Every Cloud has a silver bullet to kill the dreaded ITIL
The Cloud is not sweeping away ITIL or IT Service Management. Every over-hyped fad claims the rules are different now and we don't have to worry about some basic fundamental that has always plagued us in the past. And every time it turns out to be crap. The rules are the same and have been ever since the Europeans over-traded tulips, probably much longer. Business needs management. Without management control, risk kills it. ITSM is the framework for management of IT. It articulates what we do for the customer. ITSM is basic IT, wherever it is running. Cloud may play on different instruments but the tune is the same. The detail of what we control changes. Even the way we control changes. but we still need the controls. So this beating up on ITIL isn't about Cloud really. It is about techs frustrated because they are not allowed to do what they like without supervision.
Skep's had enough of this "Ding dong! ITSM is dead! Cloud killed it" stuff. It's happening everywhere, even over on ITSM Weekly The Podcast. Rodrigo is the most articulate (and hence dangerous) Cloud-kills-ITIL champion I have heard in my close circle but there are many more on the Web right now, including some whiny stuff on a LinkedIn thread (you need to be in the 'Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Community' group). ITSM only "gets in the way" when people are putting the business at risk.
Evolution not revolution
Yes ITSM needs to morph to adapt to the emerging shift in IT, from stability as the rest state to change as the norm. If ITIL has any sense it will evolve to deal with Agile and DevOps and Cloud and whatever else the solutions architects and apps managers throw at us. If ITIL doesn't evolve then yes ITIL will lose releavance - I'll blog on that sometime - but that doesn't mean ITSM is dead or even ITIL is dead. ITIL describes what we need to do to successfully run the information engineering of a business. That isn't changing. As Rodrigo said on his blog "As for ITIL, still useful and ITIL people will be needed. Capacity management, vendor management, service level, service catalog all apply in this new world, but there's a different emphasis. One that, I recommend ITIL people learn quickly because there's a big change coming. In many ways, cloud will make service management even more important."
[Besides, constant change is still some way off for most organisations. Cloud doesn't actually make us that much more agile - that's another blog to come.]
But whatever IT evolves to and however much of it we bung on a cloud, the business still needs to govern it. And IT still needs to deliver to customers and users. And as long as that is the case, then ITSM is the language (and ITIL one dialect) to describe what we need to do:
- develop a portfolio of services in conjuction with customers
- manage finances
- track and mitigate risks
- track change
- consider and pre-approve high risk change
- be able to undo failed change
- track and respond to user requests, including interruptions to service
- track and resolve and try to preempt underlying problems (yes we'll have many fewer to worry about with Cloud infrastructure, but that just means we'll be less rehearsed at dealing with the few that remain)
- plan for new services and future capacity growth (Cloud still needs pipes to it and funds to pay for it, we still need some form of personal appliances...)
- agree the service to be delivered
- measure and report the service delivered
- of course manage suppliers and contracts
- ...and so on
That (and much more) is ITSM. That's what we need to do. Cloud doesn't eliminate any of it. It doesn't even radically change any of it. There is merely some adjustment required at the detail level.
Those who want to throw away what we have achieved with ITSM are like the tulip merchants and e-commerce pundits trying to abolish gravity.
Analogies
An analogy is medicine. There are those who think "Western" medicine is one thing and there are other valid modalities (there goes that pernicious post-modernism again) such as Chinese or alternative medicine. This isn't true. "Western" medicine is whatever has been proven to work. One side of "Western" medicine is commercially driven. If something really works the industry falls on it with glee. the other side is driven by a desire to make people well. If something works the researchers fall on it with glee. The reason homeopathy hasn't been adopted is because it is B.S, the selling of water. The reason acupuncture hasn't been greatly adopted is because it only slightly works, due to the indirect stimulation of sticking pins into you. There is no mystic Chi flowing through you - there are nerves and blood vessels and lymphatic ducts, and acupuncture teaches us little new about how they work. Waving hands over you makes you feel better because its nice to have a kind person near you trying to make you feel better. Chiropractors make you feel better because they really do know how to massage the skeleton and its muscles. Period. None of them have access to something that orthodox medicine doesn't. None of them get better results. They appeal to superstition and desperation and ignorance of science.
Since there will be a few people reading this who are silly enough to believe in alternative medicines, try another analogy: ... on the other hand don't. The medicine analogy is a good one, I can't be bothered concocting a second for the credulous. Wise up. There are no totally new sets of rules, only the evolution of knowledge.
Back to the cowboys
Cloud so appeals to the IT cowboys. They think it's a return to anarchy, to the freedom of the wide open range. Sorry boys, ITSM's still gonna fence you in. Business survives on control. ITSM describes IT controls.
Pink Elephant have renamed their big annual conference from "IT Service Management" to just "IT Management". This is correct. Service is one language for describing what IT does. No matter how you look at it, what frame of reference or language you use, it's the same stuff: management. Innovations may make us describe it differently, they certainly may make us change the way we do parts of it - Cloud will - but it is all the same principles underneath. medicine describes how the body works and what fixes it. Consultation, diagnosis, monitoring, prognosis, treatment, medication, surgery, prevention, intervention... they'll always be there, only the details will change.
