The Skeptical Informer, October 2008, Volume 2, No. 10

The newsletter of the IT Skeptic. All the IT skeptical news that is fit to print... and then some!

The crass over-commercialisation of ITIL has spread from the certification sector to the content itself. TSO is launching a website that provides process maps - something many of us thought would be part of the base product. They'll be clickable with stuff behind them including Visio and Word templates - something else that I for one fondly imagined might be generally accessible. So what's wrong with that? Aren't we all - including me - in this for the money? Well yes, but TSO are branding this as a site overseen by the Chief Architect and Authors of ITIL, as an "official" Live site. [It will be amusing to watch APMG and TSO fight it out for who has the real official ITIL portal promised by Sharon back around the launch of the books.] That too would be OK. What has startled a number of people is the price. "Two and a half thousand fadurkin' British Pounds Sterling per annum" as I put it. Given the way the economy is going that will soon be the equivalent of about ten thousand US dollars. I resisted the temptation to make a joke about mis-spelling "per annum" but really this is too much. The ITIL core official products should be sold at prices that recover costs, give a royalty to OGC for working on the next version, and take a small margin for profitability. The corporate per-concurrent-user price for the TSO site is an eye-watering 5,750 pounds. Holy change control! ITIL is turning into just another snake oil peddled by shiny suits. A snake oil that has curative properties for sure, but sold by those whose interest is the money not the resulting health of the buyers. We aren't in Kansas any more. Most users won't care - they will get the boss to pay for the endless Intermediate courses and for the Live portal access. But a minority of us, those who pay for all this voraciosuness ourselves, will start to look elsewhere for a less commercialised IP, like COBIT. I use COBIT more than ITIL now. I get the core for free, many of the books for free as an ISACA member, printed books for less, and far more bang for my buck out of ISACA than I get out of itSMF. Of course it won't last. The vendors are already sniffing round the wide green fields of COBIT but for now that is where I am headed. Here's hoping the upcoming COBIT User's Guide for Service Managers is closely followed by a certification. Wouldn't that put a cat amongst the pigeons? I suggested a while back that the COBIT community was just biding their time before they put ITIL back in its place. I think the process has started. Certainly the recently released white paper aligning COBIT and ITIL was greeted with a stony silence by Castle ITIL, and not surprisingly as it was pretty blunt about ITIL's deficiencies in comparison. And the new Service Manager's guide won't help. Now Microsoft have launched a broadside. It is as if Castle ITIL were watching the COBIT forces quietly gathering strength in the valley below when a flaming ball of tar popped over the back wall. That flaming ball was the release of MOF (Microsoft Operating Framework, a "competitor" to ITIL) under the Creative Commons licence. You can copy MOF. You can cut it up and edit it. You can paste it and build training courses around it and do what you bloody well like with it pretty much, without having to kiss anyone's ring. And you can do a Foundation Certification in it from EXIN. Not a good month for Castle ITIL. Guess how much sympathy I feel when they are still up to the old games: five days between announcement and closing for ITIL users to respond to a survey on the ITIL Foundations course, for yet another review. I bet they are mystified by all the negative response they got to the last version. Maybe they should try asking the customer base. Properly.

Features

ITIL V3 shies away from the whole concept of processes. They are avoided and obfuscated, sometimes called elements, jumbled up with functions. And most of all, the "complete" lists are all different! in an effort to get a grasp on this, here is the IT Skeptic's cross reference of them all and hence the resulting IT Skeptic's Unofficial List of ITIL Version 3 Processes (ta daaah!)

Operations is a commoditised domain now: people buy on price. Antivirus is a commodity. So is backup. So is much of the hardware. Watch what open source software does to systems and network management, media management and a bunch of other software types. CIOs want to spend their money on an ITIL project, ISO20000 certification, SOX compliance, COBIT audit, Project Management Office, CMDB, and a Balanced Scorecard Dashboard. Funds for IT Operations are limited: it is all about cutting costs now, or soon will be.

[Update: This directory is now maintained as part of Ops4Less This page will no longer be updated]

This post has been podcast

Once upon a time IT Service Management was a movement dedicated to improving the levels of service delivered by IT. And ITIL was a body of knowledge put together by the government as a public service and released into the public domain. The books weren't free simply because costs had to be covered.

