Hornbill ITIL State of the Nation survey: Viewer discretion advised

Hornbill has released an ITIL State of the Nation survey [registration required]. I think it is a good report, relative to the usual Crap Factoids we see. It doesn't try to get all worked up about any one number. Sadly I think it still suffers from all the flaws we see in these industry "research" reports. It does however point to one interesting result: ITIL V3 doesn't seem to be taking the world by storm.

Aidan Lawes did a fine job (as usual) of demolishing it. I'm not quite as harsh on this one as Aidan but I have the following reservations:

  • It is a self-selecting sample: those who chose to answer the survey
  • like almost all "research" we see in IT, this is all anecdote. It is one person's opinion about their company. Nothing is done to validate what people say. I challenge whether all of the respondents knew "is IT represented on the Board?" or even what it means
  • it surveys only those who ARE doing ITIL - it tells us nothing about what proportion of the total population they are.
  • 88% of respondents come from the US or UK - that is hardly representative of the world ITIL population
  • 500 is big enough sample to be statistically significant but not such a huge sample. because the survey was an open web-based one, somebody could mess with the results if they wanted to. I have seen a vendor get their thousands of staff to respond to a product popularity vote before so I know it happens

No Crap Factoid alert on this one - just the usual warning "Viewer discretion advised".

For many organisations now is a time for "no frills". We'll see how many have time and money for introducing service lifecycles. As the report says, many of those who have adopted V3 are "cherry-picking", not embracing the whole cycle.

The number I focus on is the number who have "upgraded" from V2 to V3. After 2 years 31% have upgraded and 56% haven't, in a sample heavily biased to the US and UK, and heavily biased towards the kind of ITIL zealots who would find and respond to the survey. And that's not counting the ones who have come in greenfield and adopted V3 from scratch (13%). 36% [31/(31+56)] of ITIL V2 sites have bothered to rebrand what they've already done as V3 and do the bridging training. 64% of US and British ITIL enthusiasts are still on V2, yet OGC and Castle ITIL continue hell-bent on shutting V2 down (OGC : "ITIL v2 is to be withdrawn"). I hope they don't, not if they actually respond to users' needs.

Surely there's no great overhead in continuing to publish the V2 books, so the driver to kill off V2 has to come from the training vendors who don't want to have to maintain two sets of courses. That's only one voice in the community but obviously a well-connected one. Closing V2 down has nothing to do with helping people use ITIL better and everything to do with maximising profitability of the ITIL industry.

Comments

Small World, and you know it !

The white paper has been written by Ken Turbitt (http://www.itpreport.com/default.asp?Mode=Show&A=2087&R=GL) and Aidan Lawes loves to do Turbitt bashing (see for example http://www.itpreport.com/default.asp?Mode=Show&A=2012).

Don't know if the ITP bloggers sometime meet, but if they do, I'm sure they can raise the number of people reading them by filming the fights.

This industry is real fun.

Philippe

ITP bloggers in a forum

I'd love to see them all in a forum, especially now Ian Clayton is in the mix

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