And I don't think the service language will lose importance. it's all about the customer and that should always be our main focus, so ITSM will always describe the primary perspective on IT.
Narrow focus
Just in case someone comes up with that even more hysterical "With Cloud there is no IT any more", let me say I'm using the term loosely to refer to Information Engineering or Information Management, not specifically the management of in-house technology toys.
The proponents of "Cloud kills ITIL" or "Cloud kills ITSM" or even "Cloud kills IT" are victims of a too-narrow world-view, dominated by those tech toys. Cloud makes it possible to outsource much of the Stuff which appears to be a huge effect in their little worlds, but it does nothing to remove the need for management of information and management of service. In fact it raises new complexities of supplier management, sovereignty of data, confidentiality, configuration and so on. We will continue to need IT Management for ever and we will continue to need ITSM to describe it. And ITIL is likely to be an important component of that for a while yet.
Those who accuse ITSMers of falling behind are missing the point: Cloud is just a new technology. ITSM is the new, more evolved way of thinking.
[From comments:
ITIL changes slowly, about every seven years on past performance. COBIT 5 is coming out at the end of next year - it will be interesting to see if it has embraced any of this change.
In the meantime we are all learning and working it out. Few more so than Rodrigo who's right out there on the front edge of the wave.
"Best practice" or I prefer "generally accepted practice" is about what's proven. That takes time. Someone has to go there first and try it. In fact several have to try it so we can (nearly) all agree on what works.
But spouting bile and derision on the established frameworks because they are waiting to see what falls out is counter-productive. And expecting the business to drop everything and let the techs off the leash so they can find out what doesn't work at the business's expense is deluded. Cloud is experimental and will remain so until mainstream business can see how it is to be controlled in order to protect the organisation.
Those who have spoken to me recently know I'm thinking about how ITSM needs to adapt as much as anyone. We await the results of Cloud experiments to give us the evidence to make sensible decisions about that.]
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
common sense about "ITIL and the Cloud"
How nice to read some common sense about "ITIL and the Cloud", from The Register.
The headline sucks (clearly written by an editor not the author), but the article itself is measured and correct.
Common sense is even less common at cloud level than ground level.
common sense about ITIL
And common sense about ITIL, by "Tom13" in the comments on that Register article:
Implementing ITIL will magnify management: Good management will get better, bad management will get worse.
Brilliant
Despatches from the front line: Cloud makes sod all difference
A great comment on an HP blog (the post itself isn't great: it misinterprets Bob Lewis who I'm growing to like more and more)
And of course given the principle of adopt-and-adapt, one simply adapts the processes to deal with more external providers covering more of the service than usual. No big deal. This B.S. about "ITIL and Cloud are incompatible" or "if the cloud is replacing everything, what do we need ITIL for?" really is infuriating.
Techs & their toys
The organizations that have not yet embraced service-based management may well see ITSM as dead. There's a lot of the "We waited out ITIL/ITSM and we're still alive! See!" These are the companies that never moved past IT being about infrastructure management and nothing else. They see, erroneously, that they get to play with cool tech toys in the cloud.
I think the sad truth is THAT type of organization IS dying, and they don't even know it yet. They think their job is now to corral the cloud into the IT pasture so it can get branded as being owned by IT. This is important John Wayne stuff that only we can handle. Don't worry your purdy little face about it.
What they are missing is that the rest of the business has no interest in the cloud being IT branded. The tools they want are just sitting there waiting to be used. IT only makes it more complicated by insisting on branding the free-range cattle that is the cloud. IT that insists upon managing the cloud "infrastructure" will become obsolete ... Or at least nothing more than corporate data plumber.
This is not a revolution; no more than actually hiring people whose entire job was to help staff use technology. Remember, that was pretty radical at one time.
So I see ITSM's future very differently. I see it as a critical piece of moving organizations forward. We may well see a temporary drop in ITSM activity as businesses think they can go it on their own, without IT. The good companies will see right away that managing information remains a business critical function, and they will continue to embrace good practices. Other organizations will struggle for a while before they see the need for some kind of data management. "Now how are all these cloud data sources going to talk to one another? You mean they don't just work? What we really need are people that just 'get' how all this information goes together. It's really too bad our old IT folks didn't see themselves in that role, because they'd be perfect for it now!"
Well said
The detail bit is why there isn't a lot of noise around lack of ITIL attention to 'cloud'.
1) How many people looking at the details of servicest are using/referencing ITIL?
2) How many cloud providers look at ITIL for details and adjust their products accordingly? (I hope none, just do it right).
