The IT Skeptic Awards for 2010
Every year the IT Skeptic website starts the New Year with our Awards. (You can see past years' awards here). This year we present:
The Little Blue Pill for services to public sanity goes to the British Government for the second year running, this time for releasing most government information under an Open Government Licence. It remains to be seen whether OGC can wriggle out from under this one. The British Government could also have won The Stallman Award for Services to Open Content but instead we gave it specifically to their Office of Public Sector Information for a scathing report on OGC's intellectual property practices which included the remark that OGC's sneaky evasions over ITIL IP policy "begs the question as to why [OGC] sponsors the publication of proprietary IT service management guides". A wild-card entry for both the Stallman Award and The Little Blue Pill was APMG's finally publishing the awfully secret OGC ITIL Product Compliance assessment criteria.
The Cobbler's Children's Shoes (no connection to the book by Charles Betz
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 Gordon Gecko Trophy for Inappropriate Capitalism goes to OGC for paying two of its staff amongst the highest salaries in the British Government. (Well, they did in the past. We'll see what the Cabinet Office thinks of that now OGC is part of it.)
The Pirate Bay Memorial Plaque for Services to Intellectual Property goes to APMG-accredited ITIL examination institute Peoplecert for copying the content from an honour-roll of ITSM websites. The IT Skeptic had warned it would end in tears.
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 Biggest Letdown of the Year was clearly Google's abandonment of Wave.
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 Transparency Cup goes to itSMF International for announcing the call for Board nominations only to local Chapter leaders.
The Ironic Twist is awarded to TSO for their embrace of open public information.
The Tony Soprano Memorial Best Friends Steak-knife is awarded to TSO's and APMG's lawyers for busily alienating ITIL's volunteer base. Runners up were APMG for linking to only their own ATOs from their EI website
The Joseph Stalin Key for services to intellectual freedom goes to BCS for locking up SFIA tighter than a duck's rectum.
The P T Barnum Gold Cigar for the Most Hyped Concept of the Year goes to the Green IT industry for creating a product out of nothing. Cloud came a close second.
The Three Silver Thimbles for the Grossest Statistical Trickery was an easy decision. It goes to Staff and Line, vendors of EasyVista, for not one but two Crap Factoid alerts during 2010, an astonishing performance. First there was a magnificent manipulation of a survey and then a classic ROI tap-dance in conjunction with established performers Forrester.
The Blood Out of a Stone Award for extracting commercial value from the work of the IT Skeptic goes to Cleverics for publishing my books Introduction to Real ITSM and Owning ITIL in Russian. I'm honoured and impressed. I sent them my congratulations and support.
Finally, the one you have been waiting for …Envelope please… The Grand Sagan Candle for IT Skepticism goes to Keith Yost of MIT for blowing the whistle on the consulting industry.
Happy New Year everybody!!!!!
Made in New Zealand 
