How embarrassing for CSC

There is some appallingly bad information on the internet about ITSM. But you don't expect to see it in an article from a TechWeb magazine and you don't expect to see it from CSC. This is awful.

It is an article in Network Computing online magazine, entitled The IT Governance Cheat Sheet by a global VP & CTO of technology consulting for Global Business Services at CSC.

This is so bad I'm at a loss where to start. It is one long Crap Factoid.

The authors should read COBIT 5 and/or ISO38500 (which isn't even mentioned in an article entitled "IT Governance"; it is the ISO standard for Corporate Governance of IT), and learn what "governance" means. Everything the article called "governance" is actually management. That would be why we call it ITSM not ITSG.

Check out the cheat sheet in the article.

• COBIT 5 has been out for near a year now, and ITIL 2011 superceded ITIL v3 in... guess when.
• How can the cheat sheet talk about "related standards" and not mention ISO20000? That's the standard for ITSM.
• Where on earth did they get "ITALM"? I've never heard of it, and I can't find it on Google. Nor TBM and only passing references to "ITFM". I suspect these are CSC-speak; they certainly aren't "standard processes" that I can find.
• Frameworks in this area of busines and value alignment are M_o_V (stablemate of ITIL), OBASHI and BiSL, which are not mentioned either.
• Other frameworks not mentioned are eSCM (a service management framework for service providers like CSC), ISO15504 for process improvement (since the article mentioned CMMI) ...
• The inclusion of Web Services machine protocols in this context is just... odd. Web Services are not services in the service management sense. Web Services are executed by machine. They may be one component (CI) of a business service that allows the execution of a transaction. WS-xxx protocols have nothing to do with ITSM.

Then there's the article itself. I have no problem with the theme of the article:

As IT gradually gets drawn into a broad XaaS (everything as a service) transformation, service management becomes a mutual need for enterprises and their suppliers. A culture of reciprocal accountability must prevail, as it does in other industries.

Then it asks "Why doesn't an IT failure launch a predefined remediation process?". Well it does, at least in large sophisticated organisations like CSC. But reading around the question reveals that it is not about a "remediation" process: it is referring to an investigation by a regulatory body.

The article goes onto say

While the academic list of related artifacts can be daunting (what's below is just a sample) there are plenty of resources to help in preparing a highly customized and targeted subset that can serve as the materially significant list of critical ITSM tracks for a given business agenda.

The examples it cites as resources? The defunct website ITSM Watch (last new post March 2011), and Pink Elephant training.

The article recommends

I've seen plenty of theories on how many of the 26 ITIL processes and related artifacts are must-haves. Obviously, there is no universal answer. I recommend beginning with a manageable list of 10 to 15 carefully chosen subsets of these processes for large companies with cloud and in-house services. Smaller companies, or those with a simple IT infrastructure, could use fewer... ITSM is a mix of optional best practices and enforceable policies

What? You can improve a subset of the processes, but you are gonna have all of them like it or not, in one form or another. They're not options, they're a description of reality. It's like saying you can choose which laws of physics you will have.

I cringed when I read this, and I don't even work at CSC.