ITIL for small business could be called BILL: the Business Infrastructure Library of Least practice

There's a very complex and interesting debate about the role students take within state education in the UK. Are they partners, consumers, commissioning agents, subjects or employees? Probably the one thing most educationalists would agree is they are definitely not employees. I would imagine that this is also the case in the USA. Anyway we are focused on IT services here and perhaps there might be a case for considering school students to be employees in relation to the IT services, but honestly I’m not convinced. They don’t, perhaps shouldn’t is a better way of putting it, negotiate with IT about the services they require. The school hierarchy does that in their interests. If you’re thinking that being a school IT manager sounds cushy it is also worth pointing out that technical support functions need to construct their systems as if all students were malign users. To me (purely as conjecture) this is a situation not dissimilar to health operations. Patients may be customers but they surely don’t decide what is best for them either in terms of treatment or IT services for their health professionals. Do hospitals consider their employee numbers to be those directly employed plus all patients presently in wards?
Finally (and this is in danger of becoming overly long) employee numbers as an indication of size in relation to businesses is just a marker. But it does capture something important in relation to the scale of the operation – number of bodies to coordinate and financial resources – as well as the complexity. The discussion started with the utility of ITIL to the SME and in my opinion schools are much more like SME’s than large corporations. I did teach in the USA for a short time and my experience of the Chicago school system makes me think this is equally true there.

Alex Jones