The IT Infrastructure Library
I just can't get excited about ITIL4. No, you didn't miss any blog posts: I haven't written anything yet.
ITIL aspires to be customer-centric. If only the reality matched the aspiration. If only the main lesson people took away from ITIL was customer value. In practice I think the world takes away quite different lessons.
Here is a bunch of awful fallacies that the world actually took from ITIL:
Stuart Rance called out ITIL's dirty secret: they're not really processes. Stuart talks about how some things that ITIL calls a process are not a process.
Forecasting is hard, especially about the future. Nevertheless here are some thoughts on the future of ITIL: it is not going away but it is on a trajectory of gradually decreasing significance.
I've consulted on many ITSM initiatives and it always seemd a struggle to effect improvement: all stick and no carrot; dragging horses to the river with no interest in drinking. My DevOps consulting these days is a different experience - of happy horses following willingly and drinking their fill. The difference between ITIL and DevOps is that DevOps works.
It's not as if too many people really care anymore, but the ITIL market appears to continue to shrink.
I haven't kept an eye on the numbers for a while - having more important things to think about these days with DevOps - but a comment on this blog triggered me to go look again. Yup, still falling.
DevOps and ITIL are both ITSM. The patterns are the same though the execution is different.
Here is an interesting story of the use of the ITIL name....
Read this link first.
I take these lessons from this:
1) Lawyers are incapable of subtlety or nuance, or even thinking much.
2) Build an open content website and they won't come.
Axelos are shooting themselves in the foot by constraining consultants' use of ITIL.