The Skeptical Informer, 2009
2009
- ITIL-COBIT mapping shows even less coverage by ITIL
- Great paper on failure of complex systems
- Response Management
- Real-world Lean ITIL
- Is ITIL there to describe what the experts know? Or is it there to guide those setting out on the ITSM journey?
- Governance directives as input to ITIL
- What ITIL V3 says about the distinction between a Call and an Incident
- The true scope of service management and ITIL
- Where can I buy ITIL?
- Subscribe now
- 5 Tips For Developing An ITSM Strategic Road Map
- The software analyst industry needs a code of practice.
- The Julie Linden saga draws to a close
- How it feels to be the IT Skeptic
- prISM service management professional certification great in theory flawed in execution
- OGC revising ITIL again
- the end of ITIL V2 annnounced by OGC
- Constructive criticism or demonising ITIL?
- SD 4.6.4.3 five or six elements?
- Call for authors and reviewers for the ITIL V3 Refresh refresh
- Refreshes all round and no time to apply
- A hundred users call up and say they can't get emails. One incident or 100?
- Proliferation of ITIL V3 introductions and pocketbooks
- 5 easy steps to implement ITIL V3
- The average blog has 100 readers
- Carpe diem
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- What matters
- List of ITIL V3 roles
- Checklist ITIL environment health check
- On Demand CMDB implications
- Cloud Common Sense
- ITIL Software Scheme released
- Prince2 2009 plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
- More discussion of CMDB: not the best use of funds
- Cutting the cost of IT Operations
- Standardised Service
- Green IT: dolphin-free computing
- management by memo
- Operating the Cloud: the people and process questions
- Way cool! The Wright Cycle for you
- Subscribe now
- All five IT Skeptic books available on Amazon
- Why the USA is unsuitable for offshoring
- Checklist ITIL project proposal
- The scale of ITIL V3
- Checklist post ITIL implementation review
- Checklist progress of an ITIL project
- Aidan Lawes on ITIL certification
- The ITIL portal was originally going to be free
- The iPhone apps goldrush
- BOK revisions breaking out all over: PMBOK 4th Edition
- Proactive problem management description does not exist in V3
- Obtaining the ITIL V3 Foundation syllabus
- A few of our wealthier readers might now consider ITIL Live™
- Excellent analysis of how software vendors violate the customer relationship
- BMC are ahead of their competitors in ITIL compliance
- The War for Plain English
- A new skeptic enters the blogosphere
- Interesting idea for spreading the expertise - and the risk
- Crazy Stats
- Gullibility
- New Zealand makes another positive contribution to itSMF International
- Self-deluding optimism over the recession
- ITSM for the Real World
- 10 Things I don't get either
- Do we have two flavours of ITIL now? The plot to end ITIL V2
- PRINCE2 2009 refresh spookily familiar to ITIL users
- Booyaaa!! COBIT User Guide for Service Managers now available
- Satyam, Sallie Mae, and call center outsourcing
- Multiple choice questions criticised but not in ITIL V3 this time
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- Owning ITIL: project horror stories
- ABC Cafeterias
- Dreaming on a cloud - migration as an obstacle to cloud computing: an IT Skeptic Special Report
- ITIL Software Endorsement Scheme dropped on an unsuspecting public
- Subscribe now
- Updated terms and conditions for this site
- Review ITILV3 Service Strategy - The IT Skeptic
- CMDB a skeptical view
- Not Review Cult of the Amateur - The IT Skeptic
- What use is Passing Your ITIL Foundation Exam now?
- ITIL 101 for software vendors
- A new ITIL V3 online product changes the game
- How long will the IT recession last?
- Official ITIL compliance standard
- Deep discounts for ITIL Live™
- The Magnolia bursts
- Awful support conversations
- Why do we waste money training people in ITIL? Just More Crap
- ITIL is not alone
- Open Source is political: Blows Against The Empire
- dev2ops blog
- Should you spend the money on ITIL V3 certification?
- McKinsey on how CIOs should think about business value
- ST p76 Table 4.7 Nonsense RACI chart
- ST p69 Wrong hierarchy in the CMS
- What should IT call the Rest Of The Business?
