The adoption of ITIL in the Nordic Countries: exploring regional differences

Abstract

This paper responds to a call for exploring regional differences of how IT Service Management (ITSM) is adopted. We do so by examining the adoption of the ITSM processes as defined in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The adoption levels of the individual ITIL processes are compared, and the contributions of country, organization size and industry sector are assessed. The analyses are based on 836 responses from three consecutive surveys over a five-year period conducted in collaboration with the four Nordic itSMF chapters: Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. We also compare and analyze these results with findings from three studies in other regions. We found that significant differences exist in the adoption levels of ITIL between the Nordic countries, between companies of different size, and that the adoption levels of public and private sector firms differ over the years. Furthermore, compared to crossnational studies from other regions, our findings showed that the Nordic countries had lower overall adoption levels of the ITIL processes. Implications for practice and for further research are discussed.