The Skeptical Informer, 2010

October 2010, Volume 4, No. 4

The ownership and governance of ITIL content and commercialisation grows ever messier and cloudier, as does itSMF's role in the whole thing. Sometimes it is all just one big Castle ITIL and one is never sure just who is in whose pocket and who's watching who. The IT Skeptic has come into possession of a puzzling document: the itSMFUK Chairmans Report for 2010. The puzzling bit is wondering just what itSMFUK is for. itSMF at an International level seems to have a dawning realisation that it just might exist for the membership, but that is clearly not so in the UK. itSMFUK seems more than anything to be a commercial money-making operation. Member organisations grow by growing membership. Member organisations work on creating added value for their members in return for the membership fees. The only mention of the members in the Chairman's report is once in a small paragraph at the bottom of the first page, mentioning a reorganisation of the Special Interest Groups (which are a value-add service for members). The rest of the report reads like one from a multinational's Board. They've been spending too much time with the British Computer Society who suffer from a similar megalomaniac affliction. It opens with

In 2010, in keeping with many organisations and our fellow chapters in the movement, itSMF UK has continued to feel the pressures caused by the global economic downturn. It’s also fair to say that we face increased competition from organisations delivering services in the same market space that we operate in.

"Competition"? "Market spaces"? If that competition is ISACA and/or BCS, I'd like to think close cooperation between professional bodies in the interest of exploring synergies for the membership would be in order, not seeing them off and squabbling over turf. Later

Since its inception as BS15000 (and latterly ISO/IEC 20000), the itSMF UK name and people have been synonymous with the development and growth of the standard. During 2010, the management board recognised that our operational capability and marketing reach was unlikely to see the pace of development that the global market requires.

Whatever happened to promoting the good word of standards? itSMF should not exist to financially exploit them by selling them to a "global market". All this vendor-speak coming from itSMF makes me most uncomfortable. My favourite "world-conquest bit of the report is

the ever popular Service Talk remaining the world’s leading IT service management journal.

I doubt that many people outside the UK have even seen Service Talk let alone read it regularly. I've blogged before about how Service Talk is a parochial provincial publication. I said then

I can't help noticing that it has a column by someone called Barry Corless who apparently is the Chair of itSMF. Funny i thought that was David Cannon. there's a lovely two-page spread about a conference in London. How about the conferences in Melbourne, Helsinki, Nashville and Bangkok? there's two pages on IOSM too, but no mention of ICSM or PRISM? Surely the rollout and progress of PRISM is big news worldwide? perhaps the most exciting news was Nottinghamshire County Council's adoption of Hornbill. The international ramifications are immense. I wasn't so excited by the discussion of the UK's Energy Efficiency legislation. perhaps you'd be interested in an article on the impact of NZ's new labour laws on call centres? I tried to call a few of the phone numbers in the ads but just got error tones. I guess they need the UK country code first eh?

"remaining the world's leading journal" can only be a swipe at the new itSMF International magazine At Your Service (disclosure: I wrote one of the articles in the first edition). Someone needs to tell itSMFUK the sun has long since set on the Empire and the colonials no longer require their patronage. The most fascinating part of the Report is this:

Perhaps the most exciting venture of the year is working alongside APMG to produce a brand new set of ITIL qualifications to be titled the “Analyst Series”. Due for a November release, individual ITIL processes (Change, Problem and Service Level Management in Phase One) will be featured with instruction in softer skills required to perform the roles featured alongside traditional ITIL skills. Courses will focus on “How to” more than “What” with a very practical bias with syllabuses following the job roles defined by SFIA.

Castle ITIL seems to have reversed their previous objections to alternate ITIL certification schemes. It remains to be seen how these courses fit with the existing certification scheme. Will they earn points? Will they be governed by the same mechanisms? Will they be quality controlled in the same way? [Quiet up the back. I didn't say it was good governance or QA - I just think we should be consistent.] Why are we allying ITIL with SFIA? which is an even more closed proprietary framework than ITIL. Who will profit from the new courses? Who is funding the development? What is itSMF International's involvement? Do itSMFUK members know all about this? Whiffy. Like that other great multinational, BP. P.S I'm doing a presentation on Dead Cat Syndrome at CC Learning's upcoming conference in Wellington, so I thought we'd have some nice pictures of cats for this edition. P.P.S. Please welcome to the blog Rambling Sid Realitsm, who has two songs posted in this newsletter. Rambling Kid Realitsm

I hope you'll all make him welcome alongside those other blog characters The ITIL Wizard