- The word all consultants and writers should avoid: "must"
- The ITIL V3 indexes
- Problem management process graph is wrong
- CMDBf ...um...explained
- Incidents overwhelm problems
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- governance: which is hot in a serious way
- cloud computing: which is hot in an entirely vacuous vendor-hyped way
- alternatives to ITIL: which is not hot at all but I am predicting it will be
- The Pillars of ITIL
- The IT Swami's Predictions for 2009 and ITSM in Recession
- The IT Skeptic Awards for 2008
- Owning ITIL® - a skeptical guide for decision makers
- Subscribe now
- He Tangata
- Dead cat syndrome
- The CMDB Federation is a brilliant piece of vendor marketing smokescreen
- Deming cycle diagram the wrong way round
- Windows Vista - the sick slug
- Bill the IT Guy Part 2
- Delivery of COBIT User's Guide for Service Managers is slipping waiting on ITIL approval?
- ITIL V3 Foundations effectively put on hold until May 2009?
- collecting examples of terminological debasement
- Terminological debasement: a committee becomes a board
- ITIL Prime
- Crap Factoid Alert 370 percent ROI from ITSM
- How is ITIL Live doing?
- Merry Christmas
- Un-Common Language
- Batten down the hatches
- Simple useful rules for defining Configuration Items
- The Microsoft evil genius of docx format
- itSMF International website adrift
- APMG has our full support
- Setting the target goal for service management initiatives
- Real ITSM user priority
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We live in an ever accelerating world, where the rate of change itself is changing, differential of differential.
For a bloke who has just turned 50 it is all a bit alarming. Recently I wrote a nostalgic note elsewhere about the early 1970s, helping my Dad operate an IBM 360/40 when all his staff went on strike. Some of the points of interest in this to us today are:
1) it was so physical a task operating that machine that two 12- or 13-year-old boys could be of assistance
2) those boys (my friend and I) had never touched a computer before in our lives
3) for us it was like a contemporary boy being asked to help fire a rocket. Most of our peers would not touch a computer for another decade
4) there is little chance of allowing two schoolkids through the security to a modern server room to help run the place, and a manager who did it would risk being fired
5) the operators were in a union
There has to be a limit somewhere - no graph of reality is linear - but Moore's Law thunders on unchecked. My son's MP3 player, my model locomotives and my desk phone each have more processing power than that room full of machinery back in 1972.
Less talked about but just as revolutionary is the increase in bandwidth and mobility. Every kid walks around staring at a phone instead of seeing the world. Trainers and presenters are expected to impart learning to an audience who have their noses buried in laptops and Blackberries. And now presenters are supposed to be listening and responding to the Twitter "back channel" while they speak. (I thought "back channel" was a euphemism for something else). Men are accused of only being able to do one thing at a time. In the modern age I wish they would.
Something has to give and what gives is the value and quality of the communication. You can post any old crap on the internet now knowing that nobody will fact check, few will think critically, or follow your reasoning to its logical conclusions. So long as the superficial message is attractive on any level to the audience, it will get traffic, links, referrals, and isn't that what communication is all about in the 21st Century? I even had to post huge disclaimers all over the ITIL Wizard because readers were taking it seriously.
I bet you're not reading this, I mean really reading it. The percentage of you who have even got this far without tuning out are speed-reading, getting through one of fifty or a hundred emails today that you bothered to scan. None of you have stopped at any point in the read to ponder what I am saying, to roll it around like a mouthful of wine and savour it to see if it is real quality or just a supermarket quaffing red.
The sheer quantity of information and opinion pouring over my desk every day is staggering. I can't read it all, let alone consider it all, or more to the point remember it all. It just pours by like a river. We must be at a point now where we miss so much more than we pick up that the inefficiencies will slow the progress down. We are spiralling off into such an air-headed superficiality of twittered soundbites that one wonders if any real new solid valuable knowledge is formed at all.
ITIL V3 cranked out five books in a year. They pumped them out so fast that they left out some of the V2 stuff (error control, proactive problem management...) and dozens of reviewers missed basic typos. Three years down the track it is being revised. How long before the next revision? By the time ITIL talks about the cloud we'll be on to "outer space computing".
