Crap Factoid

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.

It has been a while since Chokey the Chimp got to issue a Crap Factoid warning, but here we have a Category 2. According to an ITSM Portal report on the EasyVista survey that many of you will have seen around the traps [update: here's the original article from Staff&Line, the vendor of EasyVista], "Nearly 87% of respondents said they felt negatively toward their current service desk solution". I find it a bit rich that the article says "ITSM vendors are deliberately ‘muddying the waters’" [update: and it opens with "They say there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Sometimes though, there’s just no escaping the facts"!!!!] when this vendor survey is based on such a misleading biased statistically-invalid survey as this one, and draws such outrageous conclusions.

We haven't had a Crap Factoid on this blog for a while, so it is time we had a good one. Look at Thriving in the Troubled Economy:
Ten ways you can slash IT costs and innovate in 2009. Firescope take Crap Factoids to a new level with a barrage of unsubstantiated anecdotal numbers. Never have I seen so many "Oh really?"s in one document. Chokey the Chimp had to have a lie-down.

Chokey the Chimp says today's Crap Factoid danger is HIGH. Axios Systems have released a classic piece of crap that will spread rapidly. Watch your shoe soles.

Slightly related to Crap Factoids, take a look at William Vambenepe's Crazy Stats. Love it.

I've got one for William to add: "only 34 percent say that they are more effective at introducing new technologies than their competitors"

Chokey the Chimp warns of a moderate Crap Factoid in the wild, with our old friends at BMC claiming a 370 percent ROI over 30 months on implementation of BMC's ITSM v7. One would struggle to swallow that kind of number from any business case, but given BMC's recent high-level bullshitting, Chokey definitely calls "CRAP!".

An ITIL V3 report from Sunrise Software is rich in crap factoids, since the report itself suffers from all the methodological deficiencies we have described before. Mercifully this one may not get much airtime so we rate the risk Medium.

Here is a high Crap Factoid alert from Chokey the Chimp:
We recently demolished the EMA paper on CMDB adoption but nevertheless the paper in question is being misquoted by bITaPlanet as saying that "there’s been a dramatic jump in the number of companies that have completed their CMDB, from just 9 percent in 2006 to one-third in 2008". This is nonsense but it is nonsense that is now turning up elsewhere. Be on alert and keep the CFirehose ready.