Rapid economic growth and the need for compliance with government regulations are helping drive adoption of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) for services management in Asia, according to the head of an industry group in Singapore.

"Asia-Pacific growth for ITIL is going to be large," said Tay Kheng Tiong, the president of the IT Service Management Forum's Singapore chapter.

ITIL is a set of best practices for service management that was developed by the U.K. government during the late 1980s. The adoption of ITIL in Asia has so far been led by companies and countries that rely heavily on IT, Tay said. For example, 42 percent of companies in Singapore have adopted ITIL and a further 45 percent intend to adopt ITIL in the "near future," he said, citing figures from market analyst Gartner.

Taiwan, South Korea and China are also markets where ITIL will be widely adopted, Tay said. In China, companies are looking to ITIL has a way to establish business processes that can be scalable to keep pace with fast growth, he said.

Regulatory requirements are also pushing Asian companies to adopt ITIL, Tay said.

One such company is Indonesian mobile operator PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel), which has used ITIL-compliant software from BMC Software Inc. to reduce operational IT costs. Telkomsel uses ITIL to ensure its operations are compliant with the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, required because the company's largest shareholder, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Besides improving Telekomsel's customer service, ITIL helped reduce operational IT costs by "50 to 60 percent" while keeping pace with the company's growth, Yucki Prihadi, Telekomsel's manager of IT services management.