ITSM is over half a million people

Submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2008-10-22 21:19
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Some recent stats point to lots of ITIL practitioners worldwide.

The word is that about 70,000 copies of the ITIL V3 books have shipped. I don't know if this is 70,000 sets though the implication was that it is, and I don't know if it includes online "copies" or is just hardcopy, but the implication was just hardcopy.

The other interesting stat is itSMF claiming over 100,000 members worldwide.

Now think of what proportion of ITIL/ITSM practitioners you know who have bought the books. And what proportion are itSMF members. In my experience in both cases it is a low proportion.

So I think I'm not out of line in suggesting their are easily over half a million ITSM practitioners worldwide: "users" at the coalface, vendors, and consultants.

Only about ten thousand of them read this blog. So where are the others? In these recessionary times I can already see the downturn in advertising revenue. Since the blog barely covers hosting costs and pays me nothing for my time, and the book has yet to recoup the cost of the freebies I gave away let alone the time writing it, this puts the blog's future under pressure. If you would like to see this site continue, please take a moment now to tell a few people you know in the ITSM industry that they should come take a look at the IT Skeptic. I'd really appreciate it :-D

Published in The Skeptical Informer, December 2008, Volume 2, No. 11


Comments

Submitted by aroos on Thu, 2008-10-23 06:29.

Link

I opened my new website yesterday at http://pohjoisviitta.wordpress.com/ and yes, it has a link to your site. Unfortunately you need to polish your Finnish a bit before you find it.

PS My guess is that it 70.000 books, cd's or online copies. People tend to report the max number.

Submitted by deaf-llama on Thu, 2008-10-23 15:14.

A very big market indeed

Moneywise here are some recent estimates before the economic slowdown:

Datamonitor Report 2008: Global market for ITSM training and consultancy by 2010 will be $14 Billion.
CCID Consulting 2008: China ITSM market expected to be 2B yuan (around $300M) by 2009.

That's a heck of a lot of ITIL, COBIT, ISO20000, ISO27001, Six Sigma ... books...
...So, Skep, I'd suggest keeping this blog running, plus introduce a Mandarin version of Real ITSM, too?

Submitted by buraddo on Thu, 2008-10-23 16:59.

Easy Answer

I am sure ITSMf will see these figures and say "the market is so big, we need to raise the price!" :)

Brad Vaughan

Submitted by buraddo on Thu, 2008-10-23 04:20.

such a small number

Skep.. You are doing well if you have 10K from 500K.. 500K is such a small top line number though... The number of IT professionals globally whose jobs rely on the processes covered under ITIL should be orders of magnitude larger..

I compare this to the millions of downloads a single software product gets in the open source world and it dwarfs these figures.. People and companies using IT is such a larger community.. Is ITSM meeting its goals by just addressing small market segment. Is it because of the restrictive structure and eliteist nature of the community that is dampening adoption..

All interesting concepts..

Brad Vaughan

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