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A transcript of a recent performance by the famous and fragrant folk music performer Rambling Kid Realitsm, of his popular number "Home on the Range":
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, saddle-down down in your seats now and share with me this sad ditty about a broken-hearted compu-geek, lost in the bowels of an office building, chilled to the bone amongst cheerless racks of servers, locked into the server room. He pines for the open range of his home WAN with a LAN in every room and wireless to the skies, where he can run barefoot through the root passwords and administrator privileges, free to trash and crash and rebuild on his lordly whim, king of his domains. Oppressed by evil managers who cut down his privileges and block his passwords, he weeps at the pain their soulless quest for reliability brings upon him, and slumped behind the storage array he sings this sad lament....
ITIL V3 did a little word dance around what "good practice" and "best practice" mean which had more to do with political semantics and digging themselves out of a hole than it did about what the terms really mean. It ought to be straightforward:
There's a lot of rubbish on the Web about ITIL (not on this blog of course). Take Service Owner. Actually there's a lot of rubbish in ITIL about Service Owner, or rather a lot of ambiguity and not a little outright contradiction. So it's hard to blame other web authors. But really, look at this:
Technical vs Business service catalogue: we had a go at this argument previously but I am discussing it again over on LinkedIn and I have - I hope - a clearer way of stating the position. The popular perception of a Technical Service Catalogue is that it described different service entities than a Business Service Catalogue. That's just plain wrong. It gives IT staff entirely the wrong attitudes and mindset. So here is my shot at a definitive statement of position on Technical vs Business Service Catalogue. For any organisational unit, for the services that are the outputs across the boundary of that unit, there is only one service catalogue.
The latest buzz in IT is of course Agile, and its bastard spawn Dev2Ops. I've written before about how the change is becoming the steady state and stability the exception; and how the old mainframe-centric concepts of change control will have to adapt. I'm even confident that concepts from agile will play an important part in that. But nothing in that warrants the frenzied hype around agile right now. And most of all, nothing in that warrants letting the IT cowboys out of the corral.
Peter Kretzman is an active member of my Twitterati circle who I follow. Recently he blogged about a Gartner interview that I had already read. Peter got considerably more upset by it than I did ("an abandonment of common long-standing lessons in IT"), so I re-read it. I'm no more disturbed by it on second reading. The CIO is a business-facing role. Delivery doesn't matter... to the CIO.
Are Google turning into another Apple? My local consumer org describes Apple's products as iCandy. Are Google turning into a mega-corporation peddling hype and product hysteria? Is that what Google did with Google Wave? I think it is even more cynical than that.
I didn't read The CMDB Imperative (that's the second time I started a review with that idea). I didn't read it because (a) you've got to be pretty keen on CMDBs to stick with the dry content (although the authors do as good as anyone could to make it palatable) and (b) because I fundamentally disagree with it, which dragged me down after a while. I got to about page 180 and then...
Vendors sell technology (hardware and software) as silver bullets for business problems. Take a look at this fabulous case study from McKinsey Quarterly. Reading between the lines it seems to me the vendor's pitch was cobblers. The fancy aspects of the technology delivered nothing. The real gains came from process and culture change. When will IT folk ever lose our fixation on technical answers to non-technical problems? And when will the vendors ever step up and start delivering true solutions instead of boxes of crap?
Chokey chokes! Chokey the Chimp hasn't seen such a pile of Crap in a long time. Take a look at this classic piece of vendor double-talk. Tell them the joys of owning a MacLaren F1, then describe the value your Mum derived from buying a new Daihatsu to get to the shops. Yours for only a million dollars! In fact this article isn't even describing a MacLaren: it is describing a Jetsons air-car with virtual hyperdrive.
Pierre Bernard over at Pink Elephant had a "personal rant" about "people «complaining» about the ITIL® V3 scheme" and "much negativity presently in various blogs and social media sites about the ITIL® v3 scheme". That'd be me, for one, so I feel compelled to comment.
Maybe I missed it, but ITIL V3 doesn't appear to have one person owning and accountable for the customer experience. I don't mean for one service, for one process, for one customer: all of it.
When writing the title to a blog post or a tweet or other social media where you want to grab an audience, always remember:
- The first word must be a number and the second a noun.
- Odd numbers work better than even numbers.
- Compose the rest of the title of buzzwords like "social media".
- Any formula for content gets tired after a while.
With a headline like that I had to read the CMDB is dead, long live the CMDB. Whilst much of it speaks a language I don't understand, the bits that are in English I liked...mostly. There is an unhealthy affection for DevOps and similar web-cowboy-waffle, and too much readiness to fix the problem of CMDB by throwing yet more technology at it, but the parts informed by past experience of CMDB were a voice of common sense.
The IT Skeptic was pretty scathing of Malcolm Fry's first ITIL V3 Complementary Publication, Building an ITIL-Based Service Management Department. Personally I wouldn't buy it (again). Malcolm's second "official" V3 book ITIL Lite is different. It is worth buying just for Chapter 2: "a simple but effective approach to ITIL process engineering". I got several great ideas from it and the overall methodology is a good one. But ITIL Lite has several fundamental assumptions that many will disagree with. These assumptions will mislead an already confused user community, and I think they spoil the rest of the book.
The IT Skeptic rails against Crap Factoids often enough. They're rubbish. They're even funnier when the results undermine the position of the hype-merchants keen to push them. Everyone waves around Gartner's numbers in support of their own positions, blithely ignoring the fact that Gartner just pull these statistics out of their own ...ahem... analyst. I don't see any of the ITIL zealots quoting this set though. Check out slide 7 "Polling Results: Characterization of ITIL Adoption".
Having finally had time to read the June itSMF International Board Talk [corrected URL], I must say it is good to see the International Executive Board (IEB) continue to pursue transparency and governance. Perhaps itSMF can climb out of the hole it finds itself in. It remains to be seen whether the results will match the rhetoric, but so far so good. There is one area where I take a differing view: the IEB's attitude to providing services to emerging chapters.
It is clear from reading a recent complaint report from the British Government agency OPSI (the Office of Public Sector Information,
part of the National Archives) that OGC and Van Haren Publishing aren't best mates any more. VHP allege a number of non-competitive practices, most of which OGC managed to duck as being outside the scope of OPSI's remit. Read the report yourself for the detail, but I take some interesting points from it:
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