The comment starting with 'Sorry' was from me - apologies I accidentally logged out.

Sorry - This article is so inside out thinking that will fail both the customer and the IT organization. ITSM starts with the customer and making sure that their outcomes are at the core of any initiative.

ITSM SHOULD start with customer facing responsibilities and not engineering of processes.

The ITIL processes you discuss are back office, in ITIL Version 2 terms Service Support, and in ITIL V3 terms, Service Transition and as far removed from the customer important elements of a service management system and solution as you could pick.

You also imply ITIL is an industry standard - it is not - that role goes to ISO 20000.

Back to your ITIL best practice claims for the moment. Where in ITIL does change management provide guidance on how to build the most important artifact in change - the change schedule. How is risk assessed? With respect to configuration management - is a CMDB mandatory in this setup? And for release - are you familiar with software configuration tree concept - another key concept missing from ITIL but not other release methodologies....

Altogether I feel something else is being pushed here...