There are over 60 IT frameworks. Who knows them all well enough to choose the best ones for a situation? Inherently everything we do in IT processes is sub-optimal: we use the frameworks we happen to know, which are always a few steps behind and almost certainly don't include all the best knowledge available.
Recently I read a classic example: a fantastic paper from the 1990s that I think should reshape the way we think about change, stability, availability and root cause analysis and yet ten years later it doesn't have the slightest influence on ITIL.
And another gaping gap a few days earlier: I did a presentation to the local chapter of ISACA on "Governing ITIL". So I did what I always do to learn anything these days: I fired up Google. Zip. Zilch. Then in sheer desperation I resorted to reading the ITIL books. There is five eighths of sweet flock-all written anywhere about how to interface an IT operations framework with an IT governance framework, what the interlocks are. At what points does the policy go in? Which procedures have policy, strategy or plans as an input? Where do we check we are still tracking to them? Where do we produce the metrics and reports to reassure the governors? What mechanisms allow us to be evaluated by governors? Never mind the conceptual 38500 and Val IT stuff - how does this work? As far as I can tell nobody has thought about this much.
We are operating in such a whirling fog of information that even as the technology gallops ahead the human knowledge is slipping behind. As a profession, heck as a civilisation, we can't keep up. Balls are being dropped, gaps are being left, and quality has gone to the dogs. This is not sustainable.
It does leave lots of spaces for me to poke books into. If I ever get time next year I'll write one about Governing ITIL, to follow on from Owning ITIL. I have plans to revise that book too, since things are changing so fast, not least of all my ideas on the subject. However it seems folk like Owning ITIL very much the way it is. The BCS, the Society Formerly Known as the British Computer Society, reviewed Owning ITIL and said "Score: 10 out of 10... This is a wonderfully irreverent, but totally authoritative, book... It is a slim manual that seeks to debunk the language and meaning of ITIL and relate it to the practical implementation of IT service management... It’s a gem of a book that offers a good perspective on what the ITIL v3 manuals take 5 volumes to cover."
Also in the works is a book on Simple Service, an attempt to apply the Kiwi cut-the-crap mindset to ITIL, which may or may not work. Watch this space. But you won't, you're too busy. By the time the book comes out, if it does, its release might vaguely remind you of this newsletter, but you most certainly won't ever notice if it doesn't see the light of day. It will be 2010 by then and you'll be coping with the world having changed again.
The changes might not be pretty either. I'll finish with a quote from a US government economist. I snatched it from an old newsreel on a documentary so I didn't get his name: "Every indication is that the economy has turned the corner...1931 will provide the greatest opportunities of a generation"
The IT Skeptic wonders if it is time to hang up my skepticking gear. Next week marks the third anniversary of The IT Skeptic website. When I started out, I was pretty much a lone voice questioning all the sunny optimism over ITIL. Now it is a crowded field, ranging from Aiden Lawes doing a fabulous job lobbing heavy well-considered shells to the rattatat machine-gunning of the much younger Marc Buzina, with a number of others in between. ITIL is undoubtedly over the top of the hype curve and accelerating down into the trough of despair. I wrote some time ago that I hoped that by reducing the height of the hype curve I could thereby reduce the pain of the fall. I don't think I had much effect.
Along the way I may or may not have influenced a few things. It has certainly cost me a lot of time and effort and lost revenue for very little reward indeed. It has also I suspect cost me one or two friendships and possibly even business opportunities. On the other hand it has given me a geographic reach and profile I never imagined.
But I really don't like hurting people's feelings. Nor do I like being seen as consistently negative or destructive. In my recent compilation of the blog, The Worst of the IT Skeptic, I said:
- I strongly urge everyone to do amateur acting classes even if, like me, you never tread the boards. One of the most important things you learn is mask work. It is enlightening to see how a mask transforms your personality as you put it on.
The IT Skeptic didn’t set out to be a journalist but that is what he has become. Journalists are a contemptible breed (except of course any reviewing this book). I don’t much like most that I have met. But the IT Skeptic performs a useful function in the IT industry, asking hard questions that needed to be asked, especially to put a brake on the wild exuberance that is sweeping the ITIL industry away.
