ITIL's online presence is a dog's breakfast

TSO and APMG both maintain websites "on behalf of" OGC. TSO also maintains their own commercial site with a confusingly similar name to their "on behalf" one. Neither of them provide any user community- that is left to itSMF to do. Page ranks of pages are [corrected:] 6 or less, while for purposes of comparison the less popular ISACA quietly maintains a page rank 8. The Wikipedia entry is rubbish. ITIL's online brand presence is a dog's breakfast - ill-conceived and poorly executed.

TSO owns ITIL Live, confusingly now rebranded as Best Practice Live. It is not an "official" OGC/ITIL site and yet ITIL authors and other members of the ITIL community are claimed to be contributing to it. It also contains an ITIL process model that may or may not be the one worked on originally as part of the official ITIL body of knowledge. What happens when TSO's contract with OGC as official publisher is up? It would seem to be entirely TSO's work and TSO's copyright property.

Then there is the OGC Best Management Practice site "An OGC website managed and published by TSO in conjunction with OGC and APMG", which definitely is an official site. So if you contribute to that site you are contributing to the ITIL official body of knowledge (hardly anyone does anyway). Best Management Practice is unconnected with Best Practice Live other than both being run by TSO - no confusion there right? Certainly Best Practice Live makes no attempt to point out that it is not official, or to mention that there is another site called Best Management Practice which is.

And then there is the Official ITIL Website, or as it also coyly calls itself "ITIL Home", "An OGC website managed and published by APM Group in conjunction with OGC and TSO".

Then we have itSMF International providing even more news and information about ITIL. In fact itSMF International is providing the only semi-official online forum (unless you count the pay-for-access one at ITIL Live). All three of the "official" OGC sites still fail to provide any sense of community.

All of the sites have entirely different look-and-feel - and weak cross-linking- with zero consistent branding other than the OGC swirl occasionally slapped onto things.

So which is the REAL home of ITIL, the face to the world? You got me.

Is there a three-way power-struggle here between TSO, APMG and iTSMFI for web dominance? All three are doing so anaemically that one doubts it. Best Management Practice's homepage [corrected:] has page rank 6 on Google and the ITIL page rates a 5. The Official ITIL Website [corrected:] is also a 6 and some of the pages on qualifications rate a 6 too. (Not surprising - my own traffic experience is that qualifications is what the public cares about: if I was a traffic whore I'd write about nothing else). itSMFI rates a 5 and the forum a 4. (ITIL Live [corrected:] is PR 4). By comparison the IT Skeptic manages a 4, so does MOF, the humble FITS is a 4, OGC's own PRINCE2 is a 6 and OGC's homepage is a 7, and ISACA is page rank 8 and its COBIT page is a 6. For something that is the biggest thing in ITSM since Deming rode a bike, ITIL's official presence is woeful. If it wasn't smeared all over multiple sites I reckon it would match ISACA's 8. At least they finally now appear on the front page of a Google search for "ITIL".

Finally we have the nutters on Wikipedia staunchly maintaining that they represent the ITIL community online (page rank 5), apparently without arousing the interest of OGC's somnolent lawyers.

The online branding of ITIL is a dog's breakfast. It has been handled so badly that it is now hopelessly fragmented and confused. An interested newbie is as likely to find the hideous Wikipedia entry or one of the several commercially-motivated sites or forums or this blog as any official branded presence.

Comments

Best Practice Live

I recently reviewed the Best Practice Live site. I think it is still very-much a work-in-progress; though it was nice to see process models for every process - something still not in the core guidance.

They recently reduced their membership price too. I commented at the last itSMF conference (when I first saw it) that it was too expensive; and was told that they had done their research and understood their target market. Seems they didn't quite pitch it right first time.

Anyway, as always, a nice read - keep up the Skeptical work - you know I'm a big fan.

Will
http://itiltalk.blogspot.com/

ITIL process models enhanced on ITIL Live?

Yes I recently blogged on the reduced price. Many of us were under the obviously mistaken impression that those process models were going to be part of the publicly available content of ITIL.

I've also heard rumours that the models are in fact "enhanced" - that is there have been improvement changes since the books were published. Comment on that anyone?

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