The Skeptical Informer, January 2009, Volume 3, No. 1

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

The Skeptical Informer seems to be shifting publication cycle from every month to every when I get around to it. Sorry about that. I would say that the recession has caused me to shift priorities and concentrate on chasing work, but I won't because it isn't true. I have been in the Southern Alps, with my son and some friends, in a hut with no power, doing very little and eating too much. Regular readers will know this is an annual thing. As is camping at Kaitoke (as in LOTR's Rivendell). We did that too. So the degradation in publication service levels is entirely due to the editor loafing. Actually the IT SKeptic has battened down the hatches. I've turned down three European conference speaking opportunities for 2009. Consulting work is scarce. In March I will definitely drop my lease on the big mother of a server this blog runs on, as the plunging advertising revenues will no longer cover the hosting. This means we'll be back to VPS sorry folks, with the consequent unpredictable performance. Annoying but not much I can do. It's not all doom though. I have several books in preparation that might bring in a buck, especially if you are nice enough to buy them :) If you haven't bought Introduction to Real ITSM yet you might consider it (please). Everyone says it is funny and god knows we could all use a laugh this year. This year sees three topics looming for the blog:

governance: which is hot in a serious way
cloud computing: which is hot in an entirely vacuous vendor-hyped way
alternatives to ITIL: which is not hot at all but I am predicting it will be

Of course we'll also have something to say about ITIL and OGC and itSMF and APMG. The whole certification debacle shows no sign of resolution - in fact APMG won The Coronation Street Pint For Longest Running Saga at the annual IT Skeptic Awards. COBIT and ISACA and ITGI will get attention too, especially as the two universes seem to be bumping together. If it turns out to be a matter/anti-matter thing then we could see some sparks. They certainly are different universes: like chalk and cheese, or like the Hitchhiker's Guide and the Encyclopaedia Galactica. The topic that interests me most right now is cloud computing. Look out for an article soon on how existing enterprise apps will never migrate to the cloud, and posts on how immature the whole thing is, how the vendors have already torn it to shreds by building proprietary solutions with zero standardisation, and how it is just another tech geek fantasy solution to a non-tech problem. Such technical solutions to non-technical problems often don't solve the original problem at all. They tend to introduce more problems of their own, and almost invariably introduce greater complexity to be managed, but IT loves them. They offer a silver bullet out-of-the-box fix to take the pain away, which is hard to resist. So it is with The Cloud. We don't learn. IT still runs after the latest silver bullet, or in this case the silver lining, heedless of the fact that a cloud represents a storm, poor visibility, dangerous lightning, and miserable conditions. Slowly IT is being drawn back into the business and taught to think like a business. One by one the tech managers are displaced by business managers. One by one the departments become accountable. One by one the cultures incrementally shift towards a focus on delivering service to the business and spending money as if it were their own. But it is obvious that we are still on a long road. We need to cut costs and increase scalability for sure. Spending many millions to float our existing business systems on a cloud isn't the right answer. Very few organisations see such wild variations in load that they need resort to the cloud for on-demand capacity. And the supposedly lower costs of management from service providers is a myth that the outsourcing industry still manages to perpetrate. When all the hidden costs - including lost IP, risk, migration, delays (ironically) and provider overheads - are factored in, the benefits are less compelling. Eric Knorr says “the ability to add capabilities quickly without capital investment is the real benefit of the cloud”. I disagree. Cloud capabilities are not exempt from the same considerations of robustness, reliability, accountability, compliance and audit as internal resources. Removing the capital component of the costs is not a significant saving overall. (Knorr has no illusions about cloud computing: “Fantasies of hyperautomated, self-organizing IT have been around for decades”). We should be concentrating on the non-technical aspects of IT, where there remains enormous potential for greater efficiencies in areas such as improved morale, better business skills, more efficient processes, reduced change failures, better project selection and management, server consolidation, open source, renegotiation of contracts for spare capacity onsite, and outsourcing of selected specialist functions in-house (such as network administration, monitoring, and provisioning). Cloud computing is another vendor-driven fad that adds complication, risk and expense. One day it may prove to be a useful tool in certain contexts, but it isn't the miracle fix it is touted to be. We won't save money by building ever more complex tech toys.

Features

The Pillars of ITIL

ITIL started out as just the books, but it is much more today: it is a movement, a professional group, and an industry. A great deal of activity goes on in promotion and support of ITIL worldwide. Much of it is ungoverned and ad-hoc. There are many pillars of the house of ITIL and OGC governs and manages only four.

The Skeptical Informer, January 2009, Volume 3, No. 1

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