The high energy limit of scattering processes in QCD is, at least on the purely theoretical level, described by the BFKL equation. However, many phenomenological studies of BFKL fail miserably when confronted with data. In this talk we will briefly review the application of (LL) BFKL in phenomenology, and critically examine the application of LL eigenfunctions in the study of the NLL BFKL kernel. We then introduce a recently proposed iterative solution of the NLL BFKL equation that allows for a detailed study of physical properties of the BFKL evolution.