Chokey the Chimp

and the IT Swami

August 2010, Volume 4, No. 3

Dear reader, I am resending this newsletter because a number of them arrived with missing text. The paranoid interpretation is that the dark agents of Castle ITIL Black Ops hacked my server. The less paranoid interpretation is that technology is out to get me. No wait... that's not less paranoid. Nevertheless, technology hates me and I hate it back. Here's the newsletter again. My apologies for any inconvenience. This publication is about as patchy as ITIL's own official newsletter. Which leads me to anther of my failures this year: the desire to move on from ITIL. The more I struggle, the more I seem to get dragged in to this metaphorical quicksand. Some of it I can't tell you about: work I've done and work I've turned down that I may regret later. Other stuff you'll find out about soon enough. It is nice to be recognised as having something to contribute. I like to think it shows I have walked the fine line I set myself: being honest and accurate and never personal (though that last bit is a big ask). I was going to say "fair" but part of tipping the balance of public opinion is about taking extreme positions, so I can't say I've always been fair. That's not modern journalism anyway: nobody writes a fair piece any more. They're all pushing an agenda instead of reporting facts. It's all part of the Post-Modernist destruction of intellectual civilisation and I'm clearly caught up in it.

Working in ITIL

In my working life too it's all about ITIL. ITSM actually, but "ITSM" draws blank looks where "ITIL" doesn't. I'd love to get on to governance and assurance, but when the service basics aren't there it's hard to move on. My recent comment on the blog:

"mapping Business communities to interfaces to application tiers, to infrastructure" "QA has them for testing priority and DR has them for priority restore" Oooh I wanna work where you work. Actually no I don't: there is a much much bigger constituency who regard what you just said in the same way i do - as a medieval peasant would have regarded descriptions of London: a wondrous place that I'd love to see one day. I'd be happy if all my clients had DR plans and QA in any form, let alone ones that mention services. As another analogy, I feel like a social worker dealing with kids in a slum tenement who reads about a Manhattan counselor straightening out rich kids suffering from Excess Toys Syndrome. Sorry but my work is here with my clients.

We get a very distorted view of the world from what we consume. Websites, blogs, forums, twitter, vendor and analyst crap... they are all talking about sites that already have some interest and activity around ITSM. We lose sight of the fact that many don't. I've complained for a long time that the "boffins" of ITSM only get to talk to the Fortune 1000 who can afford to talk to them, and a few others passionate enough about ITSM to seek them out. It is a biased sample. But even the chatter of the broader ITSM community is biased too: if a site knows nothing and cares not at all and does absolutely nothing about ITSM, they are unlikely to be represented in the ITSM community in any way. But they are out there in their hundreds of thousands. Ian Clayton said recently "Why are we still demystifying ITIL 22 years on...?" Because most of the IT world still hasn't got past being vaguely aware of ITIL... let alone the business management world. Client after client I deal with has ITSM that can only be described as primitive. Those I chatter with are talking about water-conserving shower-heads and desalination plants and I'm working on getting clean running water. I like to think this doesn't reflect badly on New Zealand. We may not be in the top 10 richest countries any more but we aren't Third World (except our broadband access). Kiwis embrace change and innovation. I'm confident this is a worldwide state of affairs. There are huge numbers of organisations crying out for better ITSM. They have a helpdesk they've renamed the Service Desk though they still just "bag and tag" anything that the simplest script won't fix and they don't own tickets from open to close. They have formal incident process that nobody remembers or follows, there are no OLAs. The service catalogue either doesn't exist or lies forgotten. When it exists it is a software list. Even projects aren't managed as a portfolio, let alone services. There are basic config spreadsheets, and change approvals that get steamrolled by senior management. The wrong people attend the CAB and the right ones are "too busy". Testing is not done at a service level and production readiness (service design) is poor. Capacity and Continuity are primitive. Servers are monitored, services aren't. There are no Problem, Availability or SLM processes. Service level reports are a chart of happy- and sad-faces done manually by the Service Desk Manager, usually late but customers don't believe them anyway. SLAs are defunct, irrelevant or non-existent. Sound like anyone you know? If not, you need to get out more. Before we get too much in a tizzy about oily beaches or runoff in rivers or whether to fluoridate we should remember that a child dies somewhere in the world every few minutes from preventable diarrhea and half of Pakistan is under four feet of murky brown gunk. And so it is with ITSM. We have a long way to go simply to get the basics to everyone who needs them.

