Literature review of the situation research faces in the application of ITIL in Small and Medium Enterprises

• A systematic literature review in relation to ITIL and its use in Small and Medium Enterprises.
• ITIL does not provide much help or order of execution for each of the processes, or best practices.
• SMEs cannot introduce ITIL easily.

This paper carries out a review of the issues that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face when trying to ensure their alignment with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines. It is well-known that SMEs experience different challenges to those experienced by Large Enterprises, however their demands are the same as larger companies. Given that they have less labor and technological resources, they must optimize their service levels and adapt the activities of their IT departments to the needs of the company without negatively impacting service commitments. In this context our main objective is to establish a complete review concerning the important information that exists in relation to ITIL and its use in Small and Medium Enterprises, evaluating methods for the collection of evidence and analysis. For this reason we have conducted a systematic literature review with the automated search in the range 2007–2015 which has led us to identify thirty-nine articles of relevance. It is noted that, although it was initially expected that there might be enough information that would help us validate and interpret the way that ITIL functions for Small and Medium Enterprises, the reality is that there are not many publications of relevance that deal with the topic of ITIL and SMEs.