Now it is turning into just another snake oil peddled by shiny suits.

This post has been podcast

Why is Project Management all but invisible in ITIL V3?

This post has been podcast

There are some fundamental fallacies behind the arguments for CMDB and a recent article encapsulated a number of them. Why do we keep getting told a CMDB is essential when almost nobody has one?

Just what sort of pacts has OGC signed with the money engines at TSO and APMG, or is HM still her own master? When will ITIL be set free?

The real significance remains to be seen, but Microsoft's announcement that MOF 4.0 (Microsoft Operating Framework, a MS variant of ITIL) is now available under a Creative Commons licence to not only Share but also Remix(!) puts additional pressure on Castle ITIL's proprietary grip on the ITIL content. The explicit mention of ITIL in the announcement suggests to me this pressure is not accidental. MOF was already freely available for download, as also are COBIT and FITS, but this takes open content ITSM another step.

That's "self-assessment " in the ITSM sense, not the new-age self-help sense.

I'd appreciate it if readers with a spare moment wander over to Real ITSM and take a look at the Assessment [oops! fixed the link]. (C'mon! it beats working). While you do, think about the potential:

The Benchmark is Real ITSM but it could just as easily be something else (and more than one).

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Recent podcasts

A podcast of the orginal post ITIL V3 Live is ... still coming, and VERY expensive

I see the long-awaited "ITIL portal" is showing off. It will go live on 10th November.

So if you were wondering what ever happened to the promised process maps for ITIL, or where you could get work instructions and role descriptions for the ITIL processes, or where to get ITIL V3 in Visio or Word templates, wonder no more. It is all here. All you have to do is pay more money. LOTS of money. To TSO. Two and a half thousand fadurkin' British Pounds Sterling per annum to be precise.

A podcast of the original article

Once upon a time IT Service Management was a movement dedicated to improving the levels of service delivered by IT. And ITIL was a body of knowledge put together by the government as a public service and released into the public domain. The books weren't free simply because costs had to be covered.

Now it is turning into just another snake oil peddled by shiny suits.

A podcast of the original article Why is Project Management almost invisible in ITIL V3?

PM is the engine that moves much stuff (hopefully just about everything) from Development to Production, which is pretty important now that ITIL has muscled into Application Management. PM should interlock with Change Management and Testing. PM should provide most of the Early Life Support. Release and Deployment shouldn't move without PM: if it is big enough to be a release it should be a project. And so on.

So why is it no-one tells you how ITIL aligns with the Project Management bodies of knowledge PMBOK or PRINCE2.

A podcast of the orginal post What do all the sites without a CMDB do?

There are some fundamental fallacies behind the arguments for CMDB and a recent article encapsulated a number of them. Why do we keep getting told a CMDB is essential when almost nobody has one?

A podcast of the origninal post Give up on ITIL V3 training and certification - it is not going to change
Yet another unhappy camper prompted me to hammer on the cold stone walls of Castle ITIL once again, right over the blood-stains of last time I tried. But I won't. I give up. ITIL training and certification isn't going to change. It has been taken over by the money engine and is lost. The real experts are elsewhere.

A podcast of the original blog post

The IT Skeptic believes that COBIT has matured to the point where the supporting books constitute a body of knowledge (BOK) that is coming close to a credible alternative to ITIL

Classic Skeptic

This article has been podcast

OK I'll bite. One of the nice folk at Evergreen, Jill Landers, posted "Top 10 reasons to implement a CMDB". I'll do the right thing and not quote it in full here so you need to go read that first. Then you can enjoy my "Top 10 reasons NOT to implement CMDB"

From the blog

If you are a visual person like me you may find a diagram helpful in understanding just what ITIL Version 3 means, what has changed. The diagram has been moved to here (it's still free!).

