Application Development & Maintenance - Does ITIL Matter?

I think it does. People involved in application development & maintenance (a.k.a. 3rd line teams) often use CMMi framework to manage their day-to-day tasks & activities keeping service management best practices such as the ones documented in ITIL, at bay. They believe ITIL is for people fielding end user calls at the service desk or at best for people from 2nd line support teams. However a significant amount of their time is spent resolving incidents escalated to them by the 2nd line support teams. They are also required to participate in root cause analysis for problem incidents. 3rd line application teams are most certainly involved in analysing change requests and estimating effort which helps in prioritising them. Other ITIL processes such as capacity, availability & release too need their active involvement and inputs. In essence application development teams would do themselves & others who work/interface with them a lot of good by understanding ITIL. I believe IT service management & ITIL does matter for anyone in the business of supporting users be it the frontline service desk agent or the backend application developer.