The generations after us will laugh that this was game-changing (along with Hoop), Hoop's idea of supply chain for I.T. services is spot-on. Nothing is changing, just the tools to deliver the data. As you put it " it does nothing to remove the need for management of information and management of service", it's just that people want someone to tell them how to handle the "new complexities of supplier management, sovereignty of data, confidentiality, configuration and so on"
Some people are coming up with it on their own, some look to ITIL and don't see the correlation, and some see the correlation and adapt their models. Those people will continue to thrive.
generally accepted practice
Agreed. ITIL changes slowly, about every seven years on past performance. COBIT 5 is coming out at the end of next year - it will be interesting to see if it has embraced any of this change.
In the meantime we are all learning and working it out, as you say. Few more so than Rodrigo who's right out there on the front edge of the wave.
"Best practice" or I prefer "generally accepted practice" is about what's proven. That takes time. Someone has to go there first and try it. In fact several have to try it so we can (nearly) all agree on what works.
But spouting bile and derision on the established frameworks because they are waiting to see what falls out is counter-productive. And expecting the business to drop everything and let the techs off the leash so they can find out what doesn't work at the business's expense is deluded. Cloud is experimental and will remain so until mainstream business can see how it is to be controlled in order to protect the organisation.
Those who have spoken to me recently know I'm thinking about how ITSM needs to adapt as much as anyone. We await the results of Cloud experiments to give us the evidence to make sensible decisions about that.
Kill em All
ahhh... my first Metalica album 1983....
ITSM
Four words, Information Technology Service Management
At the end of the day business are built only on one of these. Information.
In fact Facebook has proven, you don't even need the other 3 and you can become a billionaire.
Smoke signals didn't work so well, so TECHNOLOGY has helped out.
Dependancy and criticality of the TECHNOLOGY raised, so SERVICE kicks in.
Complexity, interoperability, and cost threatened the value so MANAGEMENT is layered in there.
In case no one has noticed Facebook is a horrible tool. Yet this Cowboy Techie is on his way to make Bill Gates his caddie.
Does that mean we don't need rules? Of course not. As Skep says, Facebook is not the business model "Generally Accepted", but it's moving that way.
So to Glens, point. If it's about framework and not about outcomes, then we are useless in IT, and the more savvy businesses don't need us. Btw, Glen, that trainer should be fired.
I just finished reading IT Savvy by Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill. If IT pros are ticked off by what they heard on ITSMWP with Rodrigo, then how about what an MIT Sloane research in a series of well structured studies have to say on this topic. Check it out.
Btw, Seek and Destroy was my first song I learned by Metalica... searching.... Seek and Destroy
-Matt
the "Rules are Different" song
Matthew, you're singing the "Rules are Different" song again. We're in a recession right now because the bankers convinced the Fed the rules were different, that they could magic away the risk.
Information and the technology it resides in - whoever owns it and wherever it is - must be managed. You can outsource much of the management but not all, and it must be governed by the owner, not by some bunch of geeks in Seattle.
Google promises 3-nines at the server. They promise nothing about the internet connectivity, the LAN or the desktop. So you'll never get near to 3-nines at the user. What if you need 4-nines eh?
And if Google are down for 9 minutes and 59 seconds, guess what? That doesn't count as an outage. Tell THAT to the users.
Oh and if the users have a question, who do they call please?
BTW, facebook isn't IT. It is media, entertainment, the new Hollywood. it has as much to do with business IT as my pile of CDs does. it is beer-and-circuses for the masses.
This "ITSM-is-dead" is pure crystalline essence of bullshit
Why Shoot the Messenger?
Matt, I agree the trainer could have been better, but it is a balancing act, the trainer is bound by the syllabus.
Apparently everyone passed, but according to my contact, not one of the 16 cared about ITIL.
So now I have been asked to do an overview on why ITIL matters.
ITs About the Business and IT working together.
Couple of comments....
1) How are you going to manage the cloud without some kind of framework to manage the information and usage?
2) ITIL has always been about aligning what you do with business / organizational requirements.
In plain language, if you cannot show the enterprise you work in how your efforts add value to them, you are at risk.
A toolset that helps people express their ideas and concepts in a common language and approach. So we can speak the same language.
With a core objective of aligning what we deliver to what the organization needs. That is what ITIL and ITSM represent.
It gets frustrating to listen to how the core message is lost in translation. I am working with someone who just completed their foundation.... They called the course a complete waste of time.... But when I talked to them about alignment to busines, knowing and documenting core requirements, aligning SLA metrics to show they are moving towards what they promised, using incident, change and event management to manage and sustain the environment, and more...The response was where do I go to understand and use this.
Showed em the ITIL Service Operation book. Shock and horror....its in a book, the book is getting used and read. (sigh)
Cloud killer to me would be a chaotic organization trying to support their services without some basic guidance and discipline.
Wow
Wow. Wow. Wow.
The only killer cloud is this one http://bit.ly/aYURCC
I had Rodrigo pegged wrong. He is just looking at our space the same way he did with Catalog.
The cloud danger here is the same danger with ITIL itself, plain and simple MARKETING FUD and promises.
Not because of anything killing ITSM, ITSM itself is just a means to an end.
I'm excited that we live in a time where we can see our own skill set demise and readjust.
You should be too.
Chris.