The IT Skeptic - Comments for "ITIL V3 has a bet each way: proven guidance and bleeding edge thought-leadership, but how to tell?"

Vendor market building?

Cary King — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:44:30 +0000

Well, let's see. It might be that the authors have some interest in expanding the ITIL "vision" from generally-accepted "best practices" to something a little grander.

A quick look at the acknowledgements section of ITIL v.3...
The Chief Architects work for Accenture, a university (now Gartner), and then there's Sharon Taylor.

Of the eleven authors five were from HP and two from Pink Elephant. The rest from firms that focus exclusively on ITIL consulting.

Since v.3 was written, HP has bought Mercury and Opsware and... Didn't HP just buy EDS? Perhaps they're executing on a strategy? If so, good for them.

That's not, necessarily, a problem, it's just that the conflict of interest that seems to be built in to ITIL v.3 by the author/vendors and marketed their itSMF cheerleaders needs to be fully exposed.

Some are arguing that ITIL should become a standard. I disagree. I would argue that ITIL provides a good reference for service management - but, needs to be viewed skeptically (pun intended).

Cary King
Minerva Enterprises
Managing Partner
www.MinervaE.com

(b)leading ideas

JoePearson — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:40:10 +0000

Stone the crows, Brad, but you're right. "Leading ideas" has become a Good Thing, an advertising sound bite for consulting firms or books. But they can easily be rubbish, or unclear, or unsupported. If, as I suggested one comment up, the so-called leading ideas bits of ITIL 3 were clearly separated from the "established practice", it could promote more scrutiny. More contribution from the community.

Leading or Mental M&st?rb*tion

buraddo — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:43:57 +0000

Sorry for the crudity, but it place the right mental picture for my comment (and I am an Aussie, so we are culturally inappropriate from birth).

The comments regarding ITIL not being prescriptive allows them to maintain a little distance between what is practical and what is theoretical "best practice". If they go too far, then obviously they will be left standing on there own and someone/thing else will fill the void of detachment from there community.

Community here is the critical thing. Proprietary Software vendors have a similar conundrum in competing with Free and Open Source software. If you allow the direction of your product to be decided by a few so-called "intelligent" people and not the community as a whole, then you drive a wedge between you and what makes you successful. ITIL has the problem of relying on the vision of select few authors and not the combined knowledge of its supporters.

ITIL needs to get in-touch with its community and allow for more influence of the content based on the community. I am not advocating socialism, but more a combination of leadership and participation. Without leadership its hard to push the boundary, but participant will always make you keep it REAL..

Brad Vaughan
http://blogs.sun.com/buraddo

And why

JoePearson — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:46:35 +0000

I have to agree that V3 contains leading ideas and established practice (I'm staying on the fence as to whether it's "best" or even "good" in all companies).

But why? I think you touched on the reasons:

Here are some possible reasons ITIL has wandered off from GASMP and contains unproven bleeding edge ideas:
1. the authors want to be clever
2. OGC wants ITIL to stay current for another ten years without having to go through another Refresh
3. ITIL is now a handbook for consultants not end users
4. Parts of ITIL are there to generate new markets for the vendors and/or consultants

Above all, ITIL wants to be accepted, and I think they felt that V3 would not be accepted unless it was (1) smart stuff, (2) current in the future (that even sounds logically impossible), and perhaps most of all (3) & (4) to be accepted by vendors and consultants it had to show new meat.

I think ITIL needs to be broken up into "established practice" and "leading ideas". Not so many people would buy the latter books, of course, and no one would get training or certification in them.