The IT Skeptic Awards for 2009

Every year the IT Skeptic website starts the New Year with our Awards. (You can see past years' awards here). This year we have quite a few, and even more than most years OGC seems to have swept the field:

The Gold Finger for Megalomania goes to Microsoft once again for attempting to further patent CMDB, not to mention foisting Windows Vista on a suffering public. The IT Skeptic can't help reflecting on the difference between the two big public players Microsoft and Google. I trust one of them. On the other hand Microsoft also receive the Stallman Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to the Documentation of Best Practice for placing MOF in the public domain under a Creative Commons license. We are still reeling in shock.

The Engelbert Humperdink Memorial Codpiece for Worst Change of Name goes to OGC for calling the Prince2 revision Prince2:2009 instead of the obvious Prince3. No doubt this was to perpetuate the myth that earned OGC the Orwellian Orb of Truth for describing the Prince2:2009 revision as minor

The Little Blue Pill for services to fiscal sanity goes to the British Government for apparently placing Prince2 in the public domain.

The Kim Il-sung Memorial Vase for Keeping It In The Family goes to the Castle ITIL for maintaining a cosy club for the boys (and girls): APMG gives itSMF a cut of revenues in return for itSMF's support [I'm opening up the September Skeptical Informer so you can read this - see what you miss if you don't subscribe?], the itSMF International Executive Board seems to allow Global Members (IBM, HP, CA, Sun) to nominate their staff to that same Board (though it is hard to tell because Board rules are secret), and yet itSMF is the only "user" representation on any non-elected ITIL industry bodies such as the ITIL Qualifications Board.

The Pirate Bay Memorial Plaque for Services to Intellectual Property goes to Acend Learning Corporation of Toronto for systematically plagiarising the copyright work of others, valiantly persisting even after multiple complaints and resulting revisions to their site. Bastards.

The Snake-Oil Championship goes to CA for overselling the CMDBf standard, precisely as predicted on this blog (thanks guys).

The Joseph Stalin Award for the Revision of History goes jointly to OGC/TSO for the vanishing ITIL portal, which morphed quietly from a promised free resource into a paid gated community which has had to slash its prices and still is not wildly successful.

The News of the World Trophy for Services to Journalism goes to Denise Dubie of NetworkWorld for crediting The Stationery Office (TSO) with creating ITIL. Everyone knows it was IBM.

The Tony Soprano Memorial Best Friends Steak-knife is awarded to Ken Turbitt for calling his own potential customers cowards and revealing details that they might reasonably have expected were in commercial confidence.

The P T Barnum Gold Cigar for the Most Hyped Concept of the Year goes to Green IT. Runner up was the fortune to be made from iPhone apps - I was waiting for my mother to tell me she was thinking of writing one.

The Three Silver Thimbles for the Grossest Statistical Trickery goes to those perennial favourites, BMC, for producing a 370% ROI on implementing a service desk tool within 18 months.

The Service Management Entrepreneural Championship for 2009 and the The Trump Medal for Most Inappropriate Empire Building both go to the Wikipedia merchants who held on doggedly to their ITIL listings on Wikipedia for years in the face of mounting scorn, so as to protect the resulting revenue stream for the "ITIL Toolkit". They still have one link left.

The Pollyanna trophy is presented to all those who have declared the recession over [here's another newsletter for you to sample].

The Terminological Debasement Cup is presented to APMG for renaming a committee as a board.

The Andrés Escobar Memorial Shield for Best Own Goal goes to OGC for declaring the end of ITIL V2, thereby refusing to derive any further revenue from book and pdf sales, or training.

The Coronation Street Pint For Longest Running Saga goes to the ITIL Qualifications Board for the ITIL V3 Foundation syllabus, again. The "final" V3 Foundation syllabus was finally released in May this year, just in time for OGC to announce a revision of V3. APMG did such a good job that itSMF felt compelled to make a public statement supporting them

The Transparency Cup goes to OGC for publicly providing paid endorsements of software products against a standard that is secret. We'll tell you it is compliant but we won't tell you what it is compliant with. It is hard to imagine anyone but a British government agency coming up with something like this. The Deng Xiao Peng Memorial Spittoon for Services to Democracy is awarded to OGC for declaring a standard by decree with no public consultation and no transparency over the selection process. This also earns them the Marie Antoinette Memorial Cake for Most Patronising Attitude. Well done OGC on a hat-trick from this one project!

The Ironic Twist is awarded jointly to OGC and APMG for pursuing aggressive protection of ITIL intellectual property just as the British Government is pursuing a policy of placing government intellectual property in the public domain.

The Dumbdown Cup is presented to the authors and especially the reviewers of ITIL V3 Service Operation for leaving out proactive problem management and error control, and never once mentioning determination of the affected service in Incident or Problem Management.

The Skeptic’s Banner of Best Individual Contribution to itskeptic.org goes to pjorg for his variation on a song

Finally, the one you have been waiting for …Envelope please… The Grand Sagan Candle for IT Skepticism goes to Richard Cook for his seminal paper on failure of complex systems which undermines the very foundations of IT Service Management.

Happy New Year everybody!!!!!

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