I did some work a while ago on SM in SMEs (that's Service Management in Small to Medium Enterprises of course: SMISME? SM4SME [the one I use]? SMESM?). When seen through the distorting lens of SME priorities, frameworks like ITIL look pretty different. Every 70s deadbeat like this writer knew that you can learn by tripping out, so it is enlightening for us to look at ITIL in REALLY small organisations. I wrote an article about it but the website is no longer available so here is the article:

This post is longer than normal but you may find it entertaining as an example of

  1. how not to do Level 1 support. All the politeness in the world is no substitute for actually listening, and having some understanding of the environment
  2. where email-based support (as compared to actually talking to people) can go wrong

Using indirect KPIs is always a dangerous distorter of behaviour. if you want the SLAs to ensure the appropriate resources are applied and to drive the size and location of teams required and the spare part/hot swap stock size and locations, then write the SLAs so they define the appropriate resources to be applied by priority of incident for that service and define the size and location of teams required and the spare part/hot swap stock size and locations by priority of service. Don't make the behavioural causal chain any longer than it need be - you'll get all sorts of unintended consequences.

I hope to keep up the usual stream of postings on this blog through October as I

  • disappear into the wilds of urban Manila to see the in-laws
  • present at the itSMF conference in Singapore
  • likewise in Bangkok a couple of days later

This post has been podcast

I see the long-awaited "ITIL portal" is showing off. It will go live on 10th November.

So if you were wondering what ever happened to the promised process maps for ITIL, or where you could get work instructions and role descriptions for the ITIL processes, or where to get ITIL V3 in Visio or Word templates, wonder no more. It is all here. All you have to do is pay more money. LOTS of money. To TSO. Two and a half thousand fadurkin' British Pounds Sterling per annum to be precise.

A spat breaks out in the service catalogue vendor community. As Len Beadell said when he ran out of all water in a broken down Jeep deep in the Australian desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest help, "This should relieve the monotony".

I got whipped in the stock market bubble like many people, so I'm the last to read too much into graphs any more, but nevertheless I always find Google Trends interesting.

I seldom read vendor bumph. But just this once as I was cleaning out an old conference bag the headline of a flyer caught my eye. It is clever.

We have been posting cards from the ABC of ICT card deck from GamingWorks to see what the response is, as a sort of informal opinion polling.

Those who responded to the last one were more polarised than the first poll. (Of course that might be becauser this time I didn't provide the weasel-option of "maybe"). Last time we asked what people thought of the statement "Lack of Management Commitment seriously affects project delivery in our organization" and got a resounding Yes. As a devout fan of Dilbert and especially The Dilbert Principle I'm hardly surprised that listless management would be a clear issue.

Let's try another. "IT is unable to specify the Value required by the business". What do you think of that statement in the context of your own organisation (or client)?

APMG have just run an anonymous public survey for "your valuable feedback" on the ITIL V3 Foundation Syllabus. Who knew? Oh, come on! You had a whole five days to hear about it and respond.

Don't expect laser focus from your HP providers over the next three years, they'll all be wondering if they have a job. 24,600 don't. And that's the official number starting out.

Apparently Don Tennant thinks ITSM is less than fascinating and even has a bit of fun at our expense. The thing that most impressed me about the video was that nobody actually hit him.

I had heard tales of the USA's Inland Revenue Service but this is the first time I have come to grips with it. I have no doubt that if the IRS were an individual it would be locked up as insane. Look at this: "For Paperwork Reduction Act Notice, see separate instructions". All you folk who deal with this thing regularly have my deepest sympathy.

Further to my post about the invisibility of Project Management in ITIL V3, it is interesting to see that there is even less mention of PRINCE2 in particular, despite it being ITIL's stable-mate at OGC. Not much walking across the corridor here! Of course, the North Americans were in control of writing much of ITIL V3 and none of it is actually done at OGC any more.

The diagram on p31 is just wrong. It shows the project team's job is done at the start of the pilot or warranty period. This is "dead cat syndrome" which must be avoided at all costs. A project team should retain ownership through the warranty period until acceptance has been signed off.

Colleagues of mine did a benchmark demonstration to a prospective client. For reasons that I have lost in the mists of time, they were in a room in IBM's building, even though IBM were a competitor. As a result we had to supply all our own gear, so they brought in box after box of monitors and other equipment (probably not servers, this was a LOOONG time ago). Giff had a dodgy back so he had his own special chair too.



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