed like a grenade in the ITSM community in 2025. It questioned whether ITIL — the backbone of IT service management for three decades — still fits the purpose. Practitioners responded immediately, divided, and revealing.

The short answer: ITIL is not dead. But it is no longer sufficient on its own — and the profession needs to stop pretending otherwise.

Key Takeaways

• Forrester identified three core pressures: rising costs, declining relevance in agile environments, and emerging alternatives.
• ITIL 4 has already evolved toward agile, but many organisations still apply it as a rigid rulebook rather than a flexible vocabulary.
• For regulated industries (banking, healthcare, government), ITIL's stability-first approach remains genuinely valuable.
• The "anti-ITIL" examples (Spotify, Netflix) were never ITIL shops — using them as proof of obsolescence is a category error.
• The real question is not whether to use ITIL, but how much, where, and alongside what.