Or "baattle of the acronyms" if you prefer (actually, most technology controversies could be represented that way, sadly enough).

ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a commonly used set of best practices for IT service management, developed originally by the British government in the late eighties but since distributed globally and with increasing enthusiasm as more and more organizations look to trim their IT management footprint and get a handle on the various systems in their purview. MOF, the Microsoft Operations Framework, developed at a somewhat later date by Microsoft as an implementation of ITIL oriented more specifically at supporting Microsoft products.

This post was inspired by a eponymous question posed on LinkedIn asking users to post their experiences with the two. One might imagine that a great debate was formed, but it was not... on the whole, most of us seemed pretty casual in our preferences. So I am poking the topic with a stick here to see if anything more interesting erupts. The original question was apparently posted in response to an article in CIO Decisions in which Niel Nickolaisen expressed a preference for MOF.

One might assume that ITIL is more pure and good as the original and MOF a watered-down second-rater, or one might assume that MOF is a highly refined and potent version of the old and decrepit ITIL. As I mentioned, however, few of the responders on LinkedIn seemed to buy in to either argument. Instead, and this is my own take on the matter, they seemed to feel that either methodology could be used successfully in various situations, and that one might be preferred over the other in certain circumstances but not all. The apparently obvious conclusion, that MOF might be better in situations specific to Microsoft products, wasn't obvious at all... MOF is generic enough that it can be used successfully with other products and ITIL, generic by design, can apply as well to Microsoft systems as any other. I don't dispute Nickolaisen's assertions but I think that taking ITIL out of your toolkit can reduce your options even if you find it tends to meet your needs in most cases.