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Pondered the ramifications, debated the implications, now there is only one thing left to do: get the t-shirt! Or coffee mug or mouse pad...

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At the request of a fellow skeptic, I am asking readers to name one, just one, example of an ITIL V3 Service Knowledge Management System, SKMS, in the wild. Not the beginnings of one or part of one, or a bastardised version of one. Just one fully formed, grown up, functioning SKMS. Name one.

In our discussions of Big Uncle, we have seen how privacy is pretty much a thing of the past, certainly in the electronic realm. In the final blog post of this series, we look at how it is up to all of us to ensure that the result is Big Uncle not Big Brother.

We have already discussed what should go into a business case (and we will some more). You can get the content right but fail at the communication of it. The pitch is as important as the story.

Make sure the way the case is explained does these things:

Further to our discussion of business cases, I have seen too many busines cases that contain arguments that are simply not compelling. They seem compelling to the author because the author is too self-absorbed to see things from the perspective of their target audience. Usually this boils down to whining.

A new publication from OGC highlights three good reasons why an ISO20000 certification of an organisation does not provide ITIL V3 certification (and the last one applies to ITIL V2 as well).

We have been discussing ITIL business cases in some previous posts. Now let's get down to the nitty gritty: where is the value in an ITIL project?

The keys to a strong ITIL business case are some basic things:

• There ought to be low-hanging fruit. If there are no real short-term gains you will never hold the attention of either grass-roots participants or senior management.

I thought I'd add a suggested soundtrack to the IT Skeptic blog

Certifications in the IT industry are so wimpy that ITIL Manager's looks tough. But stack it up against any undergrad or postgrad IT degree and it is just a test. Perhaps one day soon there will be plenty of ITSM-related degrees for it to compete against and it won't count for much any more.

Everyone who is interested in ITIL V3's credibility in the Application Management space should read the recent OGC white paper which shows how little ITIL used an existing respected on-hand body of knowledge.

ITIL attempts to establish authority over Application Management. Does ITIL V3 have what it takes? No. As bodies of knowledge go, it is scrawny and under-developed.

Do some vendors push the envelope of what is acceptable behaviour for those involved in itSMF? You bet. So how do we deal with this for the best interests of ITIL? Not by banning vendors, that is for sure. We need better user representation and better controls.

In previous posts the IT Skeptic covered some basic principles of business case design. Let us apply those principles to a business case for an ITIL project.

The previous posts said the strength of a business case is money, real or imagined; the strategy of a business case is how it is aligned with the target organisation. With strength and strategy, and a little luck, you can succeed.

There is an excellent blog post by Terry Doerscher over at planview.com that asks the question "Who Left ITIL in Charge of Legitimizing IT Practitioners?". It is a great read. So who did?

The CMDB Federation was formed in April 2006 by CMDB vendors so they could tell people they were moving towards a common standard of interoperability, known in the CMDB world as "federation", so the group is called the Federation. Two years later what have we got to show? Glacial advance. That's the way the vendors want it.

In a previous blog post we discussed how if you are part of a business then you should run like a business and that means having a business case, i.e. Find The Money. What if you can't FTM? Relax. It does not have to be real money. It just has to look like money.

Talk about timing. The IT Skeptic hears that, within a day or so of this blog, APMG got its accreditation back (look under "t" for "The APM Group"). Congratulations. Even the most strident of APMG critics must be sympathetic about having to wend the byzantine pathways of bureaucracy.

The EXIN-and-ASEB (British Computer Society) stranglehold on ITIL certification slips even further away with the accreditation of a sixth Examination Institute (EI) by APMG, the OGC's outsourced official accreditation body. This despite the fact that APMG remains embarassingly without its own accreditation withdrawn by the British Government for six months now.

There is much discussion of which processes to start with in ITIL, or what order to do them in, or whether to do them at all, or how to decide. If the decision on which processes to reengineer is driven by a business case then the right ones will be chosen: those where ITIL will yield a return to the business.
FTM: Find The Money.

OGC have recently published the long-promised Lifecycle Process Model for ITIL V3. It is pretty much useless in its published state.