In order to fulfil their function, journalists must be read by many readers. To be successful - to survive - journalists must serve the market. They write what the market wants to read, and the market likes a little titillation with their content.
I can’t say I entirely like the IT Skeptic, but I like what he does and I hope he continues to do it. In the end, I have come to terms with him because he is me.
In the world at large, the recession continues to gain momentum. It is like an ice age, slowly spreading ice and snow across the landscape. It seems to me most people either think the snowstorm has blown over or complain that it is a bit chilly. The G20 allocate $1.9 trillion to help and everyone relaxes. But much of that was already spent, and spent in a world economy with an annual GDP of $70 trillion. 3% of one year's GDP is hardly going to turn the world around. Twenty fiddlers watching the fires. As an independent consultant my world may get uglier than yours, but all of you should be making plans to survive the next few years.
The big news in the ITIL world in March was the ITIL Official Endorsement Scheme. What we know of this scheme is only what we can deduce through news articles and blog leaks. But -as you can see from the linked post - I don't like the look of it so far. The idea is great, the execution questionable. (That post has one of the best graphics I've used on the blog yet. I'd like to acknowledge more of the stuff I use, but I can only tell you it comes from Gudella on canstockphoto.com, no other details. Note that I don't just pillage flicker like many bloggers - I pay for my graphics, acknowledging the artist's IP rights. This month's newsletter pictures are some of my favourites.)
The IT Skeptic's little world has been all about books this last month. I'm not referring to the rearrangement of the rooms in our house that includes moving three bookcases (my son is moving into a downstairs room at last instead of being next to Mum and Dad, and Two Hills Ltd expands its share of the house by 300%!). I speak of publishing a number of my own books. I'd like to have released these at a more leisurely pace but they need to be out in the world earning their keep. Finally, today, I end - for now - by announcing the release of Owning ITIL®. I have a bunch of books in planning but they won't see the light of day until later in 2009 and into 2010, if they get writ. For now, my published books are:
Take a look at those that interest you. I'm proud of all these books and hope they will bring you much interest and enjoyment. I don't have a huge marketing budget: if you enjoy a book please please tell folks you know.
I'll see most of my Kiwi blog followers at the itSMFnz conference in May - be there bro'. I hope to meet a few readers at the Pink Elephant conference in February next year too!
Format | Price | Amazon.com | Other Amazons | Lulu | |
Introduction to Real ITSM A satire on IT operations | $18.99 +p&p Special price! | Yes | Not yet | Yes | |
The Worst of the IT Skeptic all the good stuff from three years of this blog | $19.95 +p&p | Not yet | Never | Yes | |
download | $15.95 | Never | Never | Yes | |
The IT Skeptic Looks at CMDB | $9.95 +p&p | Never | Never | Yes | |
download | $7.95 | Never | Never | Yes | |
Working in IT our career, our profession (my personal favourite) | $19.95 +p&p | Not yet | Not yet | Yes | |
download | $15.95 | Never | Never | Yes | |
Owning ITIL® a skeptical guide for decision-makers | $34.95 +p&p | Not yet | Not yet | Yes |
The Skeptical Informer seems to be shifting publication cycle from every month to every when I get around to it. Sorry about that. I would say that the recession has caused me to shift priorities and concentrate on chasing work, but I won't because it isn't true. I have been in the Southern Alps, with my son and some friends, in a hut with no power, doing very little and eating too much. Regular readers will know this is an annual thing. As is camping at Kaitoke (as in LOTR's Rivendell). We did that too. So the degradation in publication service levels is entirely due to the editor loafing.
Actually the IT SKeptic has battened down the hatches. I've turned down three European conference speaking opportunities for 2009. Consulting work is scarce. In March I will definitely drop my lease on the big mother of a server this blog runs on, as the plunging advertising revenues will no longer cover the hosting. This means we'll be back to VPS sorry folks, with the consequent unpredictable performance. Annoying but not much I can do.
It's not all doom though. I have several books in preparation that might bring in a buck, especially if you are nice enough to buy them :) If you haven't bought Introduction to Real ITSM yet you might consider it (please). Everyone says it is funny and god knows we could all use a laugh this year.
This year sees three topics looming for the blog: