The king's method of writing a new decree: how OGC does ITIL V3

I prefer the term "cult" to "religion" (see "ITIL the Cult"), but I agree about some people's uncritical adherence.

What I am not so sure about is "alternative approaches". ITIL is good stuff, and it is an enormous body of work. If there are places where ITIL is out of alignment with users' thinking, then

• how would we even know what represents the thinking of the majority of users?
• we need to wait for V3 to find what are points of criticism
• there doesn't seem to be much demand for an alternative
• there is so much invested in ITIL by OGC and by the industry and by the community, it would be far more efficient to fix it than to throw it out

Having said that, one day ITIL will get replaced, or absorbed, or morphed. I just don't think it is any time soon.

People want leaders. they want to to shown and told the way. every cult depends on it. (Let's not debate relegion here)

So you are quite right: poeple take a simplistic approach to "doing" ITIL.

Given that ITIL consultants cost even more than my plumber - something I thought I would never see - it is no wonder that people are a bit stingey on getting the expertise they need to adopt and adapt, so they tend to go for "out-of-the-packet": not quite out-of-the-box, they know they have to do some work, but they think it is just add water and stir.

Totally agree that the #1 reason and benefit of ITIL is common language and approach, for staff, users/customers, managers, new employees, consultants and auditors.

Disgree about ISO20000 and COBIT. To me they specify "how high" not "how to jump". ITIL has more beef (to date).

Actually that is just a mashup blog - ignore that link. The real "debate" is ComputerworldUK vs Techworld.

I will look closer at these when life settles down a bit. Right now there is the V3 Launch and the itSMFUSA scandal to deal with.

if like me you cannot read half the Techweek article because they seem to assume the 85% of their readers who use IE won't want to, there's the missing text

And as for "PRINCE2 can be tailored to the needs of projects": that's basically screaming at me: "PRINCE2 probably won't have everything you need, so if it doesn't quite fit, make stuff up".
The third strand to my negative viewpoint is the sheer commercial exploitation of the poor bastards who have to jump on the bandwagon in order to earn a crust. If you're in search of a job and 50 percent of the ads say you have to know ITIL, PRINCE2 or whatever in order to get an interview, there's often no alternative but to open your wallet and pay for the books, the CBT CDs or the training courses (possibly with an unaccredited muppet in ITIL's case) and get the qualification. But hang on a minute: ITIL and PRINCE2 are both government-owned concepts: they come under the auspices of the Office of Government Commerce. Why, then, is there such a hefty price tag on materials that are simply printed versions of concepts that you, I and the rest of the taxpayers of this country have already paid to develop? For instance, the 460-page large-print PRINCE2 handbook is priced at £52.00 (and that's Amazon's discounted price); this is, as far as I can see, the most expensive book on my office bookshelf - and it's less than half the thickness of the largest on the shelf. So a government-owned concept is licensed to a commercial entity (remember, even HMSO got privatised) and made available at hefty prices to people whose main benefit from spending all that money will be so they can tick a box on an application form and perhaps never actually have to use the qualification in anger.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that ITIL and PRINCE2 are alone in being used as irrelevant bollocks by employers who ought to know better. For instance, I've seen jobs that list IT degrees as a requirement, yet I've known people who've never been near a lecture theatre who could have done the jobs standing on their heads. And on the other side of the coin I'm sure there are jobs out there that list B.Sc. Media Studies as a necessary qualification: a paradox if ever I saw one.
What pisses me off, though, is that I've seen for myself that common sense and sheer, unadulterated ability are often far more useful than a formal qualification in writing vast rafts of buzzword-laden documents. Yet I know that the poor sods who would rather just get on with the job than sit studying weird terminology they'll never use (because it's peculiar to their PRINCE2/ITIL dialect) will miss out on the jobs. Just as importantly, the employers will miss out on the good candidates.
For sure, you need to go about doing stuff properly and in an organised fashion. And you certainly need to write stuff down, and have a process for checking on progress and reacting to problems (and, of course, to changes in the spec). But what the world keeps failing to spot is that in a vast number of cases you can discard formal methodologies and instead use a couple of traditional tools: a list and a brain.
Posted by: David Cartwright