ITIL V3 Live is ... still coming, and VERY expensive

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.

There are those of us who thought an ITIL portal might be a free service of user contributed content and collaboration. It does seem that at least some of the Knowledge Base will be free to all: contributed "news, white papers and case studies". Guess who will be contributing most of them? Yup, the vendors.

But all the good stuff will cost you thousands of dollars a year. The money goes to TSO, the private company who are making a big deal about how the content is overseen by the Chief Architect and the original authors on a Content Review Group, and how the content comes from the original authors "and other key stakeholders". [Thank heavens they called it a "Group", not a "Board" for once]. One assumes there is a royalty involved here for OGC to fund future development of ITIL [BTW I hear ITIL 4 is in early discussion already]. I wonder how much.

There are also some of us who thought process maps, role descriptions and work procedures might be what we would be buying in the core books. Or even the complementary books. Nope.

The core books are just a sweetener. The big payola comes online and if you want the real meat of ITIL you pay it. Nice. Very nice. I don't know of anyone who saw that one coming. As an ex-predatory-vendor I can say these guys are GOOD. Why don't sharks eat software salesemen? Professional courtesy. You can amend that old joke to include ITIL publishers too now.

There is a demo here. Reading between the lines it would seem it runs best on Flash, i.e. it is still vapourware at this point. The future tense crops up in descriptions here and there, and if you register you register your interest only. Send no money now.

I have first-hand experience of how a non-commercial model doesn't always work, but with something as big as ITIL, with so much momentum, I reckon with official backing it could. Certainly as a free marketeer I understand how a commercial incentive moves things along.

But twenty-five hundred quid per annum for an online clickable process map is just obscene. Please before you pay that kind of money for something that once was a public service from the government, check out my post about COBIT as an alternative. Don't all do it though. If COBIT gets as big as ITIL the money engine will debase it too.