ITIL Fundamentals

We also have a ways to go to get a common understanding of some fundamentals of ITSM. Take the debate over whether a service catalogue can catalogue anything more than the services provided to the customer. It bowls me over that anyone can think otherwise but a majority of my readers seemingly do. They're wrong - I'm sure of it. And if I read one more time that CMDB is the heart of ITIL or ITSM I'm gonna scream. Or the HUGE debate on the blog over whether applications are services and whether the Applications group leads the customer relationship. In the changing world of IT there are two groups who are sinking from the limelight and becoming increasingly more tactical and less strategic: applications developers and infrastructure technicians. And they don't like it. Something else that staggered me is that there seems to be no framework for IT policy. I know I mentione dit in the last newsletter, but on the subject of fundamentals I want to revisit it. ITIL bangs on about it with 44 separate strategies and policies that it scatters through the books like punctuation (thank-you Aale Roos for compiling a list of them). But I can find nothing that gives us a comprehensive list of necessary policies, let alone describes what a policy structure looks like and what the priorities are. There seems to be no systematic authoritative way to answer the following questions:

What policy applies to this situation? What policy applies to my role?
Are our IT policies complete? sufficient?
What is the maturity of our organisation's set of policies?
Does each audience (users, operators, customers, managers...) have a complete set of policies? Which audiences are not covered?
What is the hierarchy/structure of policies? how do they inter-relate?
If we have gaps, how do I prioritise addressing those gaps? What is most important?

Not in ITIL, COBIT, ValIT, ISO38500, eSCM, CMMI-SVC, ISO9000, Basel II, USMBOK... Believe me I looked. I am now developing my own framework. I've put in a request for it to be in COBIT5.

Basic Service Management

In that light, it seems ironic that my latest book is focused on promoting service management as a generic business discipline when we still haven't got our IT act together, but at least it is focused on the basics. Basic Service Management is a 50-page introduction to SM for business people everywhere. It is in early review now, to be published before Christmas (this Christmas). It is what Service Management for Dummies should have been: they tried to take the authors out of IT but they couldn't take the IT out of the authors. And it is what USMBOK needs to complement it. That 450-page doorstop is a definitive masterwork but it is hardly accessible to beginners. So I think I'm hitting a sweet spot just as awareness of the value of SM begins to grow outside of IT. For all my gloomy remarks, there are successful ITSM operations within IT departments and they are being noticed by the rest of their organisation, who look to them as centres of excellence. ITSM has proven value whatever Stevie Chambers may say. Calling the book "BSM" may annoy a few people who need annoying too :)

Goings on up at Castle ITIL

Now, to scuttlebutt. OGC took a drubbing from the Office of Public Sector Information in the UK, after Van Haren Publishing complained about anti-competitive practices between OGC and TSO. The resulting report confirmed that ITIL is a commercial product. ComputerWorld went further than that and interpreted it as saying that OGC have no remit to work on ITIL. That's not quite true: OGC have a remit alright to contribute to better practices. in order to wriggle out of their obligations to contribute to the public good and hence to protect their commercial arrangements around ITIL, they played weasel word games with the literal definition of what they do to suggest that it doesn't cover service management. This was so patently a cop-out that the OPSI's frustration and irritation is evident in the wording of the report. Personally I'm shocked that public servants can get away with this - servants who are amongst the highest paid in the British government. There is a veiled threat in the report that they won't continue to get away with it when an audit comes at the end of the year. In addition OGC have a new boss and new masters so we shall see what that brings. I wonder if the weird sudden republishing of the Official Introduction to the ITIL Service Lifecycle merely to remove the word "offical" from the title was actually a panicked response by OGC to the OPSI report. I say panicked because it was misplaced: that book is the only book NOT a valid target of the OPSI's criticsm of the mis-use of the word "official", whilst TSO continue to plaster "official" all over books like ITIL Lite to pump sales of their own copyright commercial products. On another note, common sense has finally won out within APMG and the criteria for the OGC ITIL Product Compliance Scheme [Oh for something snappy like say "ITILVerify"] are finally published. The very idea that the criteria could have been secret was the most pompous bit of British nonsense since ...[insert myriad examples here]... It is unsurprising that there was an attempt to keep them secret since my brief perusal suggests they are pretty basic. Something that isn't secret but sure isn't talked about is that vendors only have to meet 70% of the criteria (unlike PinkVerify which has more criteria and requires 100%). In fact I reckon a blind three-legged dog with a spreadsheet could pass the OGC test: something I plan to try out when I get the time but my dog got wind of it and went into hiding. The Scheme is an even more debased worthless certification than the ITIL Foundation exam, which is saying something. Speaking of which, the industry dragged the standards even lower by upping the teacher:trainee ratio to 1:18. I got disagreement from folk whose opinion I respect, but I'm holding my line on this: one person can't teach 18 adults under pressure in a few days. You can pedagogically lecture, you can preach, but you can't ensure they learned, and that's what I call teaching. Adult training has nothing to do with university lecturing so please don't give me that comparison. Universities have tutors running supplementary tutorials, students do extensive assignments and form study groups, and lecturers spend years getting the principles across. This move is just further commoditisation of the product for higher profit at the expense of the customer. Meanwhile the itSMF ructions continue, with the sudden exit of the itSMF UK CEO, Keith Aldis. Keith and one of the International Board had a small falling out, but I think this is also representative of the broader power struggle between the old school UK faction and the interests of the broader International itSMF. I had a hilarious email exchange when it was suggested to me that the itSMFUK's Service Talk was all the magazine itSMF needs internationally and the new newsletter is redundant. Allow me to share my response:

