The Skeptical Informer #8: Merry Christmas and an invitation
The IT Skeptic's Skeptical Informer newsletter for 29th December 2012.
Merry Christmas to all contributors and readers and followers of the IT Skeptic blog and twitter stream. I hope you all had a good year.
The older you get the more you come to understand that happy is a a transitory event not a permanent state. My year had its ups and downs but enough ups to say it was a good one. If a year should be measured by its results, by the fruit it bore, then overall 2012 sucked for me money-wise - as it did for many of you - but I stumbled across Standard+Case and I evolved a bunch of other ideas about ITSM so on that basis it was an excellent year. I am especially happy with the series of articles I did for ITSM Review as well. I sincerely hope you all derived some benefit from my output this year, including but not limited to entertainment.
Speaking of entertainment, every New Year the IT Skeptic awards Awards, such as these ones from past years:
- The Platinum Microscope for the Finest Hair Split goes to Pink Elephant for assuring the world that PinkVerify does not certify ITIL compliance. Assessment, validation, verification, certification, compatibility, comparison against criteria, explicit demonstration of commitment, reassurance, diligence, support for definition and requirements, and guidance met … but not compliance.
- The Gold Finger for Megalomania goes to Microsoft for trying to patent everything (and for …).
- The Joseph Stalin Award for the Revision of History goes to OGC for quietly deleting the 1.1.1 section of ITIL2 books that referred to ITIL as “public domain” and “publicly available” that “any organisation can use”.
- The Cobbler's Children's Shoes (no connection to the book by Charles Betz) for failure to follow one's own best practices goes to TSO for having zero release notification or information for new versions of ITIL books.
- The Little Blue Pill for services to public sanity goes to the British Government for the THIRD year running, this time for disbanding OGC. What they saved in eliminating the highly paid executives alone would justify this move. Hopefully now the Cabinet Office will concentrate more on complying with government policy and delivering a public service than on building a revenue-earning empire of trademarked and copyrighted products.
- The Slush Fund Championship is awarded to APMG for paying £600,000 to itSMF International to bail them out when their corporate sponsorships tanked. Apparently nobody saw a governance issue that the body that is the nominal representative of the training consumer community on the ITIL Qualifications Board is receiving 73% of its income from the training industry.
- The Snake-Oil Championship goes to those regular award-winners BMC, for a classic bait and switch case study, selling asset management as CMDB.
- The winners of the Perseverance Cup are Glenn O'Donnell and Carlos Casanova, authors of The CMDB Imperative, for clearly stating CMDB doesn't exist right now but still writing a book about it.
- The Zen Award for One Hand Clapping goes to the IT Skeptic for the non-event that was Free ITIL. A grand total of about 300 people out of over a million certified ITIListas rallied to the cause and called for ITIL intellectual property to be liberated.
- the Rainbow Headband for hippy-dippy idealistic nonsense goes to all those in the Agile, Lean or DevOps movements who think people perform better when you set them free and a practical approach can be based on multi-skilled super-humans.
...you get the idea.
This year I thought I'd plunge bravely into the 21st Century and announce the awards live online via a Google+ Hangout on New Year's Day (that's January 2nd here in paradise). You are invited https://plus.google.com/events/activity/c8qge9vo9m83m6vb6sc2dj8qkok
And don't hesitate to suggest an award! :)
A belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you!!
IThe IT Skeptic Awards for 2011
Why process maturity is a useless metric for ITSM improvement
Risk and value should be the primary metrics for planning and assessing your improvement.
Improve first
Improve first. Measure, plan, manage, define and standardise later.
How ITIL gets Incident vs Problem wrong
In ITIL, we don't separate Incidents from Problems properly. This causes a muddy and confused definition of both. Join me as I try one more time to make this clear.
How to improve your service configuration data
...or any process/practice.
The service desk isn't here right now
It seems to me that a Service Desk should be able to take time out for professional development and team building.
IT: to protect and serve
The motto "to protect and serve" is a good one for IT. OK, "to protect and serve" has acquired some negative baggage but the US police slogan still resonates as far away as where I live on The Last Rock On The Planet. There seems to be this expectation that IT exists only to create new IT in response to the demands of the business. It's not true.
Six Tactics for ITSM to Deal with Agile
As far as mainstream ITSM is concerned the primary impact of Agile development method is on our carefully constructed production environment. Agile has the potential to undo decades of work building protection for the assets for which we are accountable. It's our job to control risk as well as enable value. Sometimes it seems Agile ignores the former in pursuit of the latter. Here are six tactics to help deal with that.
Eating the ITIL elephant one leg at a time
It is ridiculously common for advice about ITSM to talk about which ITIL process to do first, or what order to do the processes in. Even the official books Planning to implement Service Management and ITIL Lite are built on the premise that an ITSM initiative is assembled from the ITIL processes. Wrong wrong wrong.
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