The Skeptical Informer, October 2007, Volume 1, No. 9

This month I have been reflecting on recent events in the ITIL world, and I must say it induces a pretty jaundiced view. This blog started out as a critical examination of some of the theoretical assumptions behind ITIL content, but events over the past year have sidetracked much of that as I reported some of the goings on in the ITIL community. Some days the blog started to sound like News of the World or the Sun. So in that vein...

Scuttlebutt: itSMF International refused a certain country's nomination for chairperson; but the outgoing chair, Brian Jennings, is quite happy to be their conference keynote speaker. Withdraw privileges when it suits us and extend them likewise.

More scuttlebutt: Sharon Taylor and Ivor Macfarlane are business partners, or at least they were. Ivor's UK address has recently disappeared from Sharon's company's website at www.aspect360.net (but it was there). Is it because he went to work for IBM? or because the link is seen as a bit too close for comfort when Sharon is also supporting Ivor's highly contentious bid for the Chair of IPESC? Aspect group still lists Ivor's company, Guillemot Rock, as an affiliate.

Even more scuttlebutt: Ivor's election as Chair of IPESC has ruffled a few feathers, including on the incoming Board of itSMF International. Why? Because Ivor is arguably not even a member of IPESC, just an invited representative of itSMFI. Certainly Ivor's name was listed an an officer but not a member on the original list of members put out by the returning officer, Luciana Abreau. Certain members of IPESC have been vocal in the past, apparently with the support of the IPESC, that they do not want a Board-imposed Chair. On the other hand the IPESC has voted for Ivor so I guess that answers that.

Given that in recent times we have had:

• the Institute of Service Management doing battle with Ian Clayton's Service Management Institute over USA trademark
• itSMFI flogging off deep discounts at the expense of local chapters to try to keep global members (read; big sponsors)
• A distinctly British approach to consultation for ITIL3
• Microsoft trying to patent the obvious in CMDB
• backstabbing and pricing shennanigans between supposed partners in ITIL the moment the ITIL3 books actually went on sale
• the itSMF USA election saga with the mysterious vanishing Julie Linden
• itSMF USA's hasty exit of their executive director, James Prunty
• the US DoJ sniffing around the industry
• itSMFI's insistence on secret governance rules and cursory public financial accounting
• itSMFI's hasty and limited call for nominations for the new Board
• itSMFI declining a significant proportion of nominations for the new Board on what some would perceive to be a technicality
• the election results are then rushed out ahead of the planned announcement at the AGM
• the ITIL3 certification program, syllabi and exams degenerate to something close to fiasco under a barrage of criticism and complaints
• the ITIL certification owners lose their own accreditation from the UK government auditors
• and now the fusty IPESC falls to the same squabbling and intrigue

...poor little IT Skeptic can hardly keep up. It is never a dull moment in the ITIL world. An extraordinary contrast to the genteel goings on over at ISACA.

I don't know about you but it makes me seriously consider my future with itSMF. I think I'll always stay a member but I am certainly looking at other options as well. One wonders how long all this can go on and the itSMF/ITIL edifice continue to stand. In reference to that last comment, the theme of this month's illustrations is "ruins".