The IT Skeptic's New Year Awards for 2012
Every year the IT Skeptic website starts the New Year with our Awards. (You can see past years' awards here). This year I announced them on a Google Hangout which I hope will be the first of a series of hangouts for skeptical conversations.
Chris Dancy ran a "Red carpet" pre-show event:
Here is the actual Awards video:
The Awards for 2012 are:
The Bob Seger Trophy goes to itSMF International for sinking slowly into obscurity, through a screwed constitution and structure, petty politics, and lack of a clear vision, despite the best efforts of many volunteers.
The Trump Medal for Most Inappropriate Empire Building goes to the UK Cabinet Office for putting the rights to ITIL, Prince2 and the whole Best Practice family on sale for commercial exploitation. Runners up were the Cabinet Office and the rest of Castle ITIL for piling the ITIL Masters accreditation onto the already-over-the-top ITIL certification scheme.
The Al Gore Trophy for Outrageous Hyperbole goes to Nucleus Research for the most outrageous Crap Factoid ever:
ROI: 7148%
Payback: 1 week
Cost : Benefit Ratio 1 : 88.5
The Frankenstein Bolt goes to Gartner for bringing the service desk Magic Quadrant back from the dead.
The Service Management Entrepreneural Champion for 2012 is APMG for landing the COBIT5 account.
The Silver Dummy for IT User Petulance goes to Forbes Online for this dummy spit over BYOD.
The Raving Loony Cup goes to the unnamed person (but I know who you are) who waged a personal hate (e)mail campaign against itSMF International and its elected Chair, thus setting a new low in behaviour (by a clear margin) by itSMF officials. Hopefully this person has received psychiatric help as we haven't heard from them in some time.
The Three Thimbles of Deception go to the Microsoft executive whose first reaction when a demo went wrong was to hide it from the audience.
The Cro-Magnon Club for Technological Neanderthals goes to VMWare for thinking IT is only about technology.
The Grand Sagan Candle for services to IT Skepticism goes to Knight Capital for lighting a shining beacon for all to see, clearly signposting the importance of careful change control and testing, and the dangers of automation.
Made in New Zealand 
