Wonderful sponsorship opportunity for ITIL reveals what?
What's going on with translations of ITIL 2011? We get an intriguing clue from a recent call-for-sponsorship.
"The Cabinet Office, the custodian of Best Management Practice; The Stationery Office (TSO), the Official Publisher; and The APM Group, the Official Accreditor" are calling for corporate sponsors for the translations of ITIL 2011 into Japanese and German. These translations have been done and are in the review phase.
Why do they need sponsors for a commercial product? Could it be a case of once-bitten, twice shy? Both the German and Japanese itSMF chapters invested a lot of money and effort into doing the last translation. How much did they get back in return?
My inside rumour (unconfirmed) is that the chapters get a small percentage of the print edition of the ITIL 2007 (a.k.a. ITIL V3) translations and ZERO % of the digital version (I welcome confirmation/corrections). Who gets the rest? As I understand it there are the normal ITIL royalties to the Cabinet Office and the rest goes to TSO, a for-profit organisation under contract to the Cabinet Office. And they all only had less than two years to recoup their investments before ITIL 2011 killed their market stone dead.
So why the call for sponsorships? Could it be that the dummy has been spat*, and the Japanese and German chapters want to get paid properly this time?
I'm sure the chapters know they could just do the translation themselves, apply for a copyright license, pay the royalties direct to Cabinet Office (I think about 20%) and keep the rest. So why still go via TSO? maybe one of these reasons
- It is perceived to be easier to let TSO handle all the publication
- The chapters fear their sales will be less if not published as the Official Cabinet Office/TSO translation
- itSMF is contractually bound to do the translation (that was the case in past versions of ITIL) and the chapter carries the burden
I welcome any light that readers can shed on this....
*regular readers will know the meaning of "the dummy has been spat". Others can look here
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
spanish is the third largest market in the world and....
I wonder why latin america is totally ignored by the traslation team. I read those books are ready for german and japan market, sure that is need because of their current country development, but friend, we have the third largest market in the world (or fourth if we exclude Brazil which is not spanish). Even a little "introduction" guide is not available (like itil in less than 100 words or something like that). I went yesterday to the official page and I verified it. The small spanish literature available in amazon is from Van Haren.
I sadly feel ITIL or whatever organizations runs this are totally ignoring our countries. We are also IT professionals. Thanks
Copyright
"I'm sure the chapters know they could just do the translation themselves, apply for a copyright license, pay the royalties direct to Cabinet Office (I think about 20%) and keep the rest. So why still go via TSO?
I suspect TSO have licensed the copyright in ALL languages worldwide from TCO, so this wouldn't be an option.
Not my understanding. In
Not my understanding. In theory TSO do not have exclusive rights to the material. Anyone can apply for right to use ITIL content. In theory I could write my own translation by getting a TCO license to the IP and jumping through all the hoops for content approval and use of the trademark.
Of course Castle ITIL's response when Van Haren used thier copyright license to start offering a competitive online ITIL was enlightening: they crushed it.
Vendor Neutral
Hmmm...the ITIL core volumes section 1.4 Why is ITIL so successful? Because it's vendor neutral. Taught as a requirement of every Foundation exam.
This doesn't sit well with me.
Claire