Gosh, sorry to be parochial. And thanks for the link - first time I've seen it. [That edition. I have been sent links to other editions occasionally by friends] But I can't help noticing that it has a column by someone called Barry Corless who apparently is the Chair of itSMF. Funny i thought that was David Cannon. there's a lovely two-page spread about a conference in London. How about the conferences in Melbourne, Helsinki, Nashville and Bangkok? there's two pages on IOSM too, but no mention of ICSM or PRISM? Surely the rollout and progress of PRISM is big news worldwide? perhaps the most exciting news was Nottinghamshire County Council's adoption of Hornbill. The international ramifications are immense. I wasn't so excited by the discussion of the UK's Energy Efficiency legislation. perhaps you'd be interested in an article on the impact of NZ's new labour laws on call centres? I tried to call a few of the phone numbers in the ads but just got error tones. I guess they need the UK country code first eh? Yup, sorry to be parochial.

Finally

I blogged about the bulls**t that goes on selling "digital abstractions" and how glad I am to be out of that and doing something - I think - of value. I've turned down several lucrative offers to go back to sales, and with a new mortgage and a son in private school the pressure has been pretty intense. But I'm not doing it. The photos in this edition are of night-fishing with my son at Mana (if you haven't tried Google Earth you need to). If you are in the digital sales world, read the post and get a life. And before I get abusive emails, I know there are good people in software or consulting sales who only want the best for their clients and who tell it like it is. I've met some of them. I like to think I sometimes was one. I also think many of you need to step back with a pure heart and consider the culture you have absorbed from your employer and peers. There's a bumper edition for you to make up for so long away. Thanks for reading this far. It was hard choosing the articles to feature after four months' gap. I think there is plenty here for everyone. Enjoy. P.S. I have to resist the habit of spelling ITIL as "#ITIL": I've been doing much too much twittering, with the 5000th tweet coming up any day now. I'm @theitskeptic if you'd like to follow. P.P.S. Four years and going strong! If you use Facebook please show the support by Liking the blog: P.P.P.S As it says in the footer at the bottom, please forward this newsletter to all who you think might enjoy it and encourage them to subscribe. I'm happy to share these exclusive insights into the ITSM world.

January 2010, Volume 4, No. 1

The New Year brought me work, which felt like rain in a drought, but the economists hedged their bets and muttered about the fragility of the recovery. And at last the grinding winds of spring and the unseasonable freezing southerlies finally let up and a late summer came in a skittish unsettled way, endlessly threatening to go back to the ugly weather. The economic climate and the natural climate are much the same right now. Experts argue endlessly about how real the changes are, and whether disaster looms or not. The northern USA is deep in snow and unemployment continues to climb. It does us good to learn from history, in order not to repeat it. Reading about the lives of rural New Zealanders in the 30s and 40s and 50s remind me just how easy we have it now, still. And just how hard life can get. So we won't be celebrating with a new deck or an upgraded car, or even a flat-screen TV, not just yet. Every week a wind comes up or it swings to the South, just to remind me it takes a lot of non-change to declare a change really happened. Is life better in 2010 than 2009? I don't know, ask me in 2011. Meanwhile beyond the real world, the arguments have continued to run hot on LinkedIn, and on the IT Skeptic blog, over the links between Incident and Problem Management, and what is Problem Management. This is the most extraordinary state of affairs: twenty years of ITIL and (a) this isn't thrashed out and (b) this isn't clearly documented. Pundits pontificate pompously. Neophites nervously negotiate. Ignorant idiots illude. It's a mess. Peter Brookes recently compared IT to psychiatry in the 50s - it's a good analogy. ITSM seems immature, informed by superstition, lacking in sound scientific fundamentals. (Actually I think Peter is generous in suggesting psychiatry has moved on much). Sure other professions debate, but from a sounder basis than a cacophany of ill-informed personal opinions. (We like to think the discussions on the Owning ITIL group are of a higher calibre - you be the judge) Images public domain from US National Archives: Dorothea Lange/NARA Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress Gottscho, Samuel H. /Library of Congress Lewis Hine/NARA If only New Zealand's National Archives had such an enlightened approach to content I'd be running Kiwi photos instead]