Comments from the IT Skeptic blog, February 2008

Comments were quiet on the blog for a second month. The Northern Hemisphere does not go into a torpor for January the way we do down here, so I assume the reduced activity stems entirely from my own leisurely posting rate.

It is good to see new people posting comments each month, though I must say a fair proportion seem to have their own websites: the ITSM blogging industry looks to be as incestuous as the blogging industry overall.

A thread from last month ended with an interesting comment about

Strategy, and the mechanisms leading up to it, are disturbingly often explained in simplistic terms. Its nature is inherently dialectic and characterized by uncertainty. It deals with a future state we cannot really know...Can we "plan" it, as in a process? I don't know, but, if so, it should be done with an understanding of the limits and traps of "strategic planning".

and another thread from December ended with discussion of Metric Monkeys - managers who manage by numbers.

Another ongoing thread was discussion of exactly what the processes are in ITIL3. Several more were suggested.

The topic of certification continued with a discussion of the relevance of ITIL V1 certifications today.

The IT Skeptic Annual Awards generated some heated comment, as they are likely to do. Someone leapt to the defense of Sharon Taylor,which lead to a discussion of the fairness of the awards, and degenerated into accusations of sycophancy. A branch thread started with that perennial "what is process" and led to an interesting discussion of BPM and its successes and failures as a BOK.

The post about the blogging industry brought new readers and new commenters. Likewise the comments about my post on privacy, which led to an interesting discussion on whether privacy is any defense against malevolent government.

Relevant to my editorial in this newsletter, I took a swipe at APMG for its ongoing degradation of the training and certification process. Appalling.

We considered the question of ITIL's scope of coverage of ITSM, actual and potential, which continued here. A closely related thread was this one on ITIl vs ISO20000: how they relate, the uptake of ISO20000 (and ITIL3), and so on. It included this quote:

One of my concerns about ITIL 3 is that amongst all the hype there is a sub text that ITIL 2 is old hat and everybody has already done it, rather than an acknowledgment that organisations still struggle with the basics.

The comment of the month must be this one though:

ISACA is devoid of politics. itSMF is a Petri dish for politics.

Nailed it in one.