Thankyou Peter for the thoughtful feedback, much better than an incoherent and illiterate response I had recently. Amazing some of the people one finds in our supposedly learned and professional industry... a topic for the IT Skeptic another day.
I understand that "best" is a moving target over time. The glass industry can measure the outcome of their processes. They have tangible metrics such as durability, clarity, cost of manufacture, and number of sales. Considerable research is conducted to close the feedback loop to ensure the practices are moving towards best and that best is getting better over time. And at any point in history best can be defined by numbers, or at least supported by numbers - as there will still be subjective interpretations, and differing bests for differing situations.
ITIL has few tangible metrics to close the loop and almost zero research into those metrics. So I contend that "best" can not be measured and isn't being measured, so the "best" claim is unsupportable. Your idea of a Journal of Service Mangement is exactly what we need to help address that problem - I commend it greatly.
My second contention is that it can't be best simply as a consequence of the process by which it is created. Your book is - with all due respect - an example of the problem, in that the theoretical foundation is derived from your personal experience and the personal experience of the set of people you used as contributors and reviewers. It is the Cathedral model not the Bazaar model (
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/ca...hedral-bazaar/). And your Journal is what we need to help address that problem too.
My final contention is that using the term 'best" is a bad idea anyway, as it sets unrealistic expectations and sounds pretentious.
On the topic of Asia, I too was in Korea, in 2003, talking to Samsung among others. Small world, innit? I too am Southern hemisphere based, and have a number of colleagues who have been into Asia more often than I. My general impression from them is that the region is less advanced than UK, Europe, Australasia or the USA. Being involved in itSMF I can use the maturity of their itSMF chapters as another metric for the region's advancement. On the basis of those measures, I stand by my assertion that the jury is still out on ITIL in Asia.
I lived, worked and travelled in Asia for several years in the 90s, and have a pretty good understanding of the Cantonese, Han, Singaporean, Indian (north and south), Thai, Karen, Burmese, Filipino and Indonesian cultures. The IT Skeptic is sceptical about whether ITIL will succeed in some of those cultures due to its fornal nature, and its emphasis on accountability, ownership and management by measurement - all of which are anathema to many Asian cultures. Like other Western systems I think it will appear to be implemented on the surface while an entirely different system is in actual effect under the covers, whose existence will only become clear when he results are not as expected.
Of course generalisations such as these don't hold true across the whole region, nor across all companies in a country, nor across all individuals within a company. There are extremely formal and process-centric companies such as Shell who operate very successfully across the region. The Japanese and Koreans have often led not followed in terms of process, at least in some manufacturing industries, automotive being the obvious example.
But broadly, I think ITIL will only be a general success in Asia as a highly modified, localised version ... if at all.