The Skeptical Informer, 2009

October 2009, Volume 3, No. 8

We live in an ever accelerating world, where the rate of change itself is changing, differential of differential. For a bloke who has just turned 50 it is all a bit alarming. Recently I wrote a nostalgic note elsewhere about the early 1970s, helping my Dad operate an IBM 360/40 when all his staff went on strike. Some of the points of interest in this to us today are: 1) it was so physical a task operating that machine that two 12- or 13-year-old boys could be of assistance 2) those boys (my friend and I) had never touched a computer before in our lives 3) for us it was like a contemporary boy being asked to help fire a rocket. Most of our peers would not touch a computer for another decade 4) there is little chance of allowing two schoolkids through the security to a modern server room to help run the place, and a manager who did it would risk being fired 5) the operators were in a union There has to be a limit somewhere - no graph of reality is linear - but Moore's Law thunders on unchecked. My son's MP3 player, my model locomotives and my desk phone each have more processing power than that room full of machinery back in 1972. Less talked about but just as revolutionary is the increase in bandwidth and mobility. Every kid walks around staring at a phone instead of seeing the world. Trainers and presenters are expected to impart learning to an audience who have their noses buried in laptops and Blackberries. And now presenters are supposed to be listening and responding to the Twitter "back channel" while they speak. (I thought "back channel" was a euphemism for something else). Men are accused of only being able to do one thing at a time. In the modern age I wish they would. Something has to give and what gives is the value and quality of the communication. You can post any old crap on the internet now knowing that nobody will fact check, few will think critically, or follow your reasoning to its logical conclusions. So long as the superficial message is attractive on any level to the audience, it will get traffic, links, referrals, and isn't that what communication is all about in the 21st Century? I even had to post huge disclaimers all over the ITIL Wizard because readers were taking it seriously. I bet you're not reading this, I mean really reading it. The percentage of you who have even got this far without tuning out are speed-reading, getting through one of fifty or a hundred emails today that you bothered to scan. None of you have stopped at any point in the read to ponder what I am saying, to roll it around like a mouthful of wine and savour it to see if it is real quality or just a supermarket quaffing red. The sheer quantity of information and opinion pouring over my desk every day is staggering. I can't read it all, let alone consider it all, or more to the point remember it all. It just pours by like a river. We must be at a point now where we miss so much more than we pick up that the inefficiencies will slow the progress down. We are spiralling off into such an air-headed superficiality of twittered soundbites that one wonders if any real new solid valuable knowledge is formed at all. ITIL V3 cranked out five books in a year. They pumped them out so fast that they left out some of the V2 stuff (error control, proactive problem management...) and dozens of reviewers missed basic typos. Three years down the track it is being revised. How long before the next revision? By the time ITIL talks about the cloud we'll be on to "outer space computing". There are over 60 IT frameworks. Who knows them all well enough to choose the best ones for a situation? Inherently everything we do in IT processes is sub-optimal: we use the frameworks we happen to know, which are always a few steps behind and almost certainly don't include all the best knowledge available. Recently I read a classic example: a fantastic paper from the 1990s that I think should reshape the way we think about change, stability, availability and root cause analysis and yet ten years later it doesn't have the slightest influence on ITIL. And another gaping gap a few days earlier: I did a presentation to the local chapter of ISACA on "Governing ITIL". So I did what I always do to learn anything these days: I fired up Google. Zip. Zilch. Then in sheer desperation I resorted to reading the ITIL books. There is five eighths of sweet flock-all written anywhere about how to interface an IT operations framework with an IT governance framework, what the interlocks are. At what points does the policy go in? Which procedures have policy, strategy or plans as an input? Where do we check we are still tracking to them? Where do we produce the metrics and reports to reassure the governors? What mechanisms allow us to be evaluated by governors? Never mind the conceptual 38500 and Val IT stuff - how does this work? As far as I can tell nobody has thought about this much. We are operating in such a whirling fog of information that even as the technology gallops ahead the human knowledge is slipping behind. As a profession, heck as a civilisation, we can't keep up. Balls are being dropped, gaps are being left, and quality has gone to the dogs. This is not sustainable. It does leave lots of spaces for me to poke books into. If I ever get time next year I'll write one about Governing ITIL, to follow on from Owning ITIL. I have plans to revise that book too, since things are changing so fast, not least of all my ideas on the subject. However it seems folk like Owning ITIL very much the way it is. The BCS, the Society Formerly Known as the British Computer Society, reviewed Owning ITIL and said "Score: 10 out of 10... This is a wonderfully irreverent, but totally authoritative, book... It is a slim manual that seeks to debunk the language and meaning of ITIL and relate it to the practical implementation of IT service management... It’s a gem of a book that offers a good perspective on what the ITIL v3 manuals take 5 volumes to cover." Also in the works is a book on Simple Service, an attempt to apply the Kiwi cut-the-crap mindset to ITIL, which may or may not work. Watch this space. But you won't, you're too busy. By the time the book comes out, if it does, its release might vaguely remind you of this newsletter, but you most certainly won't ever notice if it doesn't see the light of day. It will be 2010 by then and you'll be coping with the world having changed again. The changes might not be pretty either. I'll finish with a quote from a US government economist. I snatched it from an old newsreel on a documentary so I didn't get his name: "Every indication is that the economy has turned the corner...1931 will provide the greatest opportunities of a generation"

April 2009, Volume 3, No. 4

The IT Skeptic wonders if it is time to hang up my skepticking gear. Next week marks the third anniversary of The IT Skeptic website. When I started out, I was pretty much a lone voice questioning all the sunny optimism over ITIL. Now it is a crowded field, ranging from Aiden Lawes doing a fabulous job lobbing heavy well-considered shells to the rattatat machine-gunning of the much younger Marc Buzina, with a number of others in between. ITIL is undoubtedly over the top of the hype curve and accelerating down into the trough of despair. I wrote some time ago that I hoped that by reducing the height of the hype curve I could thereby reduce the pain of the fall. I don't think I had much effect. Along the way I may or may not have influenced a few things. It has certainly cost me a lot of time and effort and lost revenue for very little reward indeed. It has also I suspect cost me one or two friendships and possibly even business opportunities. On the other hand it has given me a geographic reach and profile I never imagined. But I really don't like hurting people's feelings. Nor do I like being seen as consistently negative or destructive. In my recent compilation of the blog, The Worst of the IT Skeptic, I said:

I strongly urge everyone to do amateur acting classes even if, like me, you never tread the boards. One of the most important things you learn is mask work. It is enlightening to see how a mask transforms your personality as you put it on. The IT Skeptic didn’t set out to be a journalist but that is what he has become. Journalists are a contemptible breed (except of course any reviewing this book). I don’t much like most that I have met. But the IT Skeptic performs a useful function in the IT industry, asking hard questions that needed to be asked, especially to put a brake on the wild exuberance that is sweeping the ITIL industry away. In order to fulfil their function, journalists must be read by many readers. To be successful - to survive - journalists must serve the market. They write what the market wants to read, and the market likes a little titillation with their content. I can’t say I entirely like the IT Skeptic, but I like what he does and I hope he continues to do it. In the end, I have come to terms with him because he is me. Now I'm struggling with the recession like everyone else, perhaps more than most reading this. I have a responsibility to my family to focus on more lucrative pursuits. And yet the material keeps streaming in. Vendors, analysts and Castle ITIL alike all keep throwing stuff my way. It's hard to imagine the IT Skeptic kicking off his boots. But he sure has to spend more time on the day job. P.S. I changed the blog colour scheme (CSS) again. Response was not overwhelming. About a third liked it. Only a couple of readers pined for the old scheme. Well I like it and as long as I'm paying that's the end of it :) Actually I'm not wild about the graphic design of the blog but I'm not making enough money to justify getting a professional makeover. Volunteers welcome - I'll credit you on the footer of every page. P.P.S. Continuing on from last month, the pictures are some of my favourites I've obtained from CanStockPhoto. The guy peering through the keyhole is Big Uncle, from a series I did about benevolent public security, but he makes me think a little of the IT Skeptic.

March 2009, Volume 3, No. 3

In the world at large, the recession continues to gain momentum. It is like an ice age, slowly spreading ice and snow across the landscape. It seems to me most people either think the snowstorm has blown over or complain that it is a bit chilly. The G20 allocate $1.9 trillion to help and everyone relaxes. But much of that was already spent, and spent in a world economy with an annual GDP of $70 trillion. 3% of one year's GDP is hardly going to turn the world around. Twenty fiddlers watching the fires. As an independent consultant my world may get uglier than yours, but all of you should be making plans to survive the next few years. The big news in the ITIL world in March was the ITIL Official Endorsement Scheme. What we know of this scheme is only what we can deduce through news articles and blog leaks. But -as you can see from the linked post - I don't like the look of it so far. The idea is great, the execution questionable. (That post has one of the best graphics I've used on the blog yet. I'd like to acknowledge more of the stuff I use, but I can only tell you it comes from Gudella on canstockphoto.com, no other details. Note that I don't just pillage flicker like many bloggers - I pay for my graphics, acknowledging the artist's IP rights. This month's newsletter pictures are some of my favourites.) The IT Skeptic's little world has been all about books this last month. I'm not referring to the rearrangement of the rooms in our house that includes moving three bookcases (my son is moving into a downstairs room at last instead of being next to Mum and Dad, and Two Hills Ltd expands its share of the house by 300%!). I speak of publishing a number of my own books. I'd like to have released these at a more leisurely pace but they need to be out in the world earning their keep. Finally, today, I end - for now - by announcing the release of Owning ITIL®. I have a bunch of books in planning but they won't see the light of day until later in 2009 and into 2010, if they get writ. For now, my published books are:

	Format	Price	Amazon.com	Other Amazons	Lulu
Introduction to Real ITSM A satire on IT operations	print	$18.99 +p&p Special price!	Yes	Not yet	Yes
The Worst of the IT Skeptic all the good stuff from three years of this blog	print	$19.95 +p&p	Not yet	Never	Yes
	download	$15.95	Never	Never	Yes
The IT Skeptic Looks at CMDB	print	$9.95 +p&p	Never	Never	Yes
The IT Skeptic Looks at CMDB	download	$7.95	Never	Never	Yes
Working in IT our career, our profession (my personal favourite)	print	$19.95 +p&p	Not yet	Not yet	Yes
	download	$15.95	Never	Never	Yes
Owning ITIL® a skeptical guide for decision-makers	print	$34.95 +p&p	Not yet	Not yet	Yes

Take a look at those that interest you. I'm proud of all these books and hope they will bring you much interest and enjoyment. I don't have a huge marketing budget: if you enjoy a book please please tell folks you know. I'll see most of my Kiwi blog followers at the itSMFnz conference in May - be there bro'. I hope to meet a few readers at the Pink Elephant conference in February next year too!

January 2009, Volume 3, No. 1

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.