The Skeptical Informer, October 2010, Volume 4, No. 4
The newsletter of the IT Skeptic. All the IT skeptical news that is fit to print... and then some!
In 2010, in keeping with many organisations and our fellow chapters in the movement, itSMF UK has continued to feel the pressures caused by the global economic downturn. It’s also fair to say that we face increased competition from organisations delivering services in the same market space that we operate in."Competition"? "Market spaces"? If that competition is ISACA and/or BCS, I'd like to think close cooperation between professional bodies in the interest of exploring synergies for the membership would be in order, not seeing them off and squabbling over turf. Later
Since its inception as BS15000 (and latterly ISO/IEC 20000), the itSMF UK name and people have been synonymous with the development and growth of the standard. During 2010, the management board recognised that our operational capability and marketing reach was unlikely to see the pace of development that the global market requires.Whatever happened to promoting the good word of standards? itSMF should not exist to financially exploit them by selling them to a "global market". All this vendor-speak coming from itSMF makes me most uncomfortable. My favourite "world-conquest bit of the report is
the ever popular Service Talk remaining the world’s leading IT service management journal.I doubt that many people outside the UK have even seen Service Talk let alone read it regularly. I've blogged before about how Service Talk is a parochial provincial publication. I said then
I can't help noticing that it has a column by someone called Barry Corless who apparently is the Chair of itSMF. Funny i thought that was David Cannon. there's a lovely two-page spread about a conference in London. How about the conferences in Melbourne, Helsinki, Nashville and Bangkok? there's two pages on IOSM too, but no mention of ICSM or PRISM? Surely the rollout and progress of PRISM is big news worldwide? perhaps the most exciting news was Nottinghamshire County Council's adoption of Hornbill. The international ramifications are immense. I wasn't so excited by the discussion of the UK's Energy Efficiency legislation. perhaps you'd be interested in an article on the impact of NZ's new labour laws on call centres? I tried to call a few of the phone numbers in the ads but just got error tones. I guess they need the UK country code first eh?"remaining the world's leading journal" can only be a swipe at the new itSMF International magazine At Your Service (disclosure: I wrote one of the articles in the first edition). Someone needs to tell itSMFUK the sun has long since set on the Empire and the colonials no longer require their patronage. The most fascinating part of the Report is this:
Perhaps the most exciting venture of the year is working alongside APMG to produce a brand new set of ITIL qualifications to be titled the “Analyst Series”. Due for a November release, individual ITIL processes (Change, Problem and Service Level Management in Phase One) will be featured with instruction in softer skills required to perform the roles featured alongside traditional ITIL skills. Courses will focus on “How to” more than “What” with a very practical bias with syllabuses following the job roles defined by SFIA.Castle ITIL seems to have reversed their previous objections to alternate ITIL certification schemes. It remains to be seen how these courses fit with the existing certification scheme. Will they earn points? Will they be governed by the same mechanisms? Will they be quality controlled in the same way? [Quiet up the back. I didn't say it was good governance or QA - I just think we should be consistent.] Why are we allying ITIL with SFIA? which is an even more closed proprietary framework than ITIL. Who will profit from the new courses? Who is funding the development? What is itSMF International's involvement? Do itSMFUK members know all about this? Whiffy. Like that other great multinational, BP. P.S I'm doing a presentation on Dead Cat Syndrome at CC Learning's upcoming conference in Wellington, so I thought we'd have some nice pictures of cats for this edition. P.P.S. Please welcome to the blog Rambling Sid Realitsm, who has two songs posted in this newsletter. I hope you'll all make him welcome alongside those other blog characters The ITIL Wizard Chokey the Chimp and the IT Swami The ownership and governance of ITIL content and commercialisation grows ever messier and cloudier, as does itSMF's role in the whole thing. Sometimes it is all just one big Castle ITIL and one is never sure just who is in whose pocket and who's watching who. The IT Skeptic has come into possession of a puzzling document: the itSMFUK Chairmans Report for 2010. The puzzling bit is wondering just what itSMFUK is for. itSMF at an International level seems to have a dawning realisation that it just might exist for the membership, but that is clearly not so in the UK. itSMFUK seems more than anything to be a commercial money-making operation. Member organisations grow by growing membership. Member organisations work on creating added value for their members in return for the membership fees. The only mention of the members in the Chairman's report is once in a small paragraph at the bottom of the first page, mentioning a reorganisation of the Special Interest Groups (which are a value-add service for members). The rest of the report reads like one from a multinational's Board. They've been spending too much time with the British Computer Society who suffer from a similar megalomaniac affliction. It opens with
Features
The Five-Percent Club is that elite group of the (less than) 5% of organisations who actually succeed in justifying and implementing a CMDB, or the more modern and equally nutty CMS.
Technical vs Business service catalogue: we had a go at this argument previously but I am discussing it again over on LinkedIn and I have - I hope - a clearer way of stating the position. The popular perception of a Technical Service Catalogue is that it described different service entities than a Business Service Catalogue. That's just plain wrong. It gives IT staff entirely the wrong attitudes and mindset. So here is my shot at a definitive statement of position on Technical vs Business Service Catalogue. For any organisational unit, for the services that are the outputs across the boundary of that unit, there is only one service catalogue ...and only one set of services.
Oh dear. “The heart of ITIL is the CMDB”? No it isn’t. Not unless you are looking at ITIL from underneath. Yet another example of inside-out thinking instead of outside-in. Do customers care about the CMDB more than the Catalogue? No. Is ITSM about being customer-focused and service-centric? Well, I thought so.
The heart of ITIL is the service catalogue.
A transcript of a recent performance by the famous and fragrant folk music performer Rambling Kid Realitsm, of his popular number "Home on the Range":
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, saddle-down down in your seats now and share with me this sad ditty about a broken-hearted compu-geek, lost in the bowels of an office building, chilled to the bone amongst cheerless racks of servers, locked into the server room. He pines for the open range of his home WAN with a LAN in every room and wireless to the skies, where he can run barefoot through the root passwords and administrator privileges, free to trash and crash and rebuild on his lordly whim, king of his domains. Oppressed by evil managers who cut down his privileges and block his passwords, he weeps at the pain their soulless quest for reliability brings upon him, and slumped behind the storage array he sings this sad lament....
Perhaps it is just New Zealand, but I'm seeing a pattern amongst a majority of clients where IT operations business as usual (BAU) is crumbling under the load of project work.
Apparently ITIL people are obstructing the Cloud. Once again the poor techno-geeks' creative brilliance is stifled by unnecessary process.
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