skeptic's blog

a more skeptical attitude toward IT is the right one to have

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2006-10-29 08:27

Nicholas Carr touched off a heated debate on the role of information technology in business with the publication in 2003 of his Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" ...
"In this era, a more skeptical attitude toward IT is the right one to have"

How to contribute to ITIL

Submitted by skeptic on Sat, 2006-10-28 19:50

You have several easy options to choose from:
1. Be an author. Wait 3-5 years for the next ITIL Refresh. Tender for one of the books. Be one of about a dozen people worldwide to win a tender. Devote a year of your life to writing a book.
2. Know an author. Get networking now: you have 3-5 years to guess who the next ones will be and get into their professional circle. Then persuade them your idea is better than theirs.
3. Contact OGC to tell them you have some content to contribute. There is no documented process to do this, not any advertised contact point, but OGC are British government bureaucrats so you should find them helpful and communicative if you just send stuff off to any old address you can find. Once you have their attention, they will put you in touch with the next authors. See 2 above.
4. Forget it.

ITIL is culturally biased by its narrow and closed contributor base

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2006-10-27 04:32

ITIL is written by “service suppliers, training companies and academia in Britain, Canada and the USA” who know IT operations and cater to corporate business. That is a narrow authorship base for a framework that sets out to document IT Service Management. No authors from Asia. No authors from government, health, engineering, non-profits, or small business. And zero mechanisms for the disenfranchised to contribute. So how does anyone know it is universal best practice, and is it best for those other users?

ITIL is far from comprehensive

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2006-10-24 05:57

ITIL certainly does not cover all aspects of "IT Infrastructure" as the name suggests. It does not even cover all aspects of an IT Service Management Library, which would be a more accurate name for its scope. For a framework that pays much lip service to the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, it is light on with any part of that cycle except "Do".

ITIL in Asia

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2006-10-13 21:55

The IT Skeptic is writing for ITSMWatch now. A recent discussion in that forum led to the IT Skeptic expressing opinions on ITIL in Asia:

The Craftsman and the Bazaar

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2006-10-08 09:16

Many of you will be familiar with that seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a manifesto of the open source movement. If not, I recommend you read it. Today I want to talk about a different perspective: the Craftsman and the Bazaar.

Quiet around here

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2006-09-11 21:41

The IT Skeptic has been quiet for a while. I've been programming. Dunno about you but when I'm cutting code it consumes me: nothing else gets done until I've got it working.

"It" is a family records site for my extended family, with working HTML-based family tree, done in PHP. Great fun.

An oldie but a goodie: software salesman dies and goes to Heaven...

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2006-08-31 23:03

This software salesman dies and, by some bookkeeping error, goes to Heaven. He gets issued with his halo and harp and assigned a cloud. He sits for a few days strumming the harp, perfect weather every day, constant peace and tranquillity.

After day four, he gets up and walks back to St Peter at the gates. “Hey buddy, does anything